Vodafone-Idea loses revenue in circles where network integration is over, says report

Washington D.C., Jan 20: An American bride asked for money from her invitees so that they can be on the 'exclusive guest list'.

Weddings can be surely expensive. But is it feasible for one to charge the guests to make up for the expenses?

According to Fox News, that is exactly what happened in a recent American wedding. A 19-year-old shared on Reddit that her cousin was getting married on Sunday and announced that she would charge 50 dollars to those who wanted to attend her wedding.

"She said that they can Venmo her money so there won't be no [sic] problems and everyone who paid will be added onto the 'exclusive guest list' which basically means you won't have to wait in line while other guests pay," wrote the user named DaintySheep.

While she refused to pay for entry into her cousin's wedding the bride-to-be contacted the elders in the family which ended up in an embarrassing situation.

"She wanted to get the money she spent on her special day back. I told her I wouldn't be able to come because this was outrageous and that I wish her well on her special day. She contacted my aunt and my aunt called me cheap and rude. My parents offered to pay for my entry, but I refused," continued the disheartened girl.

While in almost every nook and cranny of the world gifting the bride-groom with money is a tradition, asking for money from friends and family to replenish the money spent on a wedding is can be said to be a rare scenario.

Twitter has hinted that it is planning a paid subscription platform that can be reused by other teams in the future.

The news that the micro-blogging platform is building a subscription platform with a team codenamed "Gryphon" resulted in Twitter stock rising over 8% on Wednesday.

Twitter revealed its plan via a job listing that seeks a full-stack senior software engineer in New York to join "Gryphon".

Interestingly, Twitter "edited" the job listing once the news broke, removing the part about "Gryphon" and any mention of their internal team or their subscription feature. The listing said the company is looking for an Android engineer to "work on a bevy of backend engineering teams to build components that allow for experimentation to deliver the best experience possible to all of our users".

Later, Twitter users noticed that the company restored the earlier job listing that mentioned the upcoming subscription platform and "Gryphon".

A spokesperson for Twitter told CNN on Wednesday that it's only a job posting, not a product announcement.

This is not the first time Twitter has thought of a paid product. 

In 2017, it sent out a survey to users and a preview of what a premium offering of its TweetDeck app might look like, including breaking news alerts and more analytics, according to The Verge.

"We're conducting this survey to assess the interest in a new, more enhanced version of Tweetdeck. We regularly conduct user research to gather feedback about people's Twitter experience and to better inform our product investment decisions, and we're exploring several ways to make TweetDeck even more valuable for professionals," a Twitter spokesperson had said at that time.

Toronto, May 7: Scientists have uncovered how bats can carry the MERS coronavirus without getting sick, shedding light on what triggers coronaviruses, including the one behind the COVID-19 pandemic, to jump to humans.

According to the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, coronaviruses like the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) virus, and the COVID19-causing SARS-CoV-2 virus, are thought to have originated in bats.

While these viruses can cause serious, and often fatal disease in people, bats seem unharmed, the researchers, including those from the University of Saskatchewan (USask) in Canada, said.

"The bats don't get rid of the virus and yet don't get sick. We wanted to understand why the MERS virus doesn't shut down the bat immune responses as it does in humans," said USask microbiologist Vikram Misra.

In the study, the scientists demonstrated that cells from an insect-eating brown bat can be persistently infected with MERS coronavirus for months, due to important adaptations from both the bat and the virus working together.

"Instead of killing bat cells as the virus does with human cells, the MERS coronavirus enters a long-term relationship with the host, maintained by the bat's unique 'super' immune system," said Misra, one of the study's co-authors.

"SARS-CoV-2 is thought to operate in the same way," he added.

Stresses on bats, such as wet markets, other diseases, and habitat loss, may have a role in coronavirus spilling over to other species, the study noted.

"When a bat experiences stress to their immune system, it disrupts this immune system-virus balance and allows the virus to multiply," Misra said.

The scientists, involved in the study, had earlier developed a potential treatment for MERS-CoV, and are currently working towards a vaccine against COVID-19.

While camels are the known intermediate hosts of MERS-CoV, they said bats are suspected to be the ancestral host.

There is no vaccine for either SARS-CoV-2 or MERS, the researchers noted.

Follow latest updates on the COVID-19 pandemic here

"We see that the MERS coronavirus can very quickly adapt itself to a particular niche, and although we do not completely understand what is going on, this demonstrates how coronaviruses are able to jump from species to species so effortlessly," said USask scientist Darryl Falzarano, who co-led the study.

According to Misra, coronaviruses rapidly adapt to the species they infect, but little is known on the molecular interactions of these viruses with their natural bat hosts.

An earlier study had shown that bat coronaviruses can persist in their natural bat host for at least four months of hibernation.

When exposed to the MERS virus, the researchers said, bat cells adapt, not by producing inflammation-causing proteins that are hallmarks of getting sick, but instead by maintaining a natural antiviral response.

On the contrary, they said this function shuts down in other species, including humans.

The MERS virus, the researchers said, also adapts to the bat host cells by very rapidly mutating one specific gene.

These adaptations, according to the study, result in the virus remaining long-term in the bat, but being rendered harmless until something like a disease, or other stressors, upsets this balance.

In future experiments, the scientists hope to understand how the bat-borne MERS virus adapts to infection and replication in human cells.

"This information may be critical for predicting the next bat virus that will cause a pandemic," Misra said.