Anal Contact Tracing
Smart toilet recognises users by their ‘anal print’ and can detect early signs of cancer
Scientists say the smart toilet could be useful to individuals who are predisposed to certain conditions, such as irritable bowel syndrome, prostate cancer or kidney failure
Going to the loo may never be the same again thanks to scientists who claim to have invented a device that can be fitted on toilets to detect signs of various diseases in stool and urine.
The gadget, which fits inside the bowl, uses cameras, test strips and motion sensing technology to analyse the deposits and sends the data to a secure cloud server.
The researchers said their so-called “smart toilet” technology could be useful to individuals who are genetically predisposed to certain conditions, such as irritable bowel syndrome, prostate cancer or kidney failure.
Dr Sanjiv Gambhir, professor and chair of radiology at Stanford University ‘s School of Medicine in the US, and senior author on the study, said: “Our concept dates back well over 15 years.
Caveman Make String
Archaeologists Just Discovered That Neanderthals Made String 50,000 Years Ago, Suggesting They Were Waaay Smarter Than We Thought
The researchers say that Neanderthals “really weren’t very different from us.”
Archaeologists have unearthed more evidence that Neanderthals were smarter than we previously believed.
According to newly found materials, our human brethren were making the world’s first string 50,000 years ago. The oldest-known cord fragments prior to this discovery were found in Israel, and were made some 19,000 years ago.
The find comes from an archaeological site called Abri du Maras in southeastern France, where Neanderthals lived between 90,000 and 42,000 years ago.
“The idea that Neanderthals were cognitively inferior to modern humans is becoming increasingly untenable,” researchers say in an article documenting their finds published in Scientific Reports.
COVID Awareness
The Year of Magical Thinking
Last week Angela Missoni took a walk in the garden of her house in Sumirago, a snug town in Italy about an hour northwest of Milan. After a month in isolation, a difficult morning on Zoom and a steady drumbeat of bad tidings for business, she needed some air.
“You can imagine the kind of board meetings we have been having,” said Ms. Missoni, the creative director of a label founded by her parents, Ottavio and Rosita, in 1953. “It has been kind of intense.”
Ms. Missoni is a charismatic woman with an easy smile, a mane of dark curls and a disarming earth mother air. Yet she is also a hardheaded businesswoman, one who has driven the global growth of her family enterprise.
She is not, in other words, a woo-woo.
And yet when, on her walk in the garden, she spotted a four-leaf clover in the grass, she was struck by a premonition, she said. Despite the gloom, the grim economic forecast, the generalized terrors harassing a world consumed by coronavirus, all, she felt, would be well.
“To have found one right after this meeting, I suddenly thought, ‘OK, that’s a very good sign,’” Ms. Missoni, 62, said by phone. “You know, as soon as you smile, already your whole body is benefiting from your state of mind.”
Tubular Bells
The F-word Re-discovered
World’s earliest record of the F-word is discovered in manuscript written by bored Scottish student in 1568 locked away in the vault of the National Library of Scotland
- Earliest written use of the F-word dates back to a 500-year-old manuscript
- Uni student wrote the manuscript as plague locked down his Edinburgh home
- It was shown from the National Library of Scotland for a BBC documentary
By LUKE MAY
The world’s earliest recorded use of the F-word lies in a Scottish manuscript penned by a bored student who was in lockdown due to the plague.
A documentary airing on Tuesday will show off the Bannatyne Manuscript, which dates back to 1568 and is kept under lock and key in the National Library of Scotland.
Scotland – Contains Strong Language will see singer Cora Bissett take a tour of her country and find out more about Scotland’s relationship with swearing.
Happy Easter
H-O-R-S-E
NBA set to televise H-O-R-S-E competition with league stars on ESPN
The NBA stopped play on March 11 due to the coronavirus pandemic
By Weston Blasi
The NBA is nearing a deal with ESPN DIS, +3.39% to televise a H-O-R-S-E competition, which would include current NBA stars Chris Paul, Trae Young, Zach LaVine, and Mike Conley.
The game will also include retired players Chauncey Billups and Paul Pierce, as well as current WNBA star Allie Quigley and WNBA legend Tamika Catchings.
The shot-for-shot game involves one player making a basket — often a trick shot — and his opponent having to make the same shot. If the second player misses it, he gets a letter. When he misses five shots — enough to spell out H-O-R-S-E — he loses.
The NBA hosted a H-O-R-S-E competition as part of its All-Star Weekend in 2009 and 2010. It struggled to gain traction and was canceled after only two years. The NBA hosts events such as the dunk contest and 3-point-shootout during its All-Star Weekend.
Back To Our Primal Selves
The howling: Americans let it out from depths of pandemic
By DAVID ZALUBOWSKI and JAMES ANDERSON
DENVER (AP) — It starts with a few people letting loose with some tentative yelps. Then neighbors emerge from their homes and join, forming a roiling chorus of howls and screams that pierces the twilight to end another day’s monotonous forced isolation.
From California to Colorado to Georgia and upstate New York, Americans are taking a moment each night at 8 p.m. to howl in a quickly spreading ritual that has become a wrenching response of a society cut off from one another by the coronavirus pandemic.
They howl to thank the nation’s health care workers and first responders for their selfless sacrifices, much like the balcony applause and singing in Italy and Spain. Others do it to reduce their pain, isolation and frustration. Some have other reasons, such as to show support for the homeless.
Hello, Everest
Pollution Recedes Amid Lockdown, And A View Of The Himalayas Emerges For The First Time In 30 Years
by Marley Coyne
Topline: Residents in north India’s Punjab—where a nationwide coronavirus lockdown has curtailed daily activity—shared a rare look at the snow peaks of the Himalayas, a view that has for decades been obscured by the state’s heavy air pollution.
- India, with 1.3 billion residents, is consistently rated as one of the worst polluted countries in the world, according to IQAir, but the coronavirus lockdown has eased the problem’s severity.
- Accompanying a significant dip in automobile and flight traffic, at least 85 Indian cities had cleaner air, one study reported, following the first week of the March 25 lockdown.
- In Jalandhar, Punjab, air quality received a “good” rating 16 out of 17 days post-lockdown—a feat not achieved even once during the same period last year.
- “If the air cleans up like this, forget mountain ranges, we may even see god soon,” one Twitter user joked.
- The Himalayan mountain range is the world’s highest and includes Mount Everest.
Night Music
32 videos of Hal Willner’s ’80s series ‘Night Music’ that display his gift for weird, amazing collaborations
By Bill Pearis
We lost the great Hal Willner yesterday. He was a gifted producer whose greatest skill may have been his ability to bring together disparate talents that you might not think would fit together but turned out to be truly inspired. One of the places where you can really see that in action was Night Music, a musical offshoot of Saturday Night Live that lasted two weird wonderful seasons: 1988-1989 as NBC’s Sunday Night on late night on Sundays and hosted by Jools Holland; and then became a syndicated series in 1989-1990 with bandleader David Sanborn taking over hosting duties as well.” Both seasons were presented by Michelob beer who may have been hoping for a different kind of show.
In both seasons the idea was the same: bring together a bunch of great artists — some very famous, some obscure — from all over the musical spectrum and see what happens. Musicians would get their own moment in the spotlight, but every episode ended with a collective jam, which resulted in some things you’d never believe actually happened if there wasn’t video of it, like country icon Conway Twitty doing a song with The Residents. “Beyond putting on music that we love,” Willner told SPIN at the time, “I feel an obligation to expose people to other things. I mean, watching MTV, they don’t tell you about Ornette Coleman…I’m getting back to a musical education with this show. In a weird way, I’m searching for that by having all worlds meet. Having John Zorn, Marianne Faithfull and Aaron Neville in the same hour. Just to have all those emotions make sense together.”
John Zorn, Marianne Faithfull and Aaron Neville was an actual episode, by the way. Sonic Youth made their national television debut on Night Music — on an episode that also featured Diamanda Galas, the Indigo Girls, Daniel Lanois and Evan Lurie and Marc Ribot (covering The Stooges) — and so did Pixies who were on a S2 episode that also featured Sun Ra, singer-songwriter Syd Straw and dance music producer Arthur Baker.
John Prine Gone – Very Sad
from Rolling Stone
John Prine, One of America’s Greatest Songwriters, Dead at 73
Grammy-winning singer who combined literary genius with a common touch succumbs to coronavirus complications
By STEPHEN L. BETTS & PATRICK DOYLE
John Prine, who for five decades wrote rich, plain-spoken songs that chronicled the struggles and stories of everyday working people and changed the face of modern American roots music, died Tuesday at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He was 73. The cause was complications related to COVID-19, his family confirmed to Rolling Stone.
Prine, who left behind an extraordinary body of folk-country classics, was hospitalized last month after the sudden onset of COVID-19 symptoms, and was placed in intensive care for 13 days. Prine’s wife and manager, Fiona, announced on March 17th that she had tested positive for the virus after they had returned from a European tour.
As a songwriter, Prine was admired by Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, and others, known for his ability to mine seemingly ordinary experiences — he wrote many of his classics as a mailman in Maywood, Illinois — for revelatory songs that covered the full spectrum of the human experience. There’s “Hello in There,” about the devastating loneliness of an elderly couple; “Sam Stone,” a portrait of a drug-addicted Vietnam soldier suffering from PTSD; and “Paradise,” an ode to his parents’ strip-mined hometown of Paradise, Kentucky, which became an environmental anthem. Prine tackled these subjects with empathy and humor, with an eye for “the in-between spaces,” the moments people don’t talk about, he told Rolling Stone in 2017. “Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism,” Dylan said in 2009. “Midwestern mind-trips to the nth degree.”
Frey with 50 Cent and Eli Roth
Rodeo Prince
Richard Prince: This Ain’t No Retrospective, It’s a Rodeo
A new book looks at the figure of the American cowboy through the outlaw lens of Mr. Prince, an artist known for his sly borrowings.
Photography and the mythos of the American cowboy have been lassoed together almost from birth. Even when they weren’t working hand in hand, they were often in close company. The most famous showdown in the Old West, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, took place not at the corral but six doors down in front of the photography studio of Camillus Fly. He was too busy ducking to take a picture but ran out with a Henry rifle as the shots died away and disarmed Billy Clanton, one of the outlaws in a gang called — yes — the Cowboys.
“Richard Prince: Cowboy,” a lavish, offbeat new book, just published by Prestel, uses photography to take a long look at the pervasive, at times pernicious, influence of the cowboy on movies, television, books, advertising and politics. The book is nominally devoted to the work of Mr. Prince, who rose to fame in the 1980s through his coy appropriation of the majestic cowboy pictures from Marlboro magazine ads. But as compiled and edited by the collector and curator Robert Rubin, the assemblage of art, ephemera and found imagery ends up feeling more like a ripsnorting syllabus for an American studies class that might have been team-taught by Sam Peckinpah and Margaret Mead.
Bill Withers Gone
Legendary Soul Singer Bill Withers Dead at 81
By Lizzie Manno
Legendary soul singer/songwriter Bill Withers died on Monday (March 30) due to heart complications, per a statement provided to the Associated Press. He was best known for hits like “Lean On Me,” “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Use Me,” “Lovely Day” and more. Withers was a three-time Grammy winner and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015.
“We are devastated by the loss of our beloved, devoted husband and father,” his family wrote in a statement. “A solitary man with a heart driven to connect to the world at large, with his poetry and music, he spoke honestly to people and connected them to each other. As private a life as he lived close to intimate family and friends, his music forever belongs to the world. In this difficult time, we pray his music offers comfort and entertainment as fans hold tight to loved ones.”
Withers was born in Slab Fork, West Virginia in 1938 and was the youngest of six children. He joined the Navy at age 17, spending nine years there, and later moved to Los Angeles after he was discharged. After signing a record contract, he released his first album, Just As I Am, in 1971, which contained one of his greatest songs—“Ain’t No Sunshine”—and was produced by another soul giant, Booker T. Jones (of Booker T. & the M.G.’s). A year later, he released his second album, Still Bill, which contained lasting hits like “Lean On Me” and “Use Me” and became his highest charting album, reaching number four on the Billboard 200. Withers continued to record throughout the 1970s, but by the mid-1980s, he stepped away from music.
Daddy @ 89
‘When it comes to having kids, I don’t see any difference between being 89 and 29’: Bernie Ecclestone tells of delight at being a father again with wife Fabiana Flosi, 44, just three months short of his 90th birthday
By KATIE WESTON & JAMES FIELDING
The pair, who tied the knot in 2012, are at their farm in Brazil, where Flosi is from.
Ecclestone said: ‘We’re fine… We’re in Brazil at the moment so we have to wait a little while and see whether this little one is going to happen in Brazil or in England.’
The billionaire has three grown-up daughters, Deborah, Tamara, and Petra, as well as grandchildren, from two previous marriages.
‘Everybody is very pleased. They’re all happy,’ he said of the family’s response.
Asked what kind of father he was going to be, he said: ‘We don’t know, probably better than before, probably a bit more relaxed!’
Hockney’s COVID Respite
David Hockney shares exclusive art from Normandy, as ‘a respite from the news’
By Will Gompertz
David Hockney is in lockdown at his house in Normandy with his dog Ruby and two of his long-standing assistants, JP and Jonathan.
He is in the garden most days, drawing the spring awakening on his iPad. In a BBC exclusive, he is sharing 10 of his most recent images (including one animation), nine of which have never been published before, for us all to enjoy at this difficult time, along with his thoughts on the role of art in life.
The artist previously visited Normandy in the autumn of 2018 following the installation of his stained-glass window in Westminster Abbey. He thought it would be a good place to draw and paint the arrival of spring, something he’d done around a decade earlier in East Yorkshire. Those pictures, paintings, and films were the basis for a successful exhibition in 2012 at the Royal Academy in London.
He was attracted to Normandy because it offered a broader range of blossoms, with apple, cherry, pear and plum trees, as well as the hawthorn and blackthorn he had painted before.
“We found this house with a large garden that was cheaper than anything in Sussex”, he wrote in a letter to me. They bought it, renovated it and built a small studio; and have been living there since early March.
“I began drawing the winter trees on a new iPad,” he said. “Then this virus started…
M*A*S*H @ 50
50 Years Later, Robert Altman’s ‘MASH’ Is Still Unforgettable
You remember the 4077th? Hawkeye, Radar, Trapper John, Henry and Hot Lips?
These days, mentioning MASH gets you an almost uniform response: “Binged it on Netflix.” Yet it’s the movie, and not the long-running TV series that it spawned, that’s arguably more culturally significant. MASH was arguably the earliest “indie” film made inside the studio system, a piece of entertainment still side-splittingly funny, despite its dated perspective. Altman’s movie was a blockbuster back when those mattered, a critical smash back when that meant something, too, and changed the culture.
However, watching it in 2020, over 50 years after its wide release, it’s at best a black comedy about battle-scarred machismo or, at worst, patently offensive. Let’s dive into what made this film terrific, problematic and unforgettable.
Big Hair Coming Back
Coronavirus Pandemic Upends Men’s Grooming Routines: Expert Predicts Long Hair, Beards Back In Style By Summer
(CBS Local) — You’re overdue for a haircut, but you just realized your local barbershop is one of the many businesses closed stop the spread of COVID-19. You’re not alone.
It doesn’t appear the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued specific guidance on whether to get your haircut or nails done. But the CDC has advised people to avoid social gatherings of more than 10 people and stay at least 6 feet away from others.
“The primary way of cutting down the potential pathway of exposure and transmission is through social distancing,” Mitchel Rosen, associate professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health, told Insider. “Obviously someone doing your hair or nails is right on top of you.”
Marriage Going Away
Is marriage over?
Marriage is practised in every society yet is in steep decline globally. Is this it for longterm intimate relationships?
Edited by Sam Dresser
At 17, John Humphrey Noyes thought a lot about women. An awkward teenager with a gangly neck and slouching shoulders, he fretted over how good looks were the key to success, especially when pursuing women. And he was shy. ‘So unreasonable and excessive is my bashfulness,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘that I fully believe that I could face a battery of cannon with less trepidation than I could a room full of ladies with whom I was unacquainted.’ Little did he know that he would go on to have sex with dozens of women, fathering children with at least nine in a ten-year period.
Noyes was born in 1811. His father was a Congressman for Vermont. His mother worked to instil in her son a religious reverence, hoping that he would become a ‘minister of the Everlasting Gospel’. In 1831, her wish seemed likely to come true. Noyes, then 20, announced that he would devote himself to the service of God’s truth, and entered a seminary in Andover, Massachusetts. Rather than accepting his teachers’ doctrine, however, he became consumed with the revivalist furore sweeping the northeast like a prairie fire. He left Andover for Yale University and started an uproar when he began preaching Perfectionism, the heretical notion that a religious life must be free of sin. Argumentative and charismatic, Noyes became a local celebrity and attracted small crowds of supporters, opponents and gawkers.
It was around this time that Noyes met Abigail Merwin. He was 22; she was 30. It’s hard to find details about Merwin, other than that she was smart, beautiful and modest, and had dark-grey eyes. Many of Noyes’s descriptions of her are saturated with ecstatic religious imagery. During a period when he stopped eating and sleeping and instead wandered manic through the streets of lower Manhattan, he envisioned her ‘standing, as it were, on the pinnacle of the universe, in the glory of an angel’ (although, in his mania, he wondered whether she was actually the devil incarnate).
Merwin was Noyes’s first follower, and he loved her. In his Confessions of Religious Experience (1849), he admitted that ‘she was undoubtedly the person to whom I was attached more than any other person on earth’. He was drawn to her beauty, modesty and boldness but, just as importantly, he drew inspiration from her company. ‘Abigail Merwin was my first companion in the faith of holiness,’ he wrote. ‘It was natural that I should regard her with peculiar interest and confidence.’
COVID Makes The Earth Move
Coronavirus lockdowns have changed the way Earth moves
A reduction in seismic noise because of changes in human activity is a boon for geoscientists.
The coronavirus pandemic has brought chaos to lives and economies around the world. But efforts to curb the spread of the virus might mean that the planet itself is moving a little less. Researchers who study Earth’s movement are reporting a drop in seismic noise — the hum of vibrations in the planet’s crust — that could be the result of transport networks and other human activities being shut down. They say this could allow detectors to spot smaller earthquakes and boost efforts to monitor volcanic activity and other seismic events.
A noise reduction of this magnitude is usually only experienced briefly around Christmas, says Thomas Lecocq, a seismologist the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, where the drop has been observed.
Just as natural events such as earthquakes cause Earth’s crust to move, so do vibrations caused by moving vehicles and industrial machinery. And although the effects from individual sources might be small, together they produce background noise, which reduces seismologists’ ability to detect other signals occurring at the same frequency.
The Man Who Made The World Wash Its Hands
Curly Neal Gone
Globetrotters legend Fred ‘Curly’ Neal dies at 77
Fred “Curly” Neal, the face of the Harlem Globetrotters for 22 years, died Thursday morning in Houston at the age of 77, the team announced on Twitter.
Neal, with his slick ballhandling skills, recognizable shaved head and playful banter, in 2008 became just the fifth Globetrotters player to have his jersey retired, joining Wilt Chamberlain, Marques Haynes, Meadowlark Lemon and Goose Tatum. His jersey was raised to the rafters of Madison Square Garden during a special ceremony.
He also was presented with the Globetrotters’ prestigious “Legends” ring in 1993 for making “a major contribution to the success and the development of the Globetrotters organization.” He had continued to make appearances for the team as an “Ambassador of Goodwill.”
Gen-X Becomes Gen-Q
Coronavirus quarantine? Gen X was made for this. Boomers and Gen Z, not so much.
We Gen Xers will take our time in the spotlight however we can get it — and hope that means more people listen to our advice on venturing out: Just Say No.
By Megan Gerhardt
In every crisis, there is an opportunity. Amid a global pandemic, it looks like my own Gen X has finally found ours. As the generation raised in the age of stranger danger and Just Say No, our inherent risk aversion is finally being recognized as a great strength and asset to the survival of the species.
Our independent streak was fostered by our need to fend for ourselves while our boomer parents toiled for long hours at work, making us more than comfortable with self-reliance and an afternoon spent on the couch playing video games. Now, for the first time in our lives, the question “Why can’t everyone be more like Generation X?” is being uttered.
And we Gen Xers have been quick to pounce on the moment. “Shout out to Gen X, the only generation who can keep our asses at home without being told, the motherf***ing latchkey kids, the generation used to being neglected by f***ing everyone,” writer Lauren Hough declared in a self-congratulatory tweet last week. “We’ll be the only ones left.”
The best minds of my generation quickly responded to Hough with more backpatting. “As an X’er, I feel like my whole life has led up to this important moment when my nation will call upon me to do nothing,” replied one tweeter. Another added: “We survived Reagan, the crack epidemic, the AIDS epidemic, the War on Drugs, mass incarceration, the S&L collapse all the while living on nothing but PB&J and ennui. The other generations should follow our lead on this one.”
Stuart Gordon Gone
Stuart Gordon Dies: Cult Horror Director Known For ‘Re-Animator’ & ‘From Beyond’ Was 72
Re-Animator filmmaker Stuart Gordon has died aged 72, his reps have confirmed. Cause of death was not disclosed.
Known for 1980’s cult horrors including Re-Animator and From Beyond, Gordon also worked in indie theater and founded the successful Organic Theater Company with his wife, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon.
Gordon was a co-creator of the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids franchise, producing the film’s sequel and writing on the TV series. He directed films including Christopher Lambert starrer Fortress, Stephen Dorff movie Space Truckers and William H. Macy film Edmond. He wrote movies including Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers.
Telephoning Returning
I Just Called to Say … the Phone Call Is Back
The other night my friend Margot called. It’s not unusual for me to hear from Margot — we’ve been friends for more than 30 years, email frequently, have dinner every month or two, and I stay over at her house whenever I’m in town. But Margot never calls. Practically no one does; my few surviving telephonic friendships antedate the internet. But Margot has a cold, and because her husband is immunocompromised, she’d had to quarantine herself in their guest room; she was, in effect, the invalid mother confined to her room upstairs in some Victorian novel. She’d been just about to email me when she thought, why would I email? and picked up the phone.
Once I’d ascertained that it wasn’t an emergency, her call was a pleasant surprise. We talked for half an hour or so, and it cheered us both in a dark, uncertain time.
Inspired by our conversation, I started surprising other people, in these first few days of quarantine, by calling them up just to chat. They, too, seemed pleasantly surprised. We’d talk for a half-hour, 45 minutes, an hour or more — about what a weird, unprecedented time it is, how disastrous to have no one competent in charge in the crisis, how much food we have, what the local stores are like, how seriously we’re taking the restrictions on our movements, how it affects our relationships (do you hastily break up rather than be trapped for months with the wrong person? Is a pandemic a good excuse to reconcile with an ex?). We made jokes about it and laughed together from opposite coasts, like kids cracking up at a funeral.
Ghost Town
Drive-in Revival
Seoul (AFP) – A long queue of cars forms in front of a drive-in cinema in Seoul, as South Koreans look for safer spaces to enjoy a movie without the risk of contracting the coronavirus raging across the world.
Box office numbers in South Korea — which has 8,897 confirmed virus cases — have plummeted in recent weeks due to the epidemic, with authorities urging the public to avoid large crowds.
But at Park Dong-ju’s drive-in cinema, moviegoers can enjoy a film from the comfort of their cars, parked in front of a large outdoor screen.
“We’ve had a 10-20 percent increase in sales for weekdays, and sell out on weekends,” Park said, adding: “We’re definitely getting many more calls and internet inquiries after the coronavirus outbreak.”
COVID Kills Quinoa and Kale
from Bloomberg via Yahoo! News
Americans Drop Kale and Quinoa to Lock Down With Chips and Oreos
by Jen Skerritt, Lydia Mulvany and Isis Almeida
Out with the Tuscan kale and acai berries, in with the Spam and popcorn.
In a stark reversal, American shoppers who were taking up healthier eating are gravitating back to old ways as they hunker down to weather the coronavirus pandemic. They are loading up on shelf-stable items from canned meat and soup to pretzels and Kraft Macaroni & Cheese as they comply with orders to stay home.
The shift back from healthier fare toward traditional staples may boost the fortunes of packaged food companies, which have been struggling with lagging sales as consumers opted for fresher alternatives.
General Mills Inc., Tyson Foods Inc., Campbell Soup Co. and Kraft Heinz Co. saw sales gains between 10% and 20% in the rolling four weeks that ended March 8 for items such as soup and breakfast food, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Diana Rosero-Pena said in a Thursday report, citing IRI data. Hormel Food Corp.’s sales of Spam increased as much as 37% and Oreo-maker Mondelez International Inc. saw growth in the sales of cookies and crackers.
Americans aren’t holding back on treating themselves, either. Popcorn sales rose nearly 48% in the week ended March 14, compared with a year earlier, while pretzel sales were up 47% and potato chip sales surged 30%, according to Nielsen data.
MisBits Hits
MisBits Rolls Onto Steam Early Access
MisBits, the multiplayer game that has players finding and swapping bodies for your head, arrives on Steam Early Access.
MisBits comes to Steam Early Access this week. The colorful, frantic, and fun multiplayer game from 3BlackDot is a quick-paced adventure where you mismatch toy heads with different, changeable bodies which results in an ever-changing play style. MisBits is currently only available on Steam Early Access and retails for $14.99, with the full game launching on PC this summer.
Roll, switch, and control your toy head through the game’s maps to find or steal different bodies. Each mismatch provides unique abilities that directly changes the way you play. MisBit’s maps contain various items to acquire such as weapons and hazards like traps to avoid. The game includes a variety of modes. In the future, new bodies, heads, skins and modes will be added. One of the new modes will be ToyBox, which is a Dreams-light creation experience that allows players to build new mini-games or alter maps and modes with their own rules.
MisBits multi-player mini-games range from 2 to 6 players depending on the map or mode. The exploration areas and the building tools can be played solo. The game was featured at PAX East and was a finalist for DreamHack Anaheim’s Indie Rumble.
Here’s a rundown of all the game modes included with MisBits from the official press release…
COVID and Corrupted Blood
Real-World Lessons From a World of Warcraft Virtual Outbreak
Nearly 15 years ago, player responses to the “Corrupted Blood incident” helped researchers better account for unpredictable human behavior.
WHEN IT COMES to a global pandemic, human beings are the ultimate wild card. That makes it challenging to build accurate mathematical models to predict how the progress of the disease will play out. We’ve certainly seen plenty of all-too-human responses to coronavirus over the last two weeks, with some people panicking and hoarding food, toilet paper, and hand sanitizer. Others cling to denial, and still others are defying calls for “social distancing” by continuing to go to restaurants, bars, concerts, and so forth. Our epidemiological models are a bit better able to account for that unpredictability thanks in part to a virtual outbreak in World of Warcraftnearly fifteen years ago, known as the “Corrupted Blood incident.“
The Corrupted Blood outbreak was not intentional. In 2005, Blizzard Entertainment added a new dungeon called Zul’Burub into World of Warcraft for highly advanced players, controlled by an “end boss” named Hakkar. Hakkar was a blood god known as the Soulflayer, who had, among his arsenal of weapons, a “debuff” spell called “Corrupted Blood.” Infected players would suffer damage at regular repeating intervals, draining away their “hit points” until their avatars exploded in a cloud of blood. The only cure was to kill Hakkar.
Blizzard thought this would ensure the infection wouldn’t spread beyond that space. They were wrong. Rather than standing their ground, many infected players panicked, teleporting out of the dungeon before dying or killing Hakkar, and taking the disease with them. And lower ranking players, with fewer hit points, would “die” very quickly upon exposure.
The biggest factor in the rapid spread of the disease was a glitch in the programming, such that non-playable animal companions also became infected. They didn’t show symptoms, but they were carriers and ended up spreading the disease even faster. As Corrupted Blood infections spread uncontrollably, game spaces became littered with virtual “corpses,” and players began to panic. Efforts at quarantine proved unsuccessful in stopping the outbreak. In the end, at least three servers were affected, and Blizzard had to reboot the entire game to correct the problem.