Annapolis Mansion Fire: 2 More Bodies Found

BALTIMORE (AP) — Investigators found the bodies of two more people in the charred remains of an Annapolis-area mansion that burned to the ground earlier this week, bringing the number of dead to four.

Crews found two bodies on Thursday, the second day of excavating the site, and two bodies on Wednesday, according to Anne Arundel County Fire Department spokesman Capt. Russ Davies. Six people — Don and Sandra Pyle and their four grandchildren — had been unaccounted for since a massive fire reduced a 16,000-square-foot waterfront mansion near the state’s capital to rubble early Monday.

Relatives said after the blaze that they believed the Pyles and their grandchildren were all inside the mansion when it caught fire.

Investigators would not say whether the bodies found were those of adults or children, only that they are being sent to the Office of the State Medical Examiner in Baltimore for identification.

Family members of the Pyles said in a statement Thursday that they are grateful for the love and support they have received in the wake of the fire, and identified the four children they believe were killed as two sets of siblings, all between 6 and 8 years old.

Fire officials said the fire spread quickly through the 7-bedroom, 7-and-a-half bath mansion. Investigators said the home did not have a sprinkler system.

Federal investigators from the U.S. Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are assisting with the investigation.

A cause of the blaze has not yet been determined.

Scientists Warn We're Ever-Closer To The Apocalypse

WASHINGTON -– The world crept closer to doomsday on Thursday.

That’s according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which each year updates the hands on a clock meant to symbolize how close we are to the annihilation of the human race, or midnight. For the last three years, the world was five minutes from the end. Today, we’re three minutes away.

The two-minute move is symbolic, but it gives a sense of how grim the outlook some of the best scientific minds have for humanity. The decision to move the hands forward, said Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists executive director Kennette Benedict, came about largely due to the threats posed by anthropogenic climate change and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

“World leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from catastrophe,” Benedict said Thursday at an event held in the auditorium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “Stunning governmental failures have imperiled civilization on a global scale.”

The announcement came the day after the U.S. Senate voted to acknowledge that climate change is real, bringing it up to speed with every major world scientific body, but it declined to acknowledge that human activity plays any role.

Decisions on the Doomsday Clock are made by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board. Richard Somerville, a member of the board and a research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, ticked off a list of climate-related reasons for pessimism this year. He cited the latest National Climate Assessment, released in May, the latest assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the fact that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced last week that 2014 was the world’s hottest year on record. While those indicators all are grim, world leaders have moved slowly on enacting meaningful limits on emissions.

“To profoundly transform the Earth’s climate will harm millions of people, and threaten many key ecological systems upon which humanity relies,” said Somerville. “To avoid such unacceptable levels of climate change, the need for urgent action instead of continued procrastination is clear.”

While world leaders have set a goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the current emissions trajectory puts the world on path to more like 3 degrees to 8 degrees C (5 degrees to 15 degrees F). “It only took modest 3- to 8-degree warming to bring the world out from the frigid depths of the last ice age,” said Sivan Kartha, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute specializing in climate risks. Warming on that level again, he said, raises “the specter of a future where the surface of the earth is again radically transformed.”

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the clock in 1947 to use “the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet.” The closest the hands have ever come to midnight was 11:58, in 1953, after the U.S. and the then-Soviet Union began testing thermonuclear bombs.

While the movement of the minute hand closer to midnight signals distress among Bulletin members, the whole point of the symbolic clock is to draw public attention to the issues in hopes forcing change.

“This threat looms over all of humanity,” said Somerville. “We need to respond now while there is still time.”

Dreamers Prepare To Confront Republicans In Iowa

WASHINGTON — Last August, two young undocumented immigrants approached Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) while they were eating lunch to ask whether the lawmakers thought they should be deported. King talked to them for seven minutes. Paul, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, took a few bites of his burger and left within 30 seconds, later saying he’d had to go do an interview.

Expect a lot more interactions like that one between now and November 2016.

Immigration advocates, including young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers, are planning to challenge presidential candidates as much as possible over their stance on the issue. They aim to get the politicians to firmly state what they plan to do about the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. — whether they would deport them, push for some type of immigration reform or strip away protections implemented by President Barack Obama.

The effort will gather steam this weekend, when several potential Republican contenders go to Des Moines, Iowa, for the Freedom Summit, hosted by King and the group Citizens United. Among the speakers will be Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Sen. Rick Santorum.

Dreamers and other immigration advocates will be there, too, they said Thursday in a press call hosted by the pro-immigration reform group America’s Voice. They plan to hold press availabilities and will likely protest outside the event. They also hope to confront the politicians directly.

“We want to be there to have those conversations with them, to pose that question of ‘Do you really believe we should be deported?'” said Erika Andiola, co-director of DRM Action Coalition, an advocacy group, and one of the Dreamers who confronted King and Paul last year.

They also want the prospective presidential candidates to speak out against King, one of the staunchest opponents of comprehensive immigration reform in Congress. The congressman infamously said some Dreamers have “calves the size of cantaloupes” from smuggling drugs across the border, and drafted legislation that would end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, which allows Dreamers to stay in the U.S. and work. Earlier this week, he referred to a 21-year-old student and DACA recipient as “a deportable” and criticized first lady Michelle Obama for bringing her as a guest to the State of the Union.

Some potential candidates are skipping the King event this weekend. But Matt Hildreth, an Iowa-based America’s Voice staffer, said on the press call that he would rather have them show up and voice support for immigration reform than stay away.

“Not having them go is sort of letting them off easy,” he said. “I don’t think we want to give credit to candidates for not just going to a Steve King event … but if they’re going to go, they need to kind of take a stand.”

A majority of Republicans oppose DACA, and most GOP members of Congress voted against comprehensive immigration reform. But the potential GOP presidential candidates have largely steered clear of specifics when asked what exactly should be done about the nation’s undocumented immigrant population.

This weekend and at future events, advocates are hoping to press politicians on whether they support immigration reform and whether they would continue Obama’s policies, including DACA and deportation relief for parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.

On Thursday, the Iowa-based advocacy group CASA Sioux County ran an ad in The Des Moines Register that reads: “Attention 2016 presidential candidates coming to Iowa: We are Iowa Republican, Democrat, and Independent voters and we sponsored the ad to tell you that we support immigration reform.” The ad also references a 2013 poll that found 77 percent of Iowans support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Immigration reform activists won’t get the chance to talk to all of the Republicans considering a run in 2016 this weekend. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Paul will not attend the Freedom Summit. But Monica Reyes, cofounder of the group DREAM Iowa, said local Dreamers will be at their events if and when they do make it to Iowa.

“We’re going to make sure these candidates are going to be confronted and asked these tough questions,” Reyes said.

Activists plan to challenge Democrats on their immigration stances in the coming months as well. Dreamer groups have already confronted potential 2016 presidential contender Hillary Clinton multiple times.

The First Entirely Plant-Based Plastic Milk Carton Is Now on Shelves

The First Entirely Plant-Based Plastic Milk Carton Is Now on Shelves

This month, anyone in Finland who buy a lactose-free skimmed milk drink called Eila at the supermarket will buying the world’s first carton made entirely out of plant-based plastics—right down to the cap.

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Pro Tools Is Releasing a Free Version of Its Legendary Audio Software

Pro Tools is the industry standard for digital audio production, but if you wanna get with the pros, you’ve always had to pay. No longer! Now, there’s a free version of the software targeted at beginners, and that rules.

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Tell us how you really feel about the Microsoft Band

When we published our list of Engadget’s lowest-scored gadgets last month, quite a few readers took issue with the inclusion of the Microsoft Band on that list. In our original review, we dinged it for its poor battery life and for being incredibly u…

Skype Will Be Built Into Windows 10, New UI Shown Off In Screenshots

skype windows 10At the moment if you wanted Skype on your computer, you’d have to go and download it for yourself. However come Windows 10, Microsoft has announced that Skype will come integrated into the operating system itself, so that when you launch your brand new operating system, you can begin chatting with friends and family right away.

The integration of Skype is really a mix of the Messaging app that Microsoft had killed off in Windows 8.1. The newer version will see Skype integration and will allow users access to the usual Skype features, such as video/audio calls as well as sending text messages. Naturally all of the messages will be synced across your devices, like your phone and tablet.

Microsoft has also started to link mobile numbers with Skype usernames, so that in the even you or your friend can’t remember your Skype username, you should still be able to find them via their mobile numbers, which in some way is similar to apps like WhatsApp, LINE, or iMessage where you can find your contacts who are using the app via their numbers.

As expected Microsoft will also be giving Skype a makeover in terms of its UI, which you can see in the image above. The latest build of Skype can be found in Windows 10 and for those who are curious about it, you can join the Windows Insider program to try it out for yourself.

Skype Will Be Built Into Windows 10, New UI Shown Off In Screenshots , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Thieves Snap Selfies With Stolen iPad, Gets Caught

ipad selfie thiefSome of you guys might be prudent enough to enable iCloud backup where photos taken on your mobile device are automatically synced with the cloud so that you can access your photos anytime and anywhere you go. However if you did not sync your photos, perhaps you might want to consider that in the event that your iOS device gets stolen and the thieves aren’t particularly bright.

Over in Texas, police have arrested two individuals suspected of stealing the iPad belonging to a Stewart Schaefer, who had made the mistake of leaving it in his car unlocked. Now Schaefer probably thought all was lost until he noticed that a series of photos taken after his device was stolen started to make their way into his iCloud account.

The photos were that of the thieves who took a selfie using his iPad while holding fans of hundred dollar bills while in a Burger King. Schaefer then shared those photos online until a Reddit user contacted a friend of Schaefer with the details about the two thieves, who then took those details to the police which ultimately led to the arrest of a Dorian Walker-Gaines and Dillian Thompson, with the former admitting that him and Thompson had stolen the iPad, $5,000 in cash, a laptop, and other items that they found in Schaefer’s car.

Thieves Snap Selfies With Stolen iPad, Gets Caught , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

T-Mobile’s Smartphone Equality Initiative Wants To Give Everyone A Chance

Having a good credit score/history is important if you plan on taking out loans and signing up for credit cards or services where a good credit score is necessary. However we suppose it is understandable that once in a while you are late at paying your bills which in turn kind of ruins it for you.

The good news is that if you know that you have a blemish on your credit history but want to sign up for a plan at a carrier, fret not because T-Mobile has your back. In the latest move by the carrier, they have announced a new initiative called Smartphone Equality. This is basically where T-Mobile will ignore your credit score and history and instead look at your payment habits.

It seems that as long as you have been paying your bill on time for the past 12 months, you would qualify for deals that might have otherwise depended on your credit score. According to T-Mobile, “It’s a simpler, saner way to evaluate credit − our history with you. And it’s more effective. Because the simple truth is that our relationship with that customer is actually a better predictor of future behavior than their credit history.”

This is good news for customers who have had to resort to more expensive plans or maybe go on prepaid simply because their credit score has prevented them from taking advantage of such deals. The upside here is also that T-Mobile will be able to sign themselves even more customers which they might need, considering that the carrier’s Un-carrier strategy has been found to be hard to sustain. In any case what do you guys think of T-Mobile’s latest strategy?

T-Mobile’s Smartphone Equality Initiative Wants To Give Everyone A Chance , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Apple Still Trying To Fine Tune And Optimize The Apple Watch’s Battery Life

apple-iwatch-front-uiMost smartwatches have a battery life that barely extends beyond a single day’s use, but we expect that this is an issue that companies will eventually figure out how to overcome. The upcoming Apple Watch is no different as previously we had heard that employees weren’t particularly optimistic about its battery life which is said to last no more than a day.

That being said, a recent report from the folks at 9to5Mac have revealed slightly more specific numbers in terms of battery life. According to their source, “As of 2014, Apple wanted the Watch to provide roughly 2.5 to 4 hours of active application use versus 19 hours of combined active/passive use, 3 days of pure standby time, or 4 days if left in a sleeping mode.”

However in reality their source has suggested that Apple will most likely be only able to achieve a standby mode of 2-3 days. Apple is also said to be stress-testing the device’s battery life, especially as a timepiece where they are seeing how long the device can keep its display on while showing off its digital clock face complete with animation, which has been found to be approximately 3 hours, assuming that the watch is used for nothing else.

The reason for the watch’s more intensive battery consumption is due to the powerful processor and its display, both of which are a significant power drain. In any case we’re certainly hoping that Apple will be able to improve upon the battery life of the Apple Watch by the time it is released, which last we heard could take place in March.

Apple Still Trying To Fine Tune And Optimize The Apple Watch’s Battery Life , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.