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10 Things You May Not Have Known About the Fearless Comic Character Storm

The X-Men are incredibly popular, and one of the most popular superheroes on the team is Storm, whose real name is Ororo Munroe. She’s been a fixture in the X-Men team and transcended the comic into cartoons, video games and movies. She has her own ongoing series, but it’s in danger of being canceled after only five issues. So, to help raise awareness, here are some cool facts you probably didn’t know about everyone’s favorite Black female superhero. This list is courtesy of Maurice and Nigel from thegeektwins.com

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Storm Was Originally Supposed to Be a Man

Back in the 1970s, Marvel editor Roy Thomas was trying to develop an international team of mutants to appeal to foreign markets. Originally, the Black female of the team was supposed to be called “Black Cat,” who could turn into a humanoid cat. She had a similar costume as Storm but without the cape and a “cat-like haircut with tufts for ears.” Unfortunately, artist Dave Cockrum discovered several other female cat characters had been developed like Tigra, The Cat and Pantha. The team suggested he use his idea for a male character who could control weather, called “Typhoon,” and turn him into a woman.

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Storm Is the First Black Female Superhero

Storm first appeared in “Giant-Size X-Men #1” (1975), which was written by Len Wein and penciled by Dave Cockrum. She was one of the first Black comic book characters and is the first Black female in mainstream comics.

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5 Offensive Stereotypes Reinforced by Video Games That Need to End

Video games are a fun pastime that almost anyone can take part in. However, there are elements to video games that reinforce negative stereotypes about women of all races and minorities. There have been Internet critics like Anita Sarkeesian who spoke volumes about the dangers of video games and how people are perceived in the stories. With that being said, there are positive Black characters out there. But stereotypes, for the most part, drive the narratives of many games such as Grand Theft Auto.

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Black-Aggressive Stereotype

In a lot of video games, Black characters have the meanest faces and tend to be viewed as the most aggressive and violent, even if they are doing the exact same thing as whites. According to Brad Bushman, professor of communication and psychology at The Ohio State University, “Playing a violent video game as a black character reinforces harmful stereotypes that blacks are violent.” In his study, he learned that white players saw Black people to be more violent.

In the first of two experiments, 126 white university students, 60 percent of them men, played the action game Saints Row 2. Some were given a white avatar, the others a Black avatar. Some players had a violent goal, and others a nonviolent one.

Researchers found that the volunteers who played with the violent goal as a Black character “showed stronger explicit negative attitudes toward blacks” compared to volunteers who pursued the violent goal with the white character.

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22 Of The Most Amazing African American Entrepreneurs Of All Time

clara20brownClara Brown

Colorado was one of the sites for the gold rush in the 1850s. Brown moved to Central City, Colorado, established a successful laundry and bought real estate. Brown was the first woman and first Black person inducted into the Society of Colorado Pioneers.

paul20cuffePaul Cuffe

Cuffe was the son of an Ashanti man from Ghana and a Wampanoag Native American woman from Massachusetts. In the 1700s, he was a prominent sea captain whose ships and all-Black crews worked the Atlantic Coast and sailed to Europe and Africa.

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Charles Clinton Spaulding, Aaron McDuffie Moore and John Merrick

In 1898, these men founded the first Black-owned insurance company. In 1934, the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co. was the nation’s largest Black-owned business, and it is still one of the oldest Black-owned businesses in the U.S.

isaac_myersIsaac Myers

Myers organized fired ship workers, raised funds from Black churches and bought a shipyard that won a government contract. Myers let whites join his union, but his efforts to integrate white unions were stifled.

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3 Self Driving Cars That Are Propelling Us Towards A New Future

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Autonomous Cars

“As we move from struggling with today’s inefficient relationship between cars and infrastructure to one empowered by automobility, new capacities and better use of our existing resources will emerge. Daily commutes will improve in ways that allow us to accomplish so much more, making the slow seem fast,” says IDEO.

Your car of the future has a proximity sensor. As soon as you’re 200 feet away it begins prepping for your drive, pulling in info from your suite of connected devices. Based on email, calendar and text messages, it knows where you need to go and when you need to be there. Your favorite Spotify radio station is queued up, at your preferred volume. You’re ready to drive…rather, your car is ready to drive, according to Wired.

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12 Disturbing Facts About Your Mobile Phone

In today’s world, mobile phones are literally our lifelines — they are with us through the good, the bad and the ugly. This list lets you know just how ugly it can get. Here are 12 disturbing facts about your mobile phone, according to Yahoo.

 

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Your Phone Is Filled with Crud

You never know what you’ll find when you pop the cover of an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy, but you know it won’t be pretty. The repair shops we contacted report a wide range of effluvia inside, including metal shavings, construction dust, tobacco leaves and “what can only be described as green slime,” says Oz Rahman, vice president of quality assurance at Batteries Plus Bulbs.

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Your Phone Is Also Dirtier Than a Subway Toilet

And not by just a little. Cellphones have 18 times more bacteria per square inch than your average toilet seat, according to researchers in Turkey. A study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that the surface of one in six handsets contained — how do we put this delicately? — fecal matter.

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Pocket Lint Is Not Your Friend

The No. 1 cause of failure for charging ports and headphone jacks? Pocket lint, say several repair shops.

“Lint is a horrible conductor that can slow down charging or block it entirely,” says iCracked’s AJ Forsythe. “And it doesn’t move when you blow into the port — in fact, that just forces the lint in even farther.”

However, you can remove the lint from a headphone jack using a Q-tip and a tiny bit of rubbing alcohol, he adds. The charging port is trickier — you may need to open the case and reseat the power connector, a task better left to a pro.

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7 Epic Comic Book Deaths That Deserve Far More Attention

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Let’s get it out of the way. Yes, we all know death is not the end in comic books. Now there are certain deaths that have stuck and are defining: Gwen Stacy’s and Bruce Wayne’s parents, Thomas and Martha Wayne, will always be staples in comic book deaths. However, I think it is time for an update to the list of meaningful deaths or at least to acknowledge more recent deaths that should be staples of the new age we are in. Let me just say what I am presenting IS NOT IN ANY PARTICULAR ORDER. I’m just throwing out some deaths and sacrifices of people I think should be on these lists when we talk about Top 10 dead or well … stayed dead.

This list is presented courtesy of Omar Holmon from Blacknerdproblems.

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5 Advisers to Avoid When Launching a Business

In the age of trending #startups and #entrepreneurship, more people than ever believe they are experts or have advice to give. According to Mashable, “the success of any new business often hinges on getting the right advice from people who have been there before. Applying the 90-10 Rule to advice means that 90 percent of the advice worth following comes from just 10 percent of the advice-givers.” Here are five advisers to avoid, as shared by Mashable.

 

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Advisers Who Don’t Listen

Have you ever come across people who start spouting advice without taking the time to understand your specific situation? They never bother to ask a single question about the business before launching into their “advice.”

Avoid these individuals by focusing on advisers who ask thoughtful questions and then listen to your answers. The best listeners usually make the most helpful advisers.

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7 Clever Technologies Inspired by Nature

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Spider Silk

Spider silk is one of nature’s strongest materials. Scientists have created a medical product that can be peeled off a wound without damaging the tissue underneath, but it is still strong enough to protect when attached.

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Gecko’s Grip

There is an adhesive in development that will be made of millions of plastic fibers and can support almost a pound of weight. The amazing thing is that the material gets stronger with use.

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Thirsty Beetles

The Namib Desert beetle collects water by condensing fog into droplets on the ridges of its back. Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a bumpy material made of glass and plastic that recreates that process.

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11 Perfect Gift Ideas to Spark Your Child’s Engineering Curiosity

STEM toys are hot, no doubt about it. Lego announced revenues earlier this fall that made it the largest toy maker in the world for the first time ever. As Lego’s success shows, the “E” in STEM, engineering, is a natural fit for younger kids who can design, build, tweak and tinker for hours on end. Indeed, formal engineering instruction is entering more and more elementary schools, through innovative programs like Engineering is Elementary and others. And resources for informal engineering education are finding receptive audiences, as we’ve seen with the success of our own elementary-school book, “Dream, Invent, Create.”

Engineering the Holidays

But there’s lots more technical toy fun to be had than just with Legos. We found 11 great engineering-flavored toys, suitable for ages from 2 to, well, as far “up” as you like.

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Magna-Tiles or Magformers. 2 and up. Coming in sets of colorful squares and triangles, these plastic tiles have magnets at the edges. They attach in any fashion imaginable, enabling the construction of houses, castles, rockets, ships, small towns and whatever else kids can imagine. One of the favorite activities in my kids’ preschool classroom, these tiles always attract a crowd after the first kid pulls them out. Some people report that Magformers have stronger magnets and are easier for small hands to maneuver.

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Wedgits. 2 – 6 years. These are brightly colored building blocks of different shapes and sizes that stack, nest, balance, pile – and fall down if not arranged by sound structural principles. Full instructions are provided, but not really necessary. Kids will learn about angles, balance, weight and force, building objects of their own design or following the guidance of design cards that lead them through increasingly challenging projects. The starter kit is easy to expand upon, as kids grow and fine motor and building skills increase.

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5 Ways Tesla Motors Is Bringing The Auto Industry Into The 21st Century

Tesla Motors is an American company that designs, manufactures and sells electric cars, creating an all new demand in the marketplace and leaving competitors scrambling to catch up. Tesla first gained widespread attention with the release of the Tesla Roadster, the first fully electric sports car. That was only the beginning for the company. Here are five ways Tesla Motors is pushing technology in the auto industry, according to the Los Angeles Times.

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Embedded telematics: Inclusion in the Model S of an embedded connection link — as opposed to connectivity via smartphone tethering — demonstrates that embedded connectivity is the way drivers will communicate with the digital world outside their car.

In the long term, they can expect embedded connectivity to become more of a standard.

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