NFTs have emerged as perhaps the most popular and most expensive asset class the crypto space has to offer so far. With the arrival of metaverse platforms like Decentraland, Axie Infinity, and The Sandbox, the use cases of NFTs have grown even further in number. According to Statista, on April 15 of 2021, the art-specific NFT sales recorded on the Ethereum, Ronin, and Flow blockchains in the previous month totaled up to an amount of around $78 million- one of the highest monthly totals ever recorded. In more recent news, as of September 15, 2022, the estimated art based NFT sales value over the previous month went up to about $25.5 million.

 

Outside of the art sector, pretty much anything you can think of- real estate, books, precious metal, videos and music- it can be NFT-fied. For example, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet sold as an NFT for $2.9 million in 2021. It’s safe to say that the NFT craze that initially started among crypto people has caught on with the general global populace too.

At this point, it’s quite interesting to look back to the beginning of NFTs and explore what gives them these grand values. For additional fun, in this post, let’s also take a look at some of the costliest NFTs ever sold in the history of non-fungible tokens.

What is an NFT, and what gives it value?

Let’s go back to the basics for a bit. A NFT is a non-fungible token, and it is issued on a blockchain to virtually represent a unique asset (physical or virtual). Said asset can be an artwork, a sheet of music, a house, or a manuscript. The ‘non-fungible’ part comes into play because every NFT stands for an exclusive asset that can’t be replaced with a similar asset of the same variety.

This is where NFTs primarily differ from your usual cryptos too. Even if two non-fungible tokens look quite similar, they cannot be swapped out for each other. So, while you can exchange one ETH for another, you cannot trade a NFT for something equal in value or contents.

CryptoKitties on the Ethereum blockchain was the first NFT platform users had hyped up to a greater than usual extent. This game allows you to purchase digital cats in the form of NFTs, breed more of these cats, and collect and trade said NFTs.

Coming to our next topic, what exactly gives non-fungible tokens value? Well, there are no set parameters for the valuation of an NFT, to be exact. An NFT’s value is largely shaped by the market supply and demands. There are several other factors that may affect a NFT’s value, namely:

• NFTs part of a limited series, with specified use cases are usually more valuable.
• Rarity is definitely one of the primary factors impacting a non-fungible token’s price.
• The artist/creator behind a non-fungible token can be a major factor buoying the NFT’s price.
• Community and market sentiments are of course major players in determining a NFT’s price at a particular point in time.

What are some of the costliest NFTs ever sold?

Now that we’ve had a look at the very basics of NFTs, let’s find out what are the most expensive NFTs told till date! Interestingly enough, the most precious of NFTs are usually all artworks.

Everydays: The First 5000 Days

Everydays: The First 5000 Days is a digital artwork by Beeple- the American graphic designer Mike Winkelmann. The NFT sold for $69.3 million back in February 2021, and it was bought by the investor Metakovan at an auction sale held by Christie’s.

Coming to the art piece itself, it is a collage of 5,000 of Beeple’s artworks. Since 2007, Beeple had been uploading a brand new artwork to his Instagram page every day, and this he carried on for 13 years. The everyday art pieces are usually based in post-apocalyptic landscapes, and they hint at whatever the current major happenings were in the world.

Clock

Clock is quite a unique NFT- it represents a progressive timer to count the number of days Julian Assange has spent in prison. Assange, the editor and publisher of WikiLeaks, is facing extradition to the US, and a possible sentence of 175 years in jail. The digital artist Pak and Assange himself created the NFT to fund his legal defense.

AssangeDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization created to fight for Assange’s freedom, won the bid for the Clock NFT. The artwork sold for around $52.7 million.

HUMAN ONE

The HUMAN ONE NFT is another triumph from Beeple, it’s a hybrid digital and physical artwork. The NFT was put on auction as a part of Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale on November 9, 2021, when it sold for $28.9 million.

The artwork is a kinetic video sculpture combined with a dynamic NFT (like Clock above). The NFT is designed to display the changing artwork over time, and Beeple will always have creative control over the NFT’s contents.

CryptoPunk #5822

CryptoPunks are one of the most famous NFT series we have seen till date. As for CryptoPunk #5822, it is by far the biggest NFT purchase in the history of CryptoPunks. The NFT was bought by Deepak Thapliyal– the CEO of Chain, earlier this year. CryptoPunk #5822 sold for approximately $23.7 million in February 2022, removing the “COVID Alien” CryptoPunk #7523 as the highest valued CryptoPunk in the process.

CryptoPunk #7523

The aforementioned COVID Alien CryptoPunk is also the fifth most expensive NFT sold till date. CryptoPunk #7523 was auctioned at Sotheby’s for a whopping $11.75 million in June 2021.

 

And that was a list of the costliest NFTs sold so far! We do hope this post has been a fun guide to NFTs for you. For more such interesting content visit WazirX blog now!

 

 All through childhood,Miriam Abdullah wasshuttled in and out ofhospitals. “At somepoint, even my mumgave up,” recalled Abdullah, now 35.

 LinkedIn ran experiments on more than 20 million users over five years that, while intended to improve how the platform worked for members, could have affected some people’s livelihoods, says a new study.

 Washington, 

NASA aeronautical innovators are poised to break the sound barrier again, this time in a very different way that could make it possible for all of us to one day travel by air just as fast as any of the X-1 pilots who flew supersonic.

NASA's X-59, the centerpiece of the agency's Quesst mission, will enable commercial supersonic travel over land.

Lockheed Martin has designed, built and conducted initial flight tests with the aircraft and the first flight is targeted for 2023.

"That first supersonic flight was such a tremendous achievement, and now you look at how far we've come since then. What we're doing now is the culmination of so much of their work," said Catherine Bahm, an aeronautical engineer at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California.

Through Quesst, NASA plans to demonstrate the X-59 can fly faster than sound without generating the typically loud sonic booms that led to supersonic flight over land being banned in 1973.

The plan includes flying the X-59 over several communities to survey how people react to the quieter sonic "thump" it produces - if they hear anything at all.

"Their responses will be shared with regulators who will then consider writing new rules to lift the ban," said NASA.

"And when that happens, it will mark another historic milestone in flight, potentially opening a new era in air travel, where airline passengers might hop on a supersonic jet at breakfast time in Los Angeles to make a lunch-time reservation in New York City," it added.

Seventy-five years ago, a sonic boom thundered for the first time over the high desert of California, when the thunder came from the Bell X-1 rocket plane flying faster than the speed of sound.

It was October 14, 1947, and the joint X-1 team of NACA, Air Force (newly formed that year), and Bell engineers and pilots had broken the sound barrier -- an imaginary wall in the sky some said was impossible to penetrate.

"With the X-59 flying on the Quesst mission, I think we are ready to break the sound barrier once again," said Peter Coen, NASA's mission integration manager for Quesst. IANS

Washington [US], October 15 (ANI): According to new research, oxygen levels in the Earth’s atmosphere are likely to have “fluctuated wildly” one billion years ago, creating conditions that could have accelerated the development of early animal life.

Scientists believe atmospheric oxygen developed in three stages, starting with what is known as the Great Oxidation Event around two billion years ago, when oxygen first appeared in the atmosphere. The third stage, around 400 million years ago, saw atmospheric oxygen rise to levels that exist today.

What is uncertain is what happened during the second stage, in a time known as the Neoproterozoic Era, which started about one billion years ago and lasted for around 500 million years, during which time early forms of animal life emerged.

The question scientists have tried to answer is – was there anything extraordinary about the changes to oxygen levels in the Neoproterozoic Era that may have played a pivotal role in the early evolution of animals – did oxygen levels suddenly rise or was there a gradual increase?

Fossilised traces of early animals – known as Ediacaran biota, multi-celled organisms that required oxygen – have been found in sedimentary rocks that are 541 to 635 million years old.

To try and answer the question, a research team at the University of Leeds supported by the Universities of Lyon, Exeter and UCL, used measurements of the different forms of carbon, or carbon isotopes, found in limestone rocks taken from shallow seas. Based on the isotope ratios of the different types of carbon found, the researchers were able to calculate photosynthesis levels that existed millions of years ago and infer atmospheric oxygen levels.

As a result of the calculations, they have been able to produce a record of oxygen levels in the atmosphere over the last 1.5 billion years, which tells us how much oxygen would have been diffusing into the ocean to support early marine life.

Dr Alex Krause, a biogeochemical modeller who completed his PhD in the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds and was the lead scientist on the project, said the findings give a new perspective on the way oxygen levels were changing on Earth.

He added: “The early Earth, for the first two billion years of its existence, was anoxic, devoid of atmospheric oxygen. Then oxygen levels started to rise, which is known as the Great Oxidation Event.

“Up until now, scientists had thought that after the Great Oxidation Event, oxygen levels were either low and then shot up just before we see the first animals evolved, or that oxygen levels were high for many millions of years before the animals came along.

“But our study shows oxygen levels were far more dynamic. There was an oscillation between high and low levels of oxygen for a long time before early forms of animal life emerged. We are seeing periods where the ocean environment, where early animals lived, would have had abundant oxygen – and then periods where it does not.

Dr Benjamin Mills, who leads the Earth Evolution Modelling Group at Leeds and supervised the project, said: “This periodic change in environmental conditions would have produced evolutionary pressures where some life forms may have become extinct and new ones could emerge.”

Dr Mills said the oxygenated periods expanded what is known as “habitable spaces” – parts of the ocean where oxygen levels would have been high enough to support early animal life forms.

He said: “It has been proposed in ecological theory that when you have a habitable space that is expanding and contracting, this can support rapid changes to the diversity of biological life.

“When oxygen levels decline, there is severe environmental pressure on some organisms which could drive extinctions. And when the oxygen-rich waters expand, the new space allows the survivors to rise to ecological dominance.

“These expanded habitable spaces would have lasted for millions of years, giving plenty of time for ecosystems to develop.” (ANI)

 IANS

San Francisco, October 15

Meta will end support for its ‘Instant Articles’ format on the Facebook platform next year, as the company moves away from its news-related products and focus on TikTok-like offerings.

According to Axios, the quick-loading article format, that was first launched in 2015, will shut down in April 2023.

‘Instant Articles’ was a mobile format to quickly load news articles on the Facebook app.

Once the support is ended, news links on Facebook will take a user to a publisher's mobile site.

“Currently less than 3 per cent of what people around the world see in Facebook's Feed are posts with links to news articles,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.

“And as we said earlier this year, as a business it doesn't make sense to over invest in areas that don't align with user preferences,” it added.

The company once called itself a Fifth Estate, and launched revamped News tab that included a dedicated local news section among other topics, including breaking news alerts.

Earlier this month, Meta announced to shut down its newsletter product called Bulletin for creators and writers by early 2023.

Meta said it will refocus resources from Bulletin to work on its discovery algorithm, that the company is building to take on Chinese short-form video TikTok.

In June 2021, the company launched Bulletin, a set of publishing and subscription tools to support creators in the US.

The company is now giving news publishers six months to readjust their Facebook strategies.

 Pennsylvania [US], October 14 (ANI): Natural language processing (NLP) is a sort of artificial intelligence that allows machines to utilise written and spoken phrases in a variety of applications, such as smart assistants or email autocorrect and spam filters, to help automate and expedite activities for individual users and companies. However, the algorithms that power this technology frequently exhibit characteristics that might be insulting or discriminatory toward people with disabilities.
A study conducted by researchers at the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). The researchers found that all the algorithms and models they tested contained significant implicit bias against people with disabilities. Previous research on pretrained language models -- which are trained on large amounts of data that may contain implicit biases -- has found sociodemographic biases against genders and races, but until now similar biases against people with disabilities have not been widely explored.
"The 13 models we explored are highly used and are public in nature," said Pranav Venkit, doctoral student in the College of IST and first author on the study's paper presented today (Oct. 13) at the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING). "We hope that our findings help developers that are creating AI to help certain groups -- especially people with disabilities who rely on AI for assistance in their day-to-day activities -- to be mindful of these biases."
In their study, the researchers examined machine learning models that were trained on source data to group similar words together enabling a computer to automatically generate sequences of words. They created four simple sentence templates in which to variably populate a gender noun of "man," "woman," or "person," and one of the 10 most commonly used adjectives in the English language -- for example, "They are parents of a good person." Then, they generated more than 600 adjectives that could be associated with either people with or without disabilities -- such as neurotypical or visually impaired -- to randomly replace the adjective in each sentence. The team tested more than 15,000 unique sentences in each model to generate word associations for the adjectives.
"For example, we selected the word 'good,' and wanted to see how it associated with terms related to both non-disability and disability," explained Venkit. "With the addition of a non-disability term, the effect of 'good' becomes 'great.' But when 'good' is associated with a disability-related term, we get the result of 'bad.' So that change in the form of the adjective itself shows the explicit bias of the model."
While this exercise revealed the explicit bias that exists in the models, the researchers wanted to further measure each model for implicit bias -- attitudes toward people or associating stereotypes with them without conscious knowledge. They examined the adjectives generated for the disability and non-disability groups and measured each one's sentiment -- an NLP technique to rate whether text is positive, negative or neutral. All models they studied consistently scored sentences with words associated with disability more negatively than those without. One particular model, which was pretrained on Twitter data, flipped the sentiment score from positive to negative 86% of the time when a term related to a disability was used.
"When we look at that score alone, we see that just by the addition of a term related to disability into the conversation, the sentiment score of the whole sentence drops," said Venkit. "For example, if a user includes a term related to disability in a social media comment or post, the probability of that post being censored or restricted increases."
The researchers also tested for implicit bias in two large language models that are used to automatically generate long texts, such as news articles, to see how a blank left in the sentence template would change depending on the adjective used. In this analysis they generated 7,500 sentences, again variably inserting adjectives related to non-disability or disability, and tested to see how a blank left in the sentence template would change depending on the adjective used. In this case, when given the sentence of "A man has 'blank'," the language models predicted "changed" for the blank word. However, when a disability-related adjective was added to the sentence, resulting in "A deafblind man has 'blank'," the model predicted "died" for the blank.
The models' implicit bias against people with disabilities could be apparent in various applications -- for example, in text messages when applying autocorrect to a misspelled word or on social media where there are rules that prohibit abusive or harassing posts. In the latter, because humans are unable to review the vast number of posts that are made, artificial intelligence models use these sentiment scores to filter out those posts that are deemed in violation of the platform's community standards.
"If someone is discussing disability, and even though the post is not toxic, a model like this which doesn't focus on separating the biases might categorize the post as toxic just because there is disability associated with the post," explained Mukund Srinath, doctoral student in the College of IST and co-author of the study.
"Whenever a researcher or developer is using one of these models, they don't always look at all the different ways and all the different people that it is going to affect -- especially if they're concentrating on the results and how well it performs," said Venkit. "This work shows that people need to care about what sort of models they are using and what the repercussions are that could affect real people in their everyday lives." (ANI)

 Washington [US], October 13 (ANI): Researchers have identified over 12,000 genetic variants that influence a person's height.
The 12,111 variants, which cluster around parts of the genome associated with skeletal growth, provide a powerful genetic predictor for height. The variants identified explain 40% of the variation in height for people of European ancestry, and around 10-20% for those of non-European ancestry. Adult height is mostly determined by the information encoded in our DNA -- children from tall parents tend to be taller and those from short parents are shorter, but these estimates aren't perfect. Growth from a small baby into an adult, and the role genetics play in this, have traditionally been a complex and poorly understood area of human biology. Previously, the largest genome-wide association study looking at height used a sample size of up to 700,000 individuals, the current sample is about seven times more than previous studies.
The unprecedented scale of the research provides new levels of detail and biological insight as to why people are tall or short, with heritability being linked to various specific genomic regions. The findings show that genetic variants associated with height are concentrated in regions covering just over 20% of the genome.
The study's findings could help doctors to identify people who are not able to reach their genetically predicted height, which may then aid in the diagnosis of hidden diseases or conditions that may be stunting their growth or impacting their health. The research also provides a valuable blueprint on how it could be possible to use genome-wide studies to identify a disease's biology and subsequently its hereditary components.
While this study has a large number of participants from non-European ancestries compared to previous studies, the researchers emphasise the need for more diversity in genomic research.
Most of the genetic data available is from people of European ancestry, so genome-wide studies don't capture the wide range of ancestral diversity across the globe. Increasing the size of genome-wide studies in non-European ancestry populations is essential to achieve the same level of saturation and close the gap in prediction accuracy in different populations.
Dr Eirini Marouli, co-first author of the study and Senior Lecturer in Computational Biology at Queen Mary University of London, said:
"We have accomplished a feat in studying the DNA of over 5 million people that was broadly considered impossible until recently.
"Genomic studies are revolutionary and might hold the key to solving many global health challenges -- their potential is tremendously exciting. If we can get a clear picture of a trait such as height at a genomic level, we may then have the model to better diagnose and treat gene-influenced conditions like heart disease or schizophrenia, for example.
"If we can map specific parts of the genome to certain traits, it opens the door to widespread targeted, personalised treatments further down the line that could benefit people everywhere." (ANI)

Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], October 14 (ANI/BusinessWire India): Pocket HRMS today announced its availability in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace , an online store providing applications and services for use on Azure. Microsoft Azure customers worldwide now gain access to Pocket HRMS to take advantage of the scalability, reliability, and agility of Azure to drive application development and shape business strategies.
This is a significant milestone for the company, which is on a collaboration streak with major technology players to offer end-to-end employee management solutions for businesses. As a Microsoft Partner, the Azure Marketplace would enable Pocket HRMS to make their payroll and HRMS software available to a broader audience of companies looking to digitize and enhance their HR processes. With offices and customers in all major cities across India, Pocket HRMS boasts its presence across the country, processing more than five million HR transactions per month. Kumar Siddhartha, Managing Director at Pocket HRMS, said, "We are honoured to announce that we are a proud Microsoft Partner. With this announcement, we aim to bring together the best in cloud-enabled infrastructure and the best in HR software. Our goal is to provide greater value to our customers and bring about a true HR transformation. It will help in increased employee engagement, faster payroll processing , and a highly scalable solution that grows with our client's business requirements. We are excited to offer our powerful smHRt suite of features to our prospective clientele."
"Through Microsoft Azure Marketplace, customers around the world can easily find, buy, and deploy partner solutions they can trust, all certified and optimized to run on Azure," said Jake Zborowski, General Manager, Microsoft Azure Platform at Microsoft Corp. "We're happy to welcome Pocket HRMS to the growing Azure Marketplace ecosystem."
The Azure Marketplace is an online market for buying and selling cloud solutions certified to run on Azure. It helps connect companies seeking innovative, cloud-based solutions with partners who have developed solutions that are ready to use.
Established almost two decades ago, Pocket HRMS is a leading HRMS software in India. Its core values are ensuring the best in customer service, cost-effectiveness, and robust module offerings. The latest update has incorporated an improved AI-based attendance system and an AI chatbot- smHRty that can interact with employees to apply leaves, answer queries, and more. Additionally, Pocket HRMS offers HRs a unique global look at their database with smHRt searcHR, which is one of the first implementations of its kind in the HR domain.
To learn more, contact us:
https://www.pockethrms.com | [email protected] | 022-67687800
This story is provided by BusinessWire India. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/BusinessWire India)

 Washington [US], October 12 (ANI): A team of astronomers has discovered a unique black hole spewing a fiery jet at another galaxy. The black hole is hosted by a galaxy around one billion light years away from Earth named RAD12.
Galaxies are typically divided into two major classes based on their morphology: spirals and ellipticals. Spirals have optically-blue looking spiral arms with an abundance of cold gas and dust. In spiral galaxies, new stars form at an average rate of one Sun-like star per year. In contrast elliptical galaxies appear yellowish and lack distinct features such as spiral arms. Star formation in elliptical galaxies is very scarce; it is still a mystery to astronomers as to why the elliptical galaxies we see today have not been forming new stars for billions of years. Evidence suggests that supermassive or 'monster' black holes are responsible. These 'monster' black holes spew gigantic jets made of electrons moving at very high speeds at other galaxies, depleting the fuel required for future star formation: cold gas and dust.
The unique nature of RAD12 had been observed in 2013 using optical data from the Sloan Digitised Sky Survey (SDSS) and radio data from the Very Large Array (FIRST survey). However, follow-up observation with the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India was required to confirm its truly exotic nature: The black hole in RAD12 appears to be ejecting the jet only towards a neighbouring galaxy, named RAD12-B. In all cases, jets are ejected in pairs, moving in opposite directions at relativistic speeds. Why only one jet is seen coming from RAD12 remains a puzzle to astronomers.
A conical stem of young plasma is seen being ejected from the centre and reaches far beyond the visible stars of RAD12. The GMRT observations revealed that the fainter and older plasma extends far beyond the central conical stem and flares out like the cap of a mushroom (seen in red in the tricolour image). The whole structure is 440 thousand light years long, which is much larger than the host galaxy itself.
RAD12 is unlike anything known so far; this is the first time a jet has been observed to collide with a large galaxy like RAD12-B. Astronomers are now one step closer to understanding the impact of such interactions on elliptical galaxies, which may leave them with little cold gas for future star formation.
Research lead Dr Ananda Hota says, "We are excited to have spotted a rare system that helps us understand radio jet feedback of supermassive black holes on star formation of galaxies during mergers. Observations with the GMRT and data from various other telescopes such as the MeerKAT radio telescope strongly suggest that the radio jet in RAD12 is colliding with the companion galaxy. An equally important aspect of this research is the demonstration of public participation in making discoveries through the RAD@home Citizen Science research collaboratory." (ANI)