American YouTuber FaZe Rug has released his own brand of candy designed to create a user experience for the consumer. FaZe, whose real name is Brian Awadis, launched 1UP Candy – a product designed to appeal to his mainly Gen Z audience – as an experience-driven sweet treat. The 26-year-old YouTuber has 23 million subscribers and has used his following to help launch the first product under the 1UP name. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The initial product is a sour gummy marketed as the Sour Gummy Challenge as it comes alongside a dare that can win the user money if they complete it. How do you take part in the challenge? To successfully complete it, challengers have to put three sour gummies in their mouths and suck on them for thirty seconds while keeping a straight face the entire time. If they are able to complete it and provide evidence in the form of a TikTok or Instagram post, hashtagged #1UPsourchallenge and accompanied with the Cash App information, users can be in with a chance of winning cash prizes. I Created the Worlds Sourest Candy - SOUR CHALLENGE www.youtube.com Rug explained: “When I was approached to fully engage in developing a new candy that was designed to be fun and social, I jumped all over the opportunity.” He continued: “Anyone who knows me knows I love candy, and I love challenging my family, friends and fans to experience it with me.” In a YouTube video launch, Rug tested the challenge on his friends and family, with two out of three failing and having to use the neutraliser to get rid of the sour taste from their mouths. It is recommended by the company that the challenge is avoided by people who have soft teeth, sensitive gums or gastrointestinal disorders. The co-founder of 1UP, Matt Weiss, said: “Launching 1UP Candy with an experiential sour candy challenge is the perfect way for Rug to reach through the screen — and even create connections among his viewers as they experience the candy together via social media.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Global energy-related emissions should peak next year — marking a key point for the renewables transition — but

“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now in this very room." So says Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus in sci-fi classic ‘The Matrix’ as he offers Keanu Reeves’s Neo the choice to find out just how “deep the rabbit hole goes”. Now, just as Neo discovered that the "life" he'd been living was little more than an algorithmic construct, scientists and philosophers are arguing that we could be stuck inside a simulation ourselves. In a paper published earlier this month, physicist Melvin Vopson, of the University of Portsmouth, offered scientific evidence for a philosophical theory known as the simulation hypothesis. This, in a nutshell, posits that the entire universe and our objective reality are just super-advanced virtual reality illusions. Elon Musk is among the well-known fans of the theory, which – as Dr Vopson notes in his paper – has been “gaining traction in scientific circles as well as in the entertainment industry”. The university lecturer also pointed out that recent developments in a branch of science known as information physics “appear to support this possibility”. Information physics suggests that physical reality is fundamentally made up of bits of information. However, Dr Vopson has gone further and is working to prove that information has a physical mass and is a fundamental building block of the universe. He even claims that information could be the mysterious dark matter that makes up almost a third of the universe. In previous research, the physicist proposed that all elementary particles (the smallest known building blocks in the universe), store information about themselves, much like DNA in humans. Then, in 2022, he discovered a new law of physics, christened the second law of infodynamics, which states that entropy – the degree of randomness or disorder – within an isolated information system either remains constant or decreases over time. In other words, the system becomes less and less chaotic, implying that there is some kind of mechanism governing it rather than random chance. “I knew then that this revelation had far-reaching implications across various scientific disciplines,” Dr Vopson said in a statement released by the University of Portsmouth. “What I wanted to do next is put the law to the test and see if it could further support the simulation hypothesis by moving it on from the philosophical realm to mainstream science.” Is the Universe a Simulation? | Melvin Vopson www.youtube.com Dr Vopson employed the law in a range of different fields, including genetics, cosmology and even symmetry. Here, he found that the abundance of symmetry in the Universe (think snowflakes and facial structures) could be explained by the second law of infodynamics. "Symmetry principles play an important role with respect to the laws of nature, but until now there has been little explanation as to why that could be,” he said. “My findings demonstrate that high symmetry corresponds to the lowest information entropy state, potentially explaining nature's inclination towards it." Again, put simply, nature prefers things to be as well-ordered as possible. He continued: “This approach, where excess information is removed, resembles the process of a computer deleting or compressing waste code to save storage space and optimise power consumption.” As a result, this “supports the idea that we’re living in a simulation.” Dr Vopson is serious about this idea and, last year, even launched a crowdfunding campaign to test it. At the time, he announced that he had designed an experiment to determine whether we are all just characters in an advanced virtual world. “There is a growing community out there looking seriously at the possibility that information is more fundamental to everything than we think,” he said in a statement released back in December. “If information is a key component of everything in the universe, it would make sense that a vast computer somewhere is in control. “Assuming the universe is indeed a simulation, then it must contain a lot of information bits hidden everywhere around us. I’ve devised an experiment that proposes a way of extracting this information to prove it’s there.” His proposed experiment is based on his conclusion that information is physical and that elementary particles have a DNA of information about themselves. He posited that the information in an elementary particle could be detected and measured by using particle-antiparticle collision. “We can measure the information content of a particle by erasing it. If we delete the information from the particles, we can then look at what’s left,” he said in the December statement. “This experiment is highly achievable with our existing tools, and I’m hoping the crowdfunding site will help us achieve it.” And whilst the crowdfunder closed well before reaching its proposed £185,000 target, Dr Vopson still hopes to carry out the ambitious test. Following his most recent paper, he suggested the experiment had the power to confirm the “fifth state of matter in the universe” and “change physics as we know it.” Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

By Max A. Cherney Silicon Valley-based artificial intelligence chip startup d-Matrix has raised $110 million from investors that

Why did xQc end the live stream? What happened in rust server?

Two classics combine in Lego's cute new Pac-Man arcade set. Announced Monday, to mark (a

Shares in Dell Technologies Inc rose 22.2% and hit a record high on Friday after it raised full-year

By Hyunjoo Jin San Francisco (Reuters) -Kentucky is requiring that electric vehicle charging companies include Tesla's plug if they want

SOUTH JORDAN, Utah--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 18, 2023--

Across swathes of Southeast Asia, maturing palm oil trees, some as tall as a 12-storey building, are turning

Not long ago, virtual private networks (VPNs) were the exclusive realm of businesses and a

Jordan Tually amazes fans by going on a vacation 'planned' by ChatGPT