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EACH WEEK, WE highlight five apps that are worth downloading for your smartphone and tablet. There are a lot of apps released on a daily basis, but not all of them are worth paying attention to.
This week features a way to form good habits, saving space on your phone without deleting your photos and a Duolingo rival.
Streaks
For: iOS
Cost: €4.99
- Forming habits is a difficult task. Not only do you have to be consistent, but if you’re trying to do something new, you need something to help you keep on track.
- Streaks tries to help this by giving you up to six tasks that you have to complete every day.
- The format is rather basic. Pick your objectives, set the days you want to complete them and register them.
- Some like the health goals register automatically since your phone counts your steps. Others you can delegate to certain days (go to the gym on Tuesday and Thursday) if you can’t do it every day.
- For those having difficulty sticking to smaller goals and need extra encouragement.
Crunch Gallery
For: iOS, Android
Cost: Free
- If you get into the habit of taking photos regularly, it can quickly fill up space on your phone. But what if you don’t want to get rid of them all?
- Crunch Gallery reduces the size of most photos and videos as a way of freeing up space on your phone.
- It works in the background so you don’t have to activate it every time. Instead, it quietly compresses your photos without reducing quality.
- Unless you blow up the photo on a large screen, it’s pretty difficult to tell whether the photo is compressed or not on your phone alone.
- For those who have to worry regularly about storage space, this will come in useful.
OneLocker
For: Windows Phone
Cost: €2.49 (Trial version available)
- On mobile, it’s difficult to keep track of all your online accounts, especially when they’re all have different passwords for you to remember.
- In which case, it’s better to have a password manager to rely on and OneLocker wants to be that.
- Using AES (advanced encryption standard) with 256bit keys, it ensures that all sensitive information is kept safe.
- What you save on it is up to you. It can be social, credit/debit cards, website login details, emails and WiFi hotspots. The interface is fast, and everything is easily accessible (even if it takes a little bit of time to get your head around it).
- Since keeping track of all your passwords and accounts is difficult enough as it is, it’s worth trying out to see if this one is for you.
Mondly
For: iOS, Android
Cost: Free
- Any language app that comes to the fore will inevitably be compared to Duolingo. It’s difficult to avoid so what does Mondly offer?
- For one, it offers a good range of languages to learn like French, Japanese, Russian, Swedish, Chinese and Korean, some you won’t find with Duolingo.
- The presentation is nicer and while the format of learning is similar, it incorporates touch and swipe gestures
- The major difference between it and Duolingo is you have to pay for a premium service (€9.99 to be exact) which may limit its use.
- Great if you want to learn a language that Duolingo doesn’t cover.
Hitman: Sniper
For: iOS, Android
Cost: €4.99
- If you were one of the people who downloaded the boardgame-like Hitman: Go and felt it was too far removed from the source material, this is more up your street.
- Hitman: Sniper is a fixed-position game where the only aim is to eliminate your target(s) from afar while completing other objectives.
- While there are action elements, it’s better to think of this as a puzzle game. Figuring out how to complete the later objectives and finding more creative ways to dispose of your targets for points is always fun, even if the setting is the same for every mission.
- However, you will need a good phone to run it as it is a demanding game. On a iPhone 4S, it suffered from some moments of slowdown, but more recent phones won’t have the same problems.
- A sniping experience that’s better than you would initially expect.
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It has since become a profitable source of income of certain NGOs who focus on unaffected children born decades after the disaster rather than adults, who were children at the time, who carry a burden of an increased risk of thyroid cancer.
Though it should be pointed out that thyroid cancer his highly treatable, it has >99% survival rate. It is Ironically that it is often cured with the help of Iodine-131 (the same isotope responsible for thyroid cancer in the first place).
“By 2005, 5,127 cases of thyroid cancer were reported among those exposed in 1986 under the age of 14 years; 6,848 cases have been reported for those who had been under the age of 18 years; 15 cases had proved fatal.”
And a study just published found no increase in mutations in children where one or both parents had either helped clean up the accident site or had to evacuate because they lived close by.
“Study finds no excess germline mutations in children of Chernobyl survivors”
Ref.:
Yeager, M., Machiela, M.J., et al. 2021. Lack of transgenerational effects of ionizing radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident. Science, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abg2365.
Weiss, W., 2018. Chernobyl thyroid cancer: 30 years of follow-up overview. Radiation protection dosimetry, 182(1), pp.58-61.
@David Jordan: a real eye opener. Thanks for that
@David Jordan: Excellent insight into how the charities around Chernobyl work.
Eye opening stuff
@Marie Mc: sounds like the modus operandi of alot of charities
@David Jordan: Would that be the charity that still claims on their website…
“Scientists feared that a further explosion could occur, producing a force of three to five megatons, and exposing the whole of Europe to enormous radioactive contamination.”
“700,000 men, known as liquidators, risked their lives and exposed themselves to dangerous levels of radiation to contain the situation. At east 40,000 of these men have died and a further 70,000 are disabled”
@Gavin Tobin: “700,000 men, known as liquidators, risked their lives and exposed themselves to dangerous levels of radiation to contain the situation. At east 40,000 of these men have died and a further 70,000 are disabled”
Well they are 35 years older. This is expected for an aging population that was also affected by the collapse of the Soviet Union, that resulted in increased in poverty rates, worsening diet, alcoholism and smoking.
But what about comparing them to others who were not involved in the cleanup, don’t they have relatively higher rates of ill health?
Well, there’s a plausible suggestion that Chernobyl Liquidators’ increased concern for their health resulted in a higher rate of diagnosed medical conditions. They were also offered yearly medical check-ups. Medical care in the Former Soviet Union collapsed, so diagnosis and treatment all too often relied on a patient’s own initiative. There was also a problem with medical record going missing.
So this may give a false impression that Chernobyl Liquidators have higher rates of ill health.
Similar happened in reverse in Iraq, harsh sanctions caused medical care to collapse under Saddam’s rule, as a result cancer and birth defects went undiagnosed, untreated and unrecorded. After 2003, medical care improved and they they started diagnosing cancer again and a reliable record of birth defects was kept. This gives a false impression of an explosion in cancer cases and birth defects.
@David Jordan: the 2021 study you cite has a sample of 130 children. A quantitative study with a sample of 130 born between 1987-2002. Is neither rigorous nor generalisable so I would not take such findings at face value. Further to this, the study does not offer much information on the methodology of the study which also raises questions regarding the validity of the findings
I visited the site 2 yrs ago. Would recommend it to any adult (for safety reasons). Great place for reflection on the human, ecological and historical scale of the sote as mentioned in the article.
Humans: F-up the environment for themselves
Nature: Thanks and dont let the door hit you on the way out
No mention of the horrific effects on children born to people affected by radiation fallout from Chernobel, abandoned and rejected left in orphenenages to be cared for by the state.
@Richard Mccarthy: A study just published found no increase in mutations (abnormalities) in children born to parents who had either helped clean up the accident site or had to evacuate because they lived close by.
“Study finds no excess germline mutations in children of Chernobyl survivors
The study investigated the long-standing question of whether radiation exposure results in genetic changes that can be passed from parent to offspring.
In fact, the number of de novo mutations in these children was similar to those in the general population.
These findings suggest that the ionizing radiation exposure from the accident had a minimal, if any, impact on the health of the subsequent generation.”
Ref.:
Yeager, M., Machiela, M.J., et al. 2021. Lack of transgenerational effects of ionizing radiation exposure from the Chernobyl accident. Science, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abg2365.
@Richard Mccarthy: Because it a myth.
And not one superhero…….
Tragedy disaster Chernobyl power plant melt to blow to everywhere place land radioactive won’t gone next 2,000 years. Should banned power plants all world
@Brian Flavin: An estimated 2,000,000 lives have been saved by nuclear power.
@Brian Flavin: what?
@Brian Flavin: in English?
I believe he said “Tragedy disaster Chernobyl power plant melt to blow to everywhere place land radioactive won’t gone next 2,000 years. Should banned power plants all world”
@Darragh Lynch: I believe he uses some type of speech to text converter due to a disability.
What’s your excuse for being ignorant?
@Darragh Lynch: Brian said that the Chernobyl plant meltdown was a tragedy and a disaster. He said that radiation was blown everywhere and that the land became radioactive. He added that the radiation won’t be gone for the next 2,000 years. He said that power plants (nuclear) should be banned worldwide.
@Gavin Tobin: They’re not worth the risk.
@Ken Loughman: right, there’s about 440 active reactors in the world currently, producing around 10% of all power. What do you replace them with?
@Michal Rozanski: Dirty great big coal fired power stations or giant hydroelectric dams that can flood rain forest, displace towns and villages, and can collapse ,killing thousands.
1975 Banqiao Dam failure
“The dam failure created the third-deadliest flood in history which affected a total population of 10.15 million and inundated around 30 cities and counties of 12,000 square kilometers (or 3 million acres), with an estimated death toll ranging from 85,600 to 240,000 (26,000 according to the Chinese government).”
“Property damage:
62 dams collapsed
30 cities and counties (3 million acres) inundated
6.8 million houses collapsed
10.75 million people affected
Fantastic psvr game
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