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http://www.snopes.com/breatharians/

http://www.babwnews.com/2017/06/crazy-couple-says-they-no-longer-need-to-eat/

Some predictions from "the father of deep learning", Jürgen Schmidhuber:

He predicts trillions of AI in the 2050s will mine and develop [asteroids].

He has a long list of “truths” that many disagree with.

1. Many think that intelligence is this awesome, infinitely complex thing. Juergen think it is just the product of a few principles that will be considered very simple in hindsight, so simple that even kids will be able to understand and build intelligent, continually learning, more and more general problem solvers.
Partial justification of this belief:
(a) there already exist blueprints of universal problem solvers developed in my lab, in the new millennium, which are theoretically optimal in some abstract sense although they consist of just a few formulas (http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/unilearn.html, http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/goedelmachine.html).

(b) The principles of our less universal, but still rather general, very practical, program-learning recurrent neural networks can also be described by just a few lines of pseudo-code, e.g., http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/rnn.html, http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/compressednetworksearch.html

2. General purpose quantum computation won’t work (Juergen’s prediction of 15 years ago is still standing). Related: The universe is deterministic, and the most efficient program that computes its entire history is short and fast, which means there is little room for true randomness, which is very expensive to compute. What looks random must be pseudorandom, like the decimal expansion of Pi, which is computable by a short program. Many physicists disagree, but Einstein was right: no dice. There is no physical evidence to the contrary http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/randomness.html. For example, Bell’s theorem does not contradict this. And any efficient search in program space for the solution to a sufficiently complex problem will create many deterministic universes like ours as a by-product. Think about this. More here http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/computeruniverse.html and here http://www.kurzweilai.net/in-the-beginning-was-the-code

[...] Juergen won’t be surprised if Moore’s Law holds for another century. If so, computers will approach the Bremermann limit of 10^51 ops/s per kg of matter in the mid 2100s

Femtocomputing, please.

Interesting Wikipedia talk page.

This is from last month but there's no newer article about AV1:

Google’s Royalty-Free Answer to HEVC: A Look at AV1 and the Future of Video Codecs

AOMedia Video 1:

AV1 can be used together with the audio format Opus in a future version of the WebM format for HTML5 web video and WebRTC.

What kind of features are you looking for in AV1 (other than the obvious: better compression efficiency than H.265/HEVC)?

Apple is adding HEVC support to its products.

Trump's Name Will Be Bleeped Out In The Next "Broad City" Season

Would I have seen this important news if I hadn't accidentally opened BuzzFeed? I'm not so sure.

Russia protests: Opposition leader Alexei Navalny sentenced

Russia protests: Kremlin critic Navalny jailed, hundreds arrested

Will Navalny make it into the Kremlin or get shot in the night?

The Hollywood Reporter interviewed an actor and several members of the crew of Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope). They reminisced on the production of the film, which was released in May of 1977.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/ames/kepler/media-invited-to-nasa-s-kepler-and-k2-mission-science-conference

NASA invites members of the media to attend the fourth Kepler and K2 Science Conference to be held June 19-23. The weeklong science conference will take place at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

Probably a good time to look for exoplanet-related announcements.

Exclusive: U.S. special forces helping Philippines troops to end city siege

U.S. special forces are helping the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to end a siege of the southern town of Marawi by militants allied to Islamic State, a U.S. embassy spokesperson in Manila told Reuters.

From one "strong man" to another.

Around the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the USS Liberty, the Modesto Bee and the Port Huron Times Herald interviewed surviving crew members. The Intercept published two classified documents (NSFW for U.S. government employees):

The first document, a formerly unreleased NSA classification guide, details which elements of the incident the agency still regarded as secret as of 2006. The second lists a series of unauthorized signals intelligence disclosures that “have had a detrimental effect on our ability to produce intelligence against terrorist targets and other targets of national concern.” Remarkably, information relevant to the attack on the Liberty falls within this highly secret category.

UK election 2017: Conservatives 'to fall short of majority'

The Conservatives are set to be the largest party in the UK parliament, but without an overall majority, says the latest BBC forecast. It shows gains for the Labour Party after Thursday's general election.

[...] Prime Minister Theresa May - who had a small majority in the previous parliament - called an early election to try to improve her negotiation positions on Brexit. But analysts say it now appears the PM made a serious miscalculation. The BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg says Mrs May's decision may prove to have been one of the biggest political mistakes of modern times.