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Sunday, October 18, 2020

The spread of coronavirus led to a global pandemic, affecting various daily activities. Originated in Wuhan, China, the virus spread globally, and by March, drastic measures were taken by the Indian government. Some branches of the South Western Railway of India had started taking precautions by distributing masks to ticket collectors and guards from as early as March 8. Some colleges were suspended by March 13, their exams post-poned as the government introduced lockdown and enforced social distancing.

Announced in the evening, Indian Prime Minister asked the countrymen to get the essential products and avoid going out as much as possible. Long queues outside the grocery shops, people in masks, some in N-95 masks, and hand sanitisers at the gates of megamarts were a common sight. There were reduced items in the shops, and some stores had a limit of number of customers allowed in the store at any given time. Food delivery services, and taxi services were on haitus — workers who dependent on the profession for their daily income, while software engineers were working from home. Physical classes in schools and colleges were replaced by online lectures to prevent social gatherings.

While many relied on technology for continuing their work and earn their livelihood, Wikinews reached out to sex workers in Mysore in June who unlike others can’t maintain social distancing for their work. Two sex-workers, Akram Pasha, and Jaya (a pseudonym), who were a part of sex-worker’s group called “Ashodaya Samithi” discussed how their lives had been affected by the coronavirus, the lockdown and the restrictions they had faced.

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Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Over 60 miners were killed in an abandoned gold mine shaft near Welkom, in the Free State province of South Africa, after a fire broke out inside the mine.

36 bodies from the Harmony Gold mining company Eland mine shaft were brought up earlier on the weekend from depths up to 1.4 kilometers (1 mi). On Tuesday, 25 more bodies were recovered by other illegal workers.

“We suspect there was a fire on the 18th of May. We never saw any smoke. Over the weekend [30 May] we were informed by other illegal miners that people had died,” said Tom Smith, Chief Operating Officer for Harmony’s South Region, “The bodies are not burnt. It seems more of a case of gas or smoke inhalation. I don’t know if there are any more bodies down there, we just have to wait.”

The workers may have died from poisonous gasses, smoke inhalation, suffocation, cave-ins or carbon monoxide poisoning.

Harmony gold mine will not send anyone in to the mine as the conditions are extremely dangerous and abandoned shafts are without safety equipment. Illegal workers may gain access bypassing security at one mine site, and exit via a series of interconnected underground tunnels many miles away.

Harmony is internationally the fifth largest gold mining company and has bought up old, abandoned mines.

Police were seeking relatives to help identify the bodies, and are instigating an investigation into the circumstances.

Almost 300 “gold pirates” were arrested over the past two weeks at the Eland mine shaft alone. Thousands of illegal workers can be underground, and remain working for weeks and months continuously. “These are ex-miners and unemployed people – we need to target the syndicates,” said Smith.

There are over 4.18 million unemployed in South Africa due to the economic decline, and another 1 million may soon join the ranks.

Susan Shabangu, the minister of mining, extended her condolences.

Welkom, with a population of over 400,000 is located 160 kilometers (99 mi) northeast of Bloemfontein, the provincial capital.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Trusteer, a web security company, reports that a trojan horse virus called Zeus can steal online banking details from infected computers. The virus has infected one out of every 3,000 computers of the 5,500,000 million which the company monitors in the United States and the United Kingdom.

The trojan can infect users of Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows, and steals login information by recording keystrokes when the machine connects to certain websites, usually banks or other financial institutions. The stolen data is transmitted to a remote server and sold to cyber-criminals. “We expect this new version of Zeus to significantly increase fraud losses, since nearly 30% of Internet users bank online with Firefox and the infection is growing faster than we have ever seen before,” said Amit Klein, chief technology officer at Trusteer, to BBC.

The trojan has also affected Wikinews users, including Brian McNeil, who is the founder of Wikinewsie, a restricted-access wiki used to collaborate on sensitive news reports. McNeil reported on his userspace: “On Saturday [April] 17, a Windows-based PC in the house issued a cry for help, the Avira package running on the system had just detected a piece of malware; full scans indicated several known pieces of malware and numerous hidden files. Additional scans revealed that all but one of the USB memory sticks and portable hard drives in the house were infected with something. The Zeus botnet, as it turned out.” E-mail accounts for accredited reporters have also been affected.

Monday, November 26, 2007

In the 18 months since Andrea Muizelaar was crowned winner of the reality TV series Canada’s Next Top Model, her life has been a complete whirlwind. From working in a dollar store in her hometown of Whitby, Ontario, to modeling haute couture in Toronto, she had reached her dream of becoming a true Top Model.

But at what cost? Unknown to casual television viewers, Muizelaar had been enveloped in the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, which inevitably became too much for her to bear. She gave up modeling and moved back to Whitby, where she sought treatment for her disorder, re-entered college, and now works at a bank. Where is she now? Happy and healthy, she says.

Recently Andrea Muizelaar sat down with Wikinews reporter Mike Halterman in a candid interview that stretched to nearly two hours, as she told all about her hopes and aspirations, her battle with anorexia, and just what really happened on Canada’s Next Top Model.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

A research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineeringhas developed a robot that assembles itself within four minutes from a flat sheet into a 3D (three-dimensional) moving structure. Unlike previous self-folding machines, the robot can function autonomously. Science published the study this Friday.

Also on Friday, Science published a report of a Cornell University-led research team on applications of origami in design of programmable metamaterials.

As The Guardian reported, MIT–Harvard team lead author Sam Felton, a Harvard University Ph.D. candidate, priced the manufacturing equipment for the robot at $3,000, which could then make each individual unit — a 13cm-long, Transformer-like robot — for about $100.

As described by MIT researchers, the initially flat sheet consists of five layers: copper wires in the middle, then two layers of paper (above and below), and two outer layers of shape memory polymer.The embedded heating circuits activate the robot’s self-folding by heating shape memory polymers at the hinges.The parameters defining the fold pattern which determines the final 3D shape are placement of the self-folding hinges, and the order of their triggering.Felton told about creation of the pattern: “Cyclic folds are used by a software program called ‘Origamizer’ as building blocks to create any polyhedron. We’ve discovered that we can […] create a wide variety of structures and machines.”

Once the battery is attached to the design, the robot folds itself into the pre-determined shape and walks away, with motion of the four-legged robot controlled by the included microprocessor and two small motors synchronised by it.Each of the four legs has eight “linkages” which convert the force applied by a motor into motion.”It lets you transfer just one degree of freedom into a whole complicated motion, all through the mechanics of the structure,” says coauthor Erik Demaine, MIT professor of computer science and engineering.

The robot moved during testing at about 5.4 centimeters per second, over a pre-determined route, not just a straight line — without any outside assistance.Marc Lavine, a senior Science editor, suggested such robots might be put in place “through a confined passageway, such as a collapsed building, after which they would assemble into their final form autonomously”.

The folding pattern studied by the Cornell-led research team is well-known in origami as Miura-ori, whose unusual engineering properties caught the attention of team member Chris Santangelo of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Cornell University lead author Jesse Silverberg commented on potential of origami-based engineering: “When incorporated into more complex devices, these materials will enable on-the-fly transformation of mechanical function. We envision combining these origami-inspired materials with computer-controlled actuators to build more complex machines, such as hardening shells, locked-in joints and deployable barriers; and ultimately, this transformer technology will revolutionize the way we think about materials, moving them beyond their current static form, and revealing more functionality than what originally meets the eye”.