TLDR 2019-06-14

The popular encrypted chat service Telegram has been hit with a Distributed Denial of Service attack again. Citizens of Hong Kong have recently taken to the streets to protest an unpopular law that would expand the power that China has in Hong Kong over its judicial system. A DDoS attack is when a server is overrun with nonsense requests so that legitimate users are unable to use the service. This is not the first time Telegram has been attacked by China during times of civil unrest. Four years ago, China attempted to shut down Telegram during a crackdown on human rights lawyers in the country. Citizens have admitted that they use Telegram specifically to avoid surveillance by the government.

Elon Musk has revealed that he has a design for a submarine car, like the one from the James Bond movie ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’. As a child, Musk was awed by the scene where a 1976 Lotus Esprit drove off a pier and transformed into a submarine with the touch of a button. While designing such a vehicle is difficult, Musk claims that it is not impossible. He purchased a 1976 Lotus Esprit at an auction in London back in 2013 for around $997,000. While it might be fun to design and produce such a car, Musk admits that the market for this kind of vehicle would be very small.

Scientists from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences have developed a system that can accurately detect cancer cells in the bloodstream and destroy these cells in real time as they pass through the body. The machine could mean that doctors will eventually be able to destroy cancer cells in the bloodstream before they form new tumors in the body with a harmless, noninvasive, and thorough procedure. In the study, the machine was able to detect cancer cells in 27 out of the 28 patients, with a sensitivity that is about 1,000 times better than current technology. It works by aiming a laser at a vein, where it heats up circulating tumor cells faster than normal cells, causing them to expand quickly and die, a process which produces sound. The sound produced indicates how many cells have passed through the laser.

A Florida-based unmanned trucking company, Starsky Robotics, has set a record for the fastest that an unmanned truck has driven on a public road. It hit 55 MPH in a speed test on the Selmon Expressway outside Tampa. Building a driverless truck that can handle highway speeds could solve a $726 billion dollar problem in the trucking industry. Starsky’s trucks aren’t completely autonomous. Instead, they have a remote driver that controls the trucks between freight depots and the freeway, after which an automated system takes over. Truck drivers are increasingly harder to find as the work hours and conditions are unappealing, and employees have to stay away from family for long periods of time.

CSS Wand contains CSS code that can be copied and pasted. The code is easily customizable. There are currently 12 CSS effects available, with a small preview of each effect available on the page.

This repository contains a list of JavaScript questions presented in a multiple choice test format. Users are presented with code and then asked what the output of the code should be. Answers are initially hidden. There are 43 questions listed.

Bush-meat hunters have been setting up rope-and-branch snares in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, where endangered mountain gorillas live. Last week, an infant was caught in one of the traps and died due to snare-related wounds. Trackers from the Karisoke center comb through the forest for snares in order to dismantle them to protect the gorillas. During an expedition this week, trackers attempted to dismantle a snare near a known gorilla tribe but the gorillas warned the trackers to stay away from the trap. The gorillas then dismantled the trap and another one near it, which the trackers had missed. While gorillas have demonstrated intelligence and the ability to learn, it is against the ethos of aid groups to teach the gorillas skills as it would mean interfering with the populations and affecting their natural behavior.