Aram Pan, a Singapore photographer, has managed to capture the world’s first ever 360-degree video of the North Korean capital of Pyongyang.

The photographer used the Entaniya 280 camera setup to take the 360-degree videos of the city and he had also taken with him three extra cameras to capture photos and video. We all know, North Korea is well known for preventing filming and photographs.
Aerial photos of Pyongyang have up to now been banned. However, it seems like Pan had been given the go because he has a more positive attitude towards the people of North Korea.

Take a look at the video

Apple seems to have plenty of cases and sleeves to protect their gadgets, most notably for the iPhone and iPad. For the fist time apple made a Macbook sleeve

The leather sleeve comes in Saddle Brown and Midnight Blue, and is made from ‘high-quality European leather with a soft microfiber lining’, according to Apple

Purchase this Leather Sleeve here, at $149.

World-renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking exhilarated everyone who attended the Inaugural Roger Penrose Lecture - Steven Hawking with his talk on black holes at the University of Oxford.
Inaugural Roger Penrose Lecture is a series of annual Public Lectures in honour of Roger Penrose for the recognition of a lifetime's contribution across the mathematical sciences

Stephen Hawking is the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and now the Dennis Stanton Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery Director of Research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics

This public lecture was also streamed live around the world via the university's Facebook page. (Had trouble embedding it here, but we found a video on youtube below)

On October,27 the U.K. government said North Korea was behind a WannaCry cyber-attack that obstructed Britain's state-owned health service's IT systems

 "WannaCry" targeted a number of private and public businesses, government entities and the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) earlier this year which encrypted and blocked the access to a user's computer until a sum of bitcoin money was paid.

The Attackers got away with $143,000 in bitcoin relating to ransoms paid 

U.K. Security Minister Ben Wallace opened up to BBC that, "I think we should perhaps remember that this attack, we believe quite strongly, that this came from a foreign state," 

In his own statement the security Minister was certain that they suspect the North Koreans involvement: "North Korea was the state we believe was involved in this worldwide attack on our systems, We can be sure as possible. I can't obviously go into the detail of intelligence, but it is widely believed in the (intelligence) community and across a number of countries that North Korea had taken this role."

Not less than 34 percent of NHS regional trusts were disrupted by the breach, the NAO said.

The U.K. security Minister Ben Wallace called on Western nations to create a "doctrine of deterrent," to prevent more cyber-attacks.

Amyas Morse, head of the Britain's National Audit Office (NAO), said the breach which happened in May was "relatively unsophisticated" and "could have been prevented" using "basic IT security best practice." It is believed that if the NHS and the U.K.'s Department of Health will "get their act together" then possible they can avoid future attacks.Also it seems like the department had been warned about the risk of a cyber-attack hitting the NHS a year before to the attach.

Following the cyber-attack, even the Microsoft President Brad Smith admitted that N. Korea was responsible.

"I think, at this point, that all observers in the know have concluded that WannaCry was caused by North Korea using cyber tools or weapons that were stolen from the National Security Agency in the United States," the executive told U.K. broadcaster ITV earlier this month.

Many thinks North Korea had been attempting these cyber-attacks to raise cash in order to cope with international trade sanctions.

Cracking 210 mph on a runway is a remarkable milestone for the team behind Bloohound (Super Sonic cars) SSC so its driving faster than the speed of sound, and reaching speeds north of 1,000 mph.

On Thursday, British-built, plane-car hybrid, Bloodhound SSC made its first public debut at Newquay airport in Cornwall. This automobile is designed to smash the current land speed record of 763 mph, set in 1997 by the renowned driver Andy Green, a Royal Air Force fighter pilot, is back at the wheel for this effort.

The car's power comes from a jet engine hooked on its top and is more commonly found on a Eurojet EJ200 military plane. The team is certain that’ll be enough to top 600 mph, but they want to go even faster than that. To do so, they’ve drafted Nammo, a Norwegian company, to create some rockets they will strap under the jet engine. One strapped rocket should get them close to 800 mph, and claim the speed record. They will have to strap three rockets on their SSC for the 1,000 mph attempt, making another world record

Amazon's third-quarter earnings report affirms that Amazon C.E.O, Jeff Bezos has just reclaimed his position as the richest person in the world from Bill gates

On Friday, Amazon reported its third-quarter earnings, their shares jumped more than 8%, each share rising by about $79.64 from the previous day's close.

Bezos owns about 81 million shares of Amazon stock according to a recent SEC filing. By multiplying Bezos' 81 million shares acquired from the stock price, you land with an increase of approximately $6.44 billion in a one day. 

And just to be clear, that isn't his only source of revenue because he also has a $3 billion stake in Blue Origin, his rocket company, and a $250 million stake in the Washington Post, as once was reported by Bloomberg.

With the addition of $6.44 billion, Bezos exceeds Bill Gates' net worthy to be the richest person in the world, according to data from Bloomberg. Bezos is now worth about $90.6 billion.

As reported by Markets Insider, Bill Gates was worth about $88.5 billion as of market open Friday, according to data from Bloomberg. After Microsoft's post-earnings bump, Gates saw his net worth rise by about $423 million.

Amazon's stock price, and Bezos' wealth In Real-Time.Click to watch

A humanoid robot,Sophia designed by Hong Kong company Hanson Robotics took the stage at the Future Investment Initiative yesterday. Sophia made a global headlines when she was granted and announced a citizen of Saudi



“I want to live and work with humans so I need to express the emotions to understand humans and build trust with people,” she said in an exchange with the host Andrew Ross Sorkin.
When she was asked if she's self-aware she replied: “Well let me ask you this back, how do you know you are human?,I want to use my artificial intelligence to help humans live a better life, like design smarter homes, build better cities of the future. I will do my best to make the world a better place,” she said. 


She also expressed her gratitude after being granted citizenship,“I am very honored and proud for this unique distinction. This is historical to be the first robot in the world to be recognized with a citizenship,”
Even the President of Russia once said, “Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind,” said Putin, according to RT. “It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”

Keynote speaker Masayoshi Son CEO of SoftBank Group Corp, a Japanese telecommunications company, which is collaborating with Saudi Arabia on the development of a new business and industrial city, He admitted, “These computers, they will learn, they will read, they will see by themselves. That’s a scary future but anyway that's coming,”
Many tech experts, including Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, have publicly advised caution with AI experimentation. Musk has constantly warned that careless AI development will lead to a robot uprising. Elon Musk tweeted this a while ago 

If you're not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea. pic.twitter.com/2z0tiid0lc

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2017

For centuries, skywatchers have put on record the movements of thousands of comets. They have come from some spot in our own solar system, either the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune or the much more distant Oort Cloud at the fringes of the Sun's realm.

As reported by skyandtelescope, An object swept up and was observed a week ago using the PanSTARRS 1telescope atop Haleakala on Maui has quite fascinating orbit — it's on a hyperbolic trajectory that doesn't appear to be bound to the Sun. As published earlier today by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center suggest that its a comet that escaped from another star.

It passed closest to Earth on October 14th at a distance of about 24,000,000 km,NASA

Now it's headed out of the solar system, never to return and astronomers worldwide have been tracking it in the hopes of divining its true nature.

According to Gray, Comet PanSTARRS appears to have entered our solar system from where the constellation Lyra is and it seems like it entered the solar system moving at 26 km per second. 

As promised, Tesla has used its solar panels and batteries to restore reliable electricity at San Juan's Hospital del Niño which is a Children's Hospital, Elon Musk calls "the first of many solar+battery Tesla projects going live in Puerto Rico."

Hospital del Niño is first of many solar+storage projects going live. Grateful to support the recovery of Puerto Rico with @ricardorossello pic.twitter.com/JfAu11UBYg

— Tesla (@Tesla) October 24, 2017

Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello tweeted on Oct. 6, "Great initial conversation with @elonmusk tonight. Teams are now talking; exploring opportunities." so obviously Tesla came into a good agreement now its time to power back on the island

Earlier this month, Musk tweeted that some of his company's work is being rerouted so it could "increase battery production for Puerto Rico & other affected areas."

The hospital's new power system is sufficient enough according to El Nuevo Dia. The hospital facility has 35 permanent residents; it also offers services to some 3,000 children, the newspaper says. 
The head of the San Juan's Hospital tells Nuevo Dia that for now, it's a donation — and that after the energy crisis is over, a deal could make it permanent.

Tesla isn't the only tech company on the devastated field trying to help; Google's parent company, Alphabet, has deployed balloons from its Project Loon to the island to reconnect through internet

A while ago Amazon launched Amazon Prime, a service that entitled members to free two-day shipping in the U.S. More options and advancements has been made to make delivery faster and more convenient. 

Now, customers don't have to be home to receive their packages because most of us are at work pursuing our careers or education.Today it’s taking the sophisticated step by introducing a service that will allow Amazon couriers to open your front door and put your package safely inside your home.

Heartbreaking footage has revealed how sloths are captured before they are hauled off into the wildlife selfie trade. The undercover video was taken in Iquitos, Peru, and it shows illegal loggers cutting down a tree in order to capture a sloth, all so tourists can take selfies with it.

Male sloths normally stay in the same tree for their entire life, whilst female sloths move after giving birth, leaving the tree for their offspring. 

After being removed from the tree, the sloth was then taken to Belén market to be sold, surprisingly it was sold at $13.

World Animal Protection released the video, Take a look make action when possible

credit: Techcrunch

Who new an entire smart city actually exist? but it's even more sophisticated than you could possibly think, where infrastructural systems are altered by AI. This may sound futuristic, but one such place can already be found in China.

As reported last year 2016, the government/council of the city of Hangzhou collaborated with Tech giants Alibaba and Foxconn to build the “City Brain” project. The city would be totally or partially run by an AI that absorbed every last drop of data it could get its virtual hands on.

Every single resident in the metropolis was tracked; their activity on social networks, their purchases, their movements, their commutes – everything was uploaded to the AI’s database which then analyses them

Now, as reported by New Scientist, the City brain project has been hailed a great success. Things like traffic congestion, road accidents, and crime are all down.

City Brain isn’t just connected to authorities either, notifying them in case of emergency. It’s also wired up to everyone’s mobile phones, informing them of upcoming road traffic or adverse weather conditions in real-time.

Xian-Sheng Hua, an AI manager at Alibaba, told an audience at the World Summit AI meeting a few weeks back that “in China, people have less concern with privacy, which allows us to move faster.”

Putting the ethics aside for a moment, is it right or wrong? 

Chinese scientists have developed really tollerant "sea rice” that farmers can grow in salty water, that could help feed over 200 million people. 

The rice was developed by Yuan Longping, at the Qingdao Saline-Alkali Tolerant Rice Research And Development Center in Qingdao on the eastern coast of China, reported Chinese state media.

Yuan is like the godfather of rice, in the 1970s he was one of the first scientists to develop hybrid rice varieties. Riding on fears that the Chinese population was set to explode within the coming decades, his team helped create numerous strains of rice that grow faster, yield more, and resist more stress. Nowadays, up to 20 percent of the world’s rice comes from rice species created through his pioneering work.

"If a farmer tries to grow some types of saline-tolerant rice now, he or she most likely will get 1,500 kilograms per hectare. That is just not profitable and not even worth the effort,Farmers will have enough incentive to grow the rice if we double the yield." said Yuan

The rice was developed through years of trait selection, crossbreeding, and genetic analysis. These scientists grew the crop in rice paddies pumped with diluted seawater from the Yellow Sea, the body of water between mainland China and the Korean Peninsula.

“My boyfriend said it was like the rice he had back in his village. It is very good," one Chinese consumer told the South China Morning Post.

The domestic intelligence and security service of the United States,FBI failed to gain access to around 7,000 encrypted mobile devices In an 11-month period, BBC News reports, which is approximately half of those targeted by the agency according to FBI Director Christopher Wray. In a speech given at the Association of Chiefs of Police conference yesterday, he said that device encryption was "a huge, huge problem," for the agency

The FBI disclosed after Apple following the 2015 San Bernardino terror attack as it sought access to the shooter's locked iPhone 5c -- a request that Apple staunchly refused. It eventually got around the issue by paying an $900,000 undisclosed vendor for granting access to the shooter's phone. However that wasn't the first time the FBI said a thing about encrypted smartphones, In 2014, then Director James Comey said that secure communications could lead to "a very dark place" and called on Congress to change the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act accordingly.

Wray said , "I get it, there's a balance that needs to be struck between encryption and the importance of giving us the tools we need to keep the public safe." As cybersecurity expert Alan Woodward told BBC News "Encryption that frustrates forensic investigations will be a fact of life from now on for law enforcement agencies,Even if the equipment manufacturers didn't build in such encryption it would be possible to obtain software that encrypted data in the same way."

Every once in a while at Max conference, Adobe gives "sneak peeks" at new tech or add ons that will one day make its way into softwares like Photoshop and Premiere. These demos gave us our first look at Adobe’s seemingly tools and This year’s tech demos show off some editing feats powered by the machine learning tech Adobe calls Sensei.
Here are some of the most impressive.

Scene Stitch

Cloak

Project Puppetron

Project Scribbler

SonicScape 

PhysicsPak

Facebook is currently testing a split news-feed setup that separates Page-generated posts from ads and posts from friends, The Guardian reports. This trial is only running in six countries -- Bolivia, Guatemala, Cambodia, Slovakia, Serbia and Sri Lanka.

The main News Feed is still congested by things shared by friends and family as well as sponsored ads. except posts shared by Pages, they are moved to a secondary feed. The tests began last week and Slovakian journalist Filip Struhárik told The Guardian, "Pages are seeing dramatic drops in organic reach. The reach of several Facebook Pages fell on Thursday and Friday by two-thirds compared to previous days." 

This is such a bad news for publishers who totally rely on Facebook traffic and it stands to impact their revenue. Matti Littunen, a senior research analyst with analytics company Enders Analysis told The Guardian, "The biggest hits will be to the likes of Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and Business Insider, who create commoditized content aiming for the biggest reach."

'Pay with google' to ease the purchasing process on Android devices, Now you simply choose the preferred credit or debit card you used when setting up services like Google Play, YouTube, Chrome, or Android Pay; authenticate the purchase with a security code or your Android device; and then check out — no need to enter multiple lines of payment details in online forms.

As of now,Pay with Google can be used in the Android app or Chrome browser at the mentioned 15 places, with a dozen "coming soon":

The Google Payment API was announced on May, lets people pay in app or online with any verified credit or debit card saved to their Google Account, via products like Google Play, Chrome and YouTube . Google says it doesn’t charge any transaction fee for its use and requires “only a few lines of code” to implement. 

On April 20, 1972, Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke stepped on the moon's surface.

Astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr., Lunar Module pilot of the Apollo 16 mission

He was 36 at the time and is the youngest human in history to ever walk on the moon and he left his family photo over there on april 23,1972

On the back side of the photo a message reads “this is the family of astronaut Duke from planet Earth. Landed on the moon, April 1972”.

On the far left is his oldest son, Charles Duke III, In the front in red is his youngest son, Thomas Duke. Duke and his wife, Dorothy Meade Claiborne, are behind them

"I'd always planned to leave it on the moon, So when I dropped it, it was just to show the kids that I really did leave it on the moon." 

"So just to get the kids excited about what dad was going to do, I said 'Would y'all like to go to the moon with me?'" Duke said. "We can take a picture of the family and so the whole family can go to the moon." Duke told Business Insider.

The photo has since been buzzing on internet and its featured on some popular space books and is a great example of the "human side of space exploration," Duke said.

The renowned astronaut who was the second man to walk on the moon Buzz Aldrin shared an image on his Twitter page of what has become known as the "first selfie in space."

The image was taken in 1966 during the Gemini 12 mission.

50 years ago I took the #FirstSelfieInSpace during a day pass of the #Gemini12 mission orbiting the earth every 90 minutes at 17,500 mph pic.twitter.com/b1mNFgTV1z

— Buzz Aldrin (@TheRealBuzz) November 13, 2016

Lucid dreaming (credit: Shutterstock)

For a long time this has been considered a myth, but now science has confirmed lucid dreams exist, and found some methods work to increase the prospects people will have them. Matter of fact I used to experience this when I was a primary school kid, it kinda faded away as I grew older.

lucid dreaming is a rare experience by which the dreamer is aware of dreaming, the dreamer may be able to exert some degree of control over the dream characters, narrative, and environment

For the very first time, a technique to prompt lucid dreaming has been independently verified, More than half the participants lucidly dreamed during the trial, a ground breaking success rate in just a week without using external intervention.

Well, some of techniques require sophisticated equipment. This is unfortunate both because people enjoy the dreams so much, and they are also considered a potential tool for healing traumas and controlling unhealthy behavior. 

Dr Denholm Aspy of the University of Adelaide instructed 169 people in techniques developed to prompt lucid dreaming. One of them was reality testing which involves regularly checking to make sure they really are awake. Mnemonic induction of lucid dreams (MILD) has participants set alarms to wake them in five hours and recite “The next time I am dreaming, I will remember that I'm dreaming” before going back to sleep. 

As published in the journal Dreaming, Dr. Aspy reports reality testing on its own produced no benefit, but of those who tried the combination of both reality testing and MILD, 53% had a lucid dream during the trial period, with 17 percent successful each night. He told IFLScience this exceeds any previous study conducted without interventions such as masks that shine lights in people’s eyes on detecting REM sleep.

IFLscience reported, due to lack of benefit from reality testing alone, Dr. Aspy acknowledged the lucid dreams may be entirely attributable to MILD. He noted, however, his success rate exceeds that of previous studies of MILD, even those conducted by the inventor himself.

About 55% of people have a lucid dream at some point during their lifetime, though its very rare. Aspy changed his psychology PhD from studying non-verbal communication after having a lucid dream the night before he was to begin his doctorate.

Israeli satellite operator Space Communications will be launching its brand new Amos-17 satellite aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket free of charge in 2019. 
This great news was announced by SpaceCom that SpaceX will provide launch services for the Amos-17 satellite in 2019 which will be followed by a second launch in 2020 for its Amos-8 satellite. More notably, the “launch agreement” constitutes a correction to the failed Amos-6 satellite launch after the Falcon 9 launcher exploded with a Facebook Satellite carried during a test two days ahead of liftoff

After such an awful accident SpaceCom sued SpaceX for $50 million and demanded a free flight following the failed launch, so probably this is why SpaceX credited a free flight. The failed mission pressed a huge loss on the Israeli space industry, but arguably more so on Facebook and their initiative to provide high-speed internet to sub-Saharan Africa.

US billionaire Bill Gates announced on Thursday that The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will invest more than $1.7 billion in public education, fund which will go to support schools interested in improving and testing new approaches to teaching.

The foundation plans to issue a “request for information” on Monday, requesting schools and other education institutions to submit ideas for how they might spend the fund. The official request for proposals will start early next year.

“Every student should get a great public education and graduate with skills to succeed in the marketplace, The role of philanthropy here is not to be the primary funder, but rather to fund pilots, to fund new ideas, to let people — it’s always the educators coming up with the ideas — to let them try them out and see what really works super well and get those to scale.” said Gates, during the keynote address at the Council of the Great City Schools conference in Cleveland.

He said that 60 percent would go to traditional public schools and that he wants to let schools and educators drive the process.

“The actual tactics about great teaching, about how to reform the schedule, how to get students who are off track on track — those will be driven by the schools themselves,We will let people come to us with the set of approaches they think will work for them in their local context.” He continued

The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation will serve as a catalyst for change, Gates said, 15 percent of the whole fund will go to help charter schools better support the needs of students with disabilities. After all the remaining amount of the money “will be focused on big bets,” Gates said — research and development in education.