● [Tech] How to hide your Gmails from prying eyes. ︴ ︴

▼ Google has confirmed that private Gmail messages can sometimes be read by staff at external companies. Here is how to check your account permissions to see whether you are affected. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [Tech] Social media apps are 'deliberately' addictive to users. ︴ ︴

▼ Social media companies are deliberately addicting users to their products for financial gain, Silicon Valley insiders have told the BBC's Panorama programme. "It's as if they're taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that's the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back", said former Mozilla and Jawbone employee Aza Raskin. "Behind every screen on your phone, there are generally like literally a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting" he added. In 2006 Mr Raskin, a leading technology engineer himself, designed infinite scroll, one of the features of many apps that is now seen as highly habit forming. At the time, he was working for Humanized - a computer user-interface consultancy. Infinite scroll allows users to endlessly swipe down through content without clicking. "If you don't give your brain time to catch up with your impulses," Mr Raskin said, "you just keep scrolling." He said the innovation kept users looking at their phones far longer than necessary. Mr Raskin said he had not set out to addict people and now felt guilty about it. But, he said, many designers were driven to create addictive app features by the business models of the big companies that employed them. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [Tech] Revolution in quake detection technology. ︴ ︴

▼ Earthquakes may now become easier to detect than ever before, with the aid of developing technology. Researchers in Iceland have successfully used an existing fibre-optic communications cable to assess seismic activity. Such cables are laid beneath the ground in countries around the world, to supply internet and television service. The technique has proven sensitive to ground shaking, but is not yet ready for widespread use. It joins a series of recent advances in earthquake sensing, including smartphone apps and more affordable detection hardware. How does it work? Earthquake activity is usually monitored by seismometers - carefully calibrated and expensive devices placed at sensitive locations. The method tested by the research team, led by Dr Philippe Jousset from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, used 15km of fibre-optic cable that had originally been installed between two geothermal power plants in Iceland in 1994. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [Science] Woman Rescued a Baby Raccoon. Now, She and 20 Friends Need Rabies Treatment. ︴ ︴

▼ Baby raccoons are cute. But if you ever see one, you should probably resist the urge to scoop it up and bring it home with you. A woman in Colorado learned this the hard way when a baby raccoon that she brought home tested positive for rabies. Now, she needs to be treated for rabies, along with more than a dozen of her friends who visited the critter. The woman, who lives in Weld County (north of Denver), recently found the baby raccoon on her property and took it inside her home after it was abandoned by its mother, according to a statementfrom the Weld County Department of Public Health and Environment. When the woman's friends heard she had a baby raccoon, they just had to stop by — indeed, a total of 20 people asked to see the raccoon at the woman's home, according to the Greeley Tribune, a local news outlet. "This was a baby wild animal, so I think there was some heightened interest [in] seeing a baby animal in the home," Rachel Freeman, the department's health communication supervisor, told the Greeley Tribune. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [Science] Embryo breakthrough 'can save northern white rhino'. ︴ ︴

▼ The seemingly "disastrous" story of the world's most endangered mammal - the northern white rhino - could be rewritten by IVF, scientists claim. They used the method to produce rhino embryos with sperm from two dead males. The embryos were made using eggs from a closely related sub-species, but the scientists say the method could save the northern white rhino. One of the team said he hoped a baby that's fully northern white rhino would be born "within three years". This could provide a way of "rescuing valuable genes" from a sub-species that is already functionally extinct; the last male northern white rhino, named Sudan, died earlier this year at the age of 45. Only two females now remain, but the researchers who carried out this project say their carefully-developed method of assisted reproduction could work with eggs harvested from those two precious animals. How do you carry out rhino IVF? In the journal Nature Communications,Prof Thomas Hildebrandt, from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, and his international team of colleagues, described the complexities of safely extracting an egg, or oocyte, from a two-tonne female rhino. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [Science] Ancient Human Ancestors Had to Deal with Climbing Toddlers. ︴ ︴

▼ The Dikika foot is one part of a partial skeleton of a 3.32-million-year-old skeleton of anAustralopithecus afarensischild. Credit: Zeresenay Alemseged More than 3 million years ago, our adult human ancestors were walking on two feet and didn't have the option of a fashionable baby sling to carry their kids around in. Instead,Australopithecus afarensistoddlers had a special grasping toe that helped them hold on to their mothers and escape into the trees, reports a study published today (July 4) in Science Advances. The evidence comes from DIK-1-1 — a relatively complete 3.3 million-year-old skeleton of a 2.5- to 3-year-old femaleAustralopithecus afarensisdiscovered in Dikika, Ethiopia. The skeleton, nicknamed Selam — after the word for peace in Ethiopia's official language of Amharic – includes the oldest and most complete foot bones of this species ever found. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [Science] Earth's first animals probably triggered a change in climate Of course, they warmed things up over millions of years, not a couple hundred.. ︴ ︴

▼ Earth can adapt—but not very quickly. NASA Human beings might be the most egregious example of how life can wreak havoc on a planet’s natural environment, but life of all kinds push the world’s climate in new directions over time. The evolution of the first animals on Earth, in fact, helped spur climate changenearly half a billion years ago, according to new findings published in Nature Communications. For a while, scientists have noticed that the evolution of the first burrowing marine animals about 520 to 540 million years ago, during the Cambrian era, was followed by a significant reduction of oxygen in the planet’s oceans. One theory that began making the rounds is that burrowing behavior broke down organic material in the seafloor and released stored carbon dioxide into the waters. That carbon dioxide gradually made its way into the atmosphere and led to a slow, 100-million-year long period of global warming in the Paleozoic era. However, “the idea was not fully taken up due to the fact that these early animals only burrowed to shallow depths, maybe one centimeter down, so they were thought to have only a minimal impact compared to animals that evolved much later and which burrowed much deeper,” says Benjamin Mills, a researchers from the University of Leeds in the UK, and a coauthor of the new study. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [International News] Why this man is travelling the world on his bamboo bike. ︴ ︴

▼ Yakuza Solo is travelling the world on his bamboo bicycle to kick-start conversations with strangers about his home state Nagaland. It's not a particularly well-known part of India but he's hoping his epic bamboo bike ride will change that. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [International News] Sacred Games: can Netflix's Mumbai mob drama turn India on to TV? Indian audiences traditionally see the small screen as a poor cousin to Bollywood movies. But Netflix is hoping this gritty crime series will pull in a new, internet-savvy viewer. ︴ ︴

▼ Netflix’s plans for global domination take another step forward on Friday with the release of its first original Indian TV series Sacred Games. One of several Indian shows greenlit by the streaming service, it is hoped that the crime drama will follow in the footsteps of Narcos, another international series that revealed an appetite among western audiences to broaden their horizons. Yet perhaps the biggest challenge Sacred Games faces is whether it can win over domestic audiences closer to home. Based on the acclaimed book by Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games tells the story of Sartaj Singh, a jaded cop living under the shadow of his deceased father and seeking validation from a police force he nevertheless loathes for its corruption. When Singh receives an anonymous tip-off regarding the whereabouts of Ganesh Galtonde, a notorious crime lord who has been missing for 16 years, it sets the wheels in motion for a chain of events that burrows deep into India’s dark underworld. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [International News] Venezuela promotes 16,900 soldiers for 'loyalty'. ︴ ︴

▼ Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has promoted 16,900 soldiers as a reward for their "loyalty". The promotion comes amid a worsening economic and political crisis during which opposition politicians have called on the armed forces to side "with the people". Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino said those promoted had been "loyal to the constitutionally elected president". He also praised them "for respecting human rights". The promotion comes just 10 days after the UN human rights body released a report saying that Venezuelan security forces had carried out hundreds of arbitrary killings. According to the report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, there has been "a pattern of disproportionate and unnecessary use of force by security forces". (▪ ▪ ▪)

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● [International News] 'Our fingers bleed': India's female miners toil over sandstone for the UK Discrimination confines women in Rajasthan’s mines to menial tasks, lugging rocks in ‘super-exploitative conditions’. ︴ ︴

▼ India’s mining laws effectively ensure that women are confined to less safe, insecure, manual work. Photograph: Anumeha Yadav In Bhilwara district, in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, sandstone slabs form a makeshift fence around a field, marking the boundaries of a temporary worksite. In the centre, Seema, a tall young woman, lifts sandstone cobbles into large wooden crates. A firm in Jaipur, the state capital, has ordered the stones for export to Britain, where they will be used to pave streets and build sea defences. Employed by a contractor on piece-rate wages, Seema has no idea where the stones will end up. She arrives for work at 8am, after cooking and cleaning for her family, and works through the peak afternoon heat, her thumb bandaged from recurring cuts. She will be paid 60 rupees (66p) for each crate she fills. Seema is a Dalit at the bottom of India’s caste hierarchy, and has been a casual labourer in Bhilwara’s sandstone mines for 11 years. She has no employment record and no health cover. She is one of thousands of lower-caste women labouring on the margins of the mining industry. Despite one of the world’s highest growth rates, India has one of the lowest female work participation rates, with just 27%in employment. Accurate figures are hard to find, but in 2011 women constituted 8% of registered full-time workersin the mining sector, and today’s numbers are likely to be higher. India’s mining laws effectively ensure that women are confined to less safe, insecure, manual work. They are not legally allowed to work in underground mines or on night shifts. “Better-paid or technical jobs in mines do not usually go to women, nor do women receive training in mineral sciences or engineering,” says academic Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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