Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Southern California’s Thomas fire is now officially the largest in modern state history, Cal Fire announced late Friday night, after surpassing the 273,000-plus acre Cedar fire from 2003. Per CNN, Cal Fire says the blaze has now burned through some 1,063 buildings and is just 65 percent contained weeks after starting on December 4th. It also said it expects fire crews to be working on the blaze 24/7 until at least January 7th.

Earlier this month, news broke that the Pentagon had secretly run a $22 million program to investigate unidentified flying objects—and obtained evidence including footage of Navy F/A-18 pilots chasing a strange craft off the coast of San Diego in 2004 and an alleged warehouse of mysterious “alloys.

Coinbase, one of the larger markets for buying and selling bitcoin, announced that all buying and selling has been temporarily disabled. The announcement comes in the midst of a price slump for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and it’s not yet clear when Coinbase will open back up again. Bitcoin’s value has surged over the past few months, but has been correcting back downward this week and experienced a significant drop in value today.

I’m not going to tell you what to do with your baby’s placenta after birth. If the doctor lets you have it, and you would like to encapsulate it, sauté it, or even ink it to make placenta prints, that is your decision to make. But you should at least know whether scientists have found any health benefits to consuming it. They haven’t yet—not for you, a human, at least.

Early this year, we all pretended to be shocked when we saw a video of monkeys having sex with deer in Japan. New research actually studies the behavior. Scientists headed to the Meiji Memorial Forest in Japan from November 2012 to January 2013 and again from November 2014 to January 2015 to watch Japanese macaques get freaky. What they found the second time was females humping the backs of sika deer.

Nobody likes it when a bird poops on their car. But the residents of a wealthy neighborhood in Bristol, England seem to have taken this dislike to another level. They’ve installed anti-bird spikes on local trees. Humans really are the worst. Anti-bird spikes aren’t new. The spikes prevent birds from landing and you can see them on buildings all over the world. But placing the spikes on trees, a place that the birds obviously have more claim to than humans, really is extreme.

Every year, SplashData compiles a list of the most popular passwords based on millions of stolen logins made public in the last year. And each time, we own ourselves. Hard. 2017 is no exception. You probably already know the top two choices: Based on more than five million leaked passwords, they are “123456” and “password.

Feds are eager to exchange a bitcoin haul seized from the leader of an opioid drug operation because they are worried the digital booty could devalue at any moment. The US government seized more than 513 bitcoins and 512 Bitcoin Cash from Aaron Shamo last year after arresting him for selling synthetic pharmaceuticals containing fentanyl on dark net markets. Shamo was also busted with 500,000 pills and $1 million in cash stuffed into trash bags, according to authorities.

Social media users are praising a “hero” who was supposedly arrested in New York City for selling altered Chuck E. Cheese tokens as bitcoins. A report claims that he raked in $1.1 million with the scam. Sadly, there is no hero, and this story is phonier than Monopoly money. Scroll through Twitter and you’ll find numerous screenshots of a story titled “Bitcoin Scam: Man Arrested After Making Over $1 Million Selling Chuck E.

Wildfires in California have continued to ravage large portions of the state, with the Thomas fire in southern California now entering its 13th day and claiming over 267,500 acres of land, CNN reported. The wildfire is now the third-largest in California history and is just 40 percent contained, with over 8,400 firefighters and $110 million in resources deployed to fight it.