The 'Hearthstone' pro, also known as Chung Ng Wai, was blocked from competing after voicing support for protesters in Hong Kong.
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Atlanta rap group Migos made at rain at a strip club in L.A.
Anything goes with the Hunchos!
Migos members, Offset, Takeoff, Quavo were throwing racks at fat booties inside VLive, a strip club in L.A., and it was seriously a hurricane of $45,000 worth of cash flowing.
READ MORE: Offset’s baby momma wants regularly scheduled child support payments
The rappers were on hand to support Quavo’s girlfriend Saweetie who was hosting the strip club’s Reign Sundays series, TMZ reports.
And the rappers flooded the floor with cash and dipped in less than an hour. They reportedly came in at 1:20 AM and left by 2 AM.
The “Stripper Bowl“ rappers are used to making it ran and in Feb. dropped $500k at a strip club in Atlanta.
But it’s interesting that so much money was dumped in a strip club, when Offset’s baby momma has alleged that he doesn’t give her enough child support to sustain taking care of their child.
TMZ reports that Nicole Marie Algarin, the mother of Offset’s 4-year-old daughter Kalea, filed court papers asking for more child support to care for their daughter and she wants the judge to invoke court order payments.
Algarin who goes by Shya L’amour is saying that the Migos front man provides “limited financial support” for their daughter, and it seems as if he’s not giving her payments in regular intervals.
Algarin is not only asking for more money, but she wants the court to make payments official so that she can get those child support checks on a regular rotation.
READ MORE: Offset’s oldest daughter’s mother says Cardi B has made him a better man
Offset has reportedly already claimed his kid, and she contends that there’s no dispute as far as determining if the child’s father. DNA has been proven a match, since the two have already taken the test.
Well proof that he’s throwing stacks in the club at strangers surely won’t help his case if he says he can’t afford more child support. Just saying.
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Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is on a mission to change his name… again
Here we go again.
Sean “Diddy” Combs has once again set up a thirst trap saying that he plans to change his name for the umpteenth time.
READ MORE: Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’ two sons involved in car crash in LA
First the Bad Boy’s moniker was “Puff Daddy.” Then he teetered from that nickname to “Puffy” to “P Diddy.” Then he dropped the “P” and settled on simply “Diddy.”
Mo’ money, obviously brings mo’ monikers.
Us Weekly is reporting that the 49-year-old music mogul has filed a name change petition in Los Angeles County Superior Court to legally switch from his born name, Sean John Combs to Sean Love Combs.
It’s obvious that Diddy is on a mission searching for some real love somewhere since his relationships have bottomed out in the past few years.
Once before he caused an internet stir too when he announced in the heat of the moment that he would change his name to Brother Love, but he later doubled back saying it was a joke.
READ MORE: Diddy made it rain at Atlanta’s Magic City strip club
In November 2017 he said: “I’ve been praying on this, and I decided that — I know it was risky ‘cause it could come off corny to some people, like yo — I decided to change my name again,” he explained in a video shared on Twitter at the time.
“I’m just not who I am before. I’m something different. So my new name is Love, a.k.a. Brother Love. I will not be answering to Puffy, Diddy, Puff Daddy or any of my other monikers but Love, or Brother Love, OK?”
But he later told folks he was just fooling around.
“Due to the overwhelming response to the media out there, and just to not wanting there to be any confusion, I was only joking,” he said in a follow-up post. “I didn’t change my name. It was just part of one of my alter-egos, and one of my alter-egos is Love.”
“To set the record straight, because I have a lot of press to do in the next couple weeks, you can address me by any of my older names, but if you still wanna call me Love, you can call me Love, baby. But I was only playing.”
Diddy’s got some love on his mind, that’s for sure.
He recently reportedly split up with his gal pal Lori Harvey after things seemed to get hot and heavy between the two. But 22-year-old Harvey ended up unfollowing Diddy on Instagram, after she reportedly saw him leaving Nobu in L.A. with actress Nicole Olivera.
Diddy’s definitely in his feelings and earlier this week shared another tribute to his late ex Kim Porter who he has called the love of his life.
As the one year anniversary of Porter’s dearth approaches, we’re sure to see more post dedicated to the mother of three of his children. Porter died unexpectedly Nov. 15, 2018 from pneumonia.
READ MORE: Diddy and Lori Harvey spotted hanging out in Italy with her family
He told Essence, “She had the flu, and she sent the kids over to my house so they wouldn’t get sick,” he told the publication. “One night I was checking on her, and she was like, ‘Puffy, take care of my babies.’ She actually said that to me before she died.”
Diddy’s doing the most, but it’s likely his heart is still healing. We him peace and love.
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MIT engineers develop a new way to remove carbon dioxide from air
A new way of removing carbon dioxide from a stream of air could provide a significant tool in the battle against climate change. The new system can work on the gas at virtually any concentration level, even down to the roughly 400 parts per million currently found in the atmosphere.
Most methods of removing carbon dioxide from a stream of gas require higher concentrations, such as those found in the flue emissions from fossil fuel-based power plants. A few variations have been developed that can work with the low concentrations found in air, but the new method is significantly less energy-intensive and expensive, the researchers say.
The technique, based on passing air through a stack of charged electrochemical plates, is described in a new paper in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, by MIT postdoc Sahag Voskian, who developed the work during his PhD, and T. Alan Hatton, the Ralph Landau Professor of Chemical Engineering.
The device is essentially a large, specialized battery that absorbs carbon dioxide from the air (or other gas stream) passing over its electrodes as it is being charged up, and then releases the gas as it is being discharged. In operation, the device would simply alternate between charging and discharging, with fresh air or feed gas being blown through the system during the charging cycle, and then the pure, concentrated carbon dioxide being blown out during the discharging.
As the battery charges, an electrochemical reaction takes place at the surface of each of a stack of electrodes. These are coated with a compound called polyanthraquinone, which is composited with carbon nanotubes. The electrodes have a natural affinity for carbon dioxide and readily react with its molecules in the airstream or feed gas, even when it is present at very low concentrations. The reverse reaction takes place when the battery is discharged — during which the device can provide part of the power needed for the whole system — and in the process ejects a stream of pure carbon dioxide. The whole system operates at room temperature and normal air pressure.
“The greatest advantage of this technology over most other carbon capture or carbon absorbing technologies is the binary nature of the adsorbent’s affinity to carbon dioxide,” explains Voskian. In other words, the electrode material, by its nature, “has either a high affinity or no affinity whatsoever,” depending on the battery’s state of charging or discharging. Other reactions used for carbon capture require intermediate chemical processing steps or the input of significant energy such as heat, or pressure differences.
“This binary affinity allows capture of carbon dioxide from any concentration, including 400 parts per million, and allows its release into any carrier stream, including 100 percent CO2,” Voskian says. That is, as any gas flows through the stack of these flat electrochemical cells, during the release step the captured carbon dioxide will be carried along with it. For example, if the desired end-product is pure carbon dioxide to be used in the carbonation of beverages, then a stream of the pure gas can be blown through the plates. The captured gas is then released from the plates and joins the stream.
In some soft-drink bottling plants, fossil fuel is burned to generate the carbon dioxide needed to give the drinks their fizz. Similarly, some farmers burn natural gas to produce carbon dioxide to feed their plants in greenhouses. The new system could eliminate that need for fossil fuels in these applications, and in the process actually be taking the greenhouse gas right out of the air, Voskian says. Alternatively, the pure carbon dioxide stream could be compressed and injected underground for long-term disposal, or even made into fuel through a series of chemical and electrochemical processes.
The process this system uses for capturing and releasing carbon dioxide “is revolutionary” he says. “All of this is at ambient conditions — there’s no need for thermal, pressure, or chemical input. It’s just these very thin sheets, with both surfaces active, that can be stacked in a box and connected to a source of electricity.”
“In my laboratories, we have been striving to develop new technologies to tackle a range of environmental issues that avoid the need for thermal energy sources, changes in system pressure, or addition of chemicals to complete the separation and release cycles,” Hatton says. “This carbon dioxide capture technology is a clear demonstration of the power of electrochemical approaches that require only small swings in voltage to drive the separations.”
In a working plant — for example, in a power plant where exhaust gas is being produced continuously — two sets of such stacks of the electrochemical cells could be set up side by side to operate in parallel, with flue gas being directed first at one set for carbon capture, then diverted to the second set while the first set goes into its discharge cycle. By alternating back and forth, the system could always be both capturing and discharging the gas. In the lab, the team has proven the system can withstand at least 7,000 charging-discharging cycles, with a 30 percent loss in efficiency over that time. The researchers estimate that they can readily improve that to 20,000 to 50,000 cycles.
The electrodes themselves can be manufactured by standard chemical processing methods. While today this is done in a laboratory setting, it can be adapted so that ultimately they could be made in large quantities through a roll-to-roll manufacturing process similar to a newspaper printing press, Voskian says. “We have developed very cost-effective techniques,” he says, estimating that it could be produced for something like tens of dollars per square meter of electrode.
Compared to other existing carbon capture technologies, this system is quite energy efficient, using about one gigajoule of energy per ton of carbon dioxide captured, consistently. Other existing methods have energy consumption which vary between 1 to 10 gigajoules per ton, depending on the inlet carbon dioxide concentration, Voskian says.
The researchers have set up a company called Verdox to commercialize the process, and hope to develop a pilot-scale plant within the next few years, he says. And the system is very easy to scale up, he says: “If you want more capacity, you just need to make more electrodes.”
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Putting the “bang” in the Big Bang
As the Big Bang theory goes, somewhere around 13.8 billion years ago the universe exploded into being, as an infinitely small, compact fireball of matter that cooled as it expanded, triggering reactions that cooked up the first stars and galaxies, and all the forms of matter that we see (and are) today.
Just before the Big Bang launched the universe onto its ever-expanding course, physicists believe, there was another, more explosive phase of the early universe at play: cosmic inflation, which lasted less than a trillionth of a second. During this period, matter — a cold, homogeneous goop — inflated exponentially quickly before processes of the Big Bang took over to more slowly expand and diversify the infant universe.
Recent observations have independently supported theories for both the Big Bang and cosmic inflation. But the two processes are so radically different from each other that scientists have struggled to conceive of how one followed the other.
Now physicists at MIT, Kenyon College, and elsewhere have simulated in detail an intermediary phase of the early universe that may have bridged cosmic inflation with the Big Bang. This phase, known as “reheating,” occurred at the end of cosmic inflation and involved processes that wrestled inflation’s cold, uniform matter into the ultrahot, complex soup that was in place at the start of the Big Bang.
“The postinflation reheating period sets up the conditions for the Big Bang, and in some sense puts the ‘bang’ in the Big Bang,” says David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at MIT. “It’s this bridge period where all hell breaks loose and matter behaves in anything but a simple way.”
Kaiser and his colleagues simulated in detail how multiple forms of matter would have interacted during this chaotic period at the end of inflation. Their simulations show that the extreme energy that drove inflation could have been redistributed just as quickly, within an even smaller fraction of a second, and in a way that produced conditions that would have been required for the start of the Big Bang.
The team found this extreme transformation would have been even faster and more efficient if quantum effects modified the way that matter responded to gravity at very high energies, deviating from the way Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts matter and gravity should interact.
“This enables us to tell an unbroken story, from inflation to the postinflation period, to the Big Bang and beyond,” Kaiser says. “We can trace a continuous set of processes, all with known physics, to say this is one plausible way in which the universe came to look the way we see it today.”
The team’s results appear today in Physical Review Letters. Kaiser’s co-authors are lead author Rachel Nguyen, and John T. Giblin, both of Kenyon College, and former MIT graduate student Evangelos Sfakianakis and Jorinde van de Vis, both of Leiden University in the Netherlands.
“In sync with itself”
The theory of cosmic inflation, first proposed in the 1980s by MIT’s Alan Guth, the V.F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics, predicts that the universe began as an extremely small speck of matter, possibly about a hundred-billionth the size of a proton. This speck was filled with ultra-high-energy matter, so energetic that the pressures within generated a repulsive gravitational force — the driving force behind inflation. Like a spark to a fuse, this gravitational force exploded the infant universe outward, at an ever-faster rate, inflating it to nearly an octillion times its original size (that’s the number 1 followed by 26 zeroes), in less than a trillionth of a second.
Kaiser and his colleagues attempted to work out what the earliest phases of reheating — that bridge interval at the end of cosmic inflation and just before the Big Bang — might have looked like.
“The earliest phases of reheating should be marked by resonances. One form of high-energy matter dominates, and it’s shaking back and forth in sync with itself across large expanses of space, leading to explosive production of new particles,” Kaiser says. “That behavior won’t last forever, and once it starts transferring energy to a second form of matter, its own swings will get more choppy and uneven across space. We wanted to measure how long it would take for that resonant effect to break up, and for the produced particles to scatter off each other and come to some sort of thermal equilibrium, reminiscent of Big Bang conditions.”
The team’s computer simulations represent a large lattice onto which they mapped multiple forms of matter and tracked how their energy and distribution changed in space and over time as the scientists varied certain conditions. The simulation’s initial conditions were based on a particular inflationary model — a set of predictions for how the early universe’s distribution of matter may have behaved during cosmic inflation.
The scientists chose this particular model of inflation over others because its predictions closely match high-precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background — a remnant glow of radiation emitted just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, which is thought to contain traces of the inflationary period.
A universal tweak
The simulation tracked the behavior of two types of matter that may have been dominant during inflation, very similar to a type of particle, the Higgs boson, that was recently observed in other experiments.
Before running their simulations, the team added a slight “tweak” to the model’s description of gravity. While ordinary matter that we see today responds to gravity just as Einstein predicted in his theory of general relativity, matter at much higher energies, such as what’s thought to have existed during cosmic inflation, should behave slightly differently, interacting with gravity in ways that are modified by quantum mechanics, or interactions at the atomic scale.
In Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the strength of gravity is represented as a constant, with what physicists refer to as a minimal coupling, meaning that, no matter the energy of a particular particle, it will respond to gravitational effects with a strength set by a universal constant.
However, at the very high energies that are predicted in cosmic inflation, matter interacts with gravity in a slightly more complicated way. Quantum-mechanical effects predict that the strength of gravity can vary in space and time when interacting with ultra-high-energy matter — a phenomenon known as nonminimal coupling.
Kaiser and his colleagues incorporated a nonminimal coupling term to their inflationary model and observed how the distribution of matter and energy changed as they turned this quantum effect up or down.
In the end they found that the stronger the quantum-modified gravitational effect was in affecting matter, the faster the universe transitioned from the cold, homogeneous matter in inflation to the much hotter, diverse forms of matter that are characteristic of the Big Bang.
By tuning this quantum effect, they could make this crucial transition take place over 2 to 3 “e-folds,” referring to the amount of time it takes for the universe to (roughly) triple in size. In this case, they managed to simulate the reheating phase within the time it takes for the universe to triple in size two to three times. By comparison, inflation itself took place over about 60 e-folds.
“Reheating was an insane time, when everything went haywire,” Kaiser says. “We show that matter was interacting so strongly at that time that it could relax correspondingly quickly as well, beautifully setting the stage for the Big Bang. We didn’t know that to be the case, but that’s what’s emerging from these simulations, all with known physics. That’s what’s exciting for us.”
This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
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Dorian Burton: Philanthropy Executive Shares Journey To Servant Leadership
BE Modern Man: Dorian Burton
Philanthropy executive; 37; Chief Program Officer, The William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust
Twitter: @Dorian_Burton
I work to create sustained opportunities for communities of color and individuals most affected by broken systems. In my daily work as a philanthropy executive, I serve as the chief program officer for the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust and have been dedicated to switching the narrative in philanthropy from one of charity to one of justice. Far too often, philanthropy rewards individuals who tell the worst stories, the best, about communities of color. As a philanthropy executive, I have taken it as a personal mission to flip the paradigm to one that increases the capacity of individuals to become the heroes and heroines that lead change in their own communities.
HOW HAVE YOU TURNED STRUGGLE INTO SUCCESS?
Growing up with my father, education wasn’t heavily stressed or supported. By the time I was 17, I was the proud owner of a 0.6 grade point average and had failed out of school. Eventually, my father remarried and I returned to my mother and sisters, with whom I’d had very little contact over the previous 10 years.
My mother and step-father, both professors, were elated with my return to the family and quickly implemented a plan of action to help me turn my life around. They provided me with what I lacked: a caring environment, structure, predictability, and academic assistance. After five-and-a-half years of high school, I finally graduated and was accepted to The Pennsylvania State University on probation. The turning point in my life was the transition from an environment where education was never talked about to an environment where education was the focal point of every dinner conversation. I went from a 0.6 G.P.A. to getting a doctorate degree from Harvard, all because someone made the choice to be significant in my life.
WHO WAS YOUR GREATEST MALE ROLE MODEL AND WHAT DID YOU LEARN FROM HIM?
My two sons, Bryce and Brayden. My oldest holds me accountable as a man and my youngest shows me how to love unconditionally. They are two boys who continually show me how, and push me, to be a better man.
WHAT’S THE BEST ADVICE YOU’VE EVER RECEIVED?
Surviving is not really living, success is about individual accomplishments, but to be significant means you served, poured into someone else’s life and helped to build a legacy. The greatest amongst us are the ones who seek to be significant through serving someone else. In that God has said that you are perfectly flawed, and that you have an opportunity to be significant and change someone’s life every day. God does not choose the qualified; he qualifies the chosen. Killing your ego every day, working for an audience of one, and choosing significance over success will always lead you to live in purpose.
WHAT DO YOU LIKE MOST ABOUT BEING A BLACK MAN?
Being a black man is a badge of honor. It comes with a rich legacy, and a tradition of honor, community, and service. Being a black man means to know love and compassion, and it comes with a responsibility and obligation to others. I love being a black man, and what I love more is being a black father and having amazing kids who I know I don’t deserve, but I try my best anyway.
HOW DO YOU DEFINE MANHOOD?
The greatest strength a man has is in his ability to be vulnerable. Now, I say that carefully, knowing that the privilege of being emotionally vulnerable is a luxury that not all of us have, especially our black boys. I have two sons, 11 and 9 years old, and I must say I am terrified every day because I know that America thinks it has a black boy problem.
As our black baby boys start to grow into young black men, the world forgets about the genius in their short stories or the Picasso-like masterpieces they are able to create with a minimal palette of watercolors and crayons. Unfortunately, it doesn’t create a great deal of time for us to teach them or reference points to show them how to be vulnerable. So like our fathers and their fathers before them, we tell our sons, “boys don’t cry,” and that they have to be tough because the world will be tough on them.
In spaces that have other black boys, we show them that there is danger in their tears, and that your smile makes you unsafe. In spaces with white boys, they learn to code switch and smile more, not out of joy but so they can neutralize the perceived threat. Where is our safe space for our boys to even play with the idea of growing into the man they might want to be?
The catalyst for me coming into my manhood came on the heels of being in the middle of a divorce and having a child on the way with a woman who was not my wife. My soon to be ex-wife told me I wasn’t a man and she “never wanted our sons to be like me.” Firm words and a hard pill to swallow, but she was right; I would never want my boys to be like 29-year-old me.
So when I hear “Man Up” now, I hear it in a very different way. “Man up” is not about the machismo of being the toughest guy in the room, or the deeply false and extremely problematic narrative of sexual conquest. “Man up” for me now means that I am deeply connected to my feelings, aware of how those feelings show up and affect those around me, and express myself in ways that are authentic to who I am and the loved ones and the community I am accountable too and for.
BE Modern Man is an online and social media campaign designed to celebrate black men making valuable contributions in every profession, industry, community, and area of endeavor. Each year, we solicit nominations in order to select men of color for inclusion in the 100 Black Enterprise Modern Men of Distinction. Our goal is to recognize men who epitomize the BEMM credo “Extraordinary is our normal” in their day-to-day lives, presenting authentic examples of the typical black man rarely seen in mainstream media. The BE Modern Men of Distinction are celebrated annually at Black Men XCEL (www.blackenterprise.com/blackmenxcel/). Click this link to submit a nomination for BE Modern Man: https://www.blackenterprise.com/nominate/. Follow BE Modern Man on Twitter: @bemodernman and Instagram: @be_modernman.
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Bed, Bath and Beyond pull Blackface jack-o’-lanterns from shelves after complaints
Roses are red, violets are blue and let’s be clear: pumpkins are orange, not the new Black!
READ MORE: Woman who donned blackface to look like Prince at 80s tribute denies being racist
Bed, Bath & Beyond got called out for selling what many called Blackface jack-o’-lanterns on their website. The retailer now has pulled the Blackface pumpkins, after getting hit with a barrage of complaints from consumers who frowned at the unnecessary color change, Fox News reports.
In one New York community, a law office got slammed for displaying the Black pumpkins on the steps of the Feerick, Nugent, MacCartney Law Offices on South Broadway. The partners at the firm heard the complaints loud and clear and removed the pumpkins, News 12 reports.
“We understand that someone complained about them, and so once we got word of that we immediately took them down,” said Mary Marzolla, one of the firm’s partners.
“We represent people of all colors and faiths, and we would never do anything to exclude anyone from any community.”
Alak Shah, an associate at the firm, shared her sentiments.
“It’s just nothing I take offense to personally, but since it did offend someone we took proactive steps to take it down,” said Shah.
Wilbur Aldridge, the regional director at the NAACP, condemned the black pumpkin décor.
“By now I would believe everyone [would] know that anything in Blackface is offensive… Equally as offensive is that a retail store would have such an item in [their] inventory for general purchase,” the statement read, according to the outlet.
As for Bed, Bath & Beyond, they have since apologized for offending people, and removed the items from their website and said they are not in store anymore.
“This is a sensitive area and, though unintentional, we apologize for any offense caused,” the spokeswoman said.
READ MORE: Ole Miss honors student wears Blackface, prompts warning
Surprisingly, Bed, Bath and Beyond earlier this year hired a new interim CEO, a Black woman named Mary Winston.
Winston was appointed in the midst of Bed, Bath & Beyond’s troubles and decline in sales, series of layoffs, and 60 store closures by the end of 2019.
This latest news certainly doesn’t help their standing.
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