Unicef Calls On Consumers To Donate Compute Power For Cryptocurrency

Unicef is tapping into the cryptocurrency craze to generate much-needed funding for vulnerable children worldwide and is calling on Australian consumers to hand over their computing power to help. In what it claims is an Australian charity first, the not-for-profit has launched a website that allows consumers to share their computer processing power in order to help mine for cryptocurrency.

The digital money is the converted into funding for Unicef’s global efforts to help children. To do this, consumers just open up the new HopePage on their Web browser, which is currently prioritising funding to support Unicef’s response to the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar. The group said an estimated 720,000 Rohingyans have fled their homes to Bangladesh since August last year, half of which are children.

Unicef is working to supply safe water, food, medicine and immunisations to these people. Unicef Australia director of fundraising and communications, Jennifer Tierney, said the team wanted to make it easy and digital for people to help. “We wanted to leverage new emerging technologies to raise awareness about current humanitarian crises and raise funds to support children caught up in them,” she said. Users can specify how much of their computing power they want to donate to currency mining. As at 10.30am today, nearly 1500 people were donating. Unicef has been working with digital agency VML to create the HopePage website.

Food poisoning is most often caused by meat, seafood or eggs. For a start, how cold is your fridge, Ideally the fridge should stay between zero and five degrees C. Don't turn the fridge temperature down making it too cold, till a can of soft drink turned to ice and explodes. It's not question of the colder the better, if the temperature's too cold food will partially freeze. Apart from spoiling the texture, this means it may not thaw out properly when it's cooked. This will prevent the food cooking properly and may allow food-poisoning bacteria to survive.

On the other hand, bacteria thrive in a fridge that's not cold enough. One of the commonest ways of warming up a fridge is by leaving the door open. So get people to take out what they want and shut the door as rapidly as possible. Refrigeration does not killed bacteria, and really hardy ones like listeria can even go on breeding fridges. Most foods have a short fridge life: a couple of days for milk, cream or cooked food; only twelve hours for fish. As long as hard cheese looks all right it probably is.

But don't keep soft cheese for more than a few days, and throw it out at once if it looks discolored or starts leaking liquid. Meat has to be kept especially carefully. Uncooked meat needs to be kept a safe distance away from other food, especially if that food is ready to eat. Bacteria from raw meat can easily contaminate the other food, and if it then wont' be destroyed by cooking it's a serious food-poisoning risk.

All cooked food should be stored at the top of the fridge, with raw meat and seafood separated from everything else at the bottom, where they can't drip on to anything. Any food that was cut from a bulk pack in the shop, such as pate or salami, should be used within forty-eight hours. Poultry shouldn't be kept more than twenty-four hours in the fridge. If you're not going to cook it within this time, buy a frozen bird and put it in the freezer, leaving plenty of time to defrost it when it's needed.

It's not really safe to freeze chicken or other poultry yourself, since these are the likeliest things to carry food-poisoning bugs and if you don't get the temperature quite right they could survive. Should eggs go in the fridge or not, Food-safety experts used to say no. They advise leaving eggs in a cool place, since they haven't been refrigerated before. Dampness in a fridge could dissolve the shell's protective coating and they risk getting too cold to cook through properly.

Now the government recommends putting eggs in the least cold part of the fridge, for example the door, since temperatures outside tend to fluctuate. Either way, don't wash or wipe them. Most fresh fruit and vegetable should be kept in the fridge. If anything arrived home bruised, cut out the damaged part and use what's left the same day. The rest of your buy should be stored without being washed or cut up: once it's peeled or cut it start rapidly losing vitamins and soon goes off.

If you bought vegetables in plastic packs, open them up to stop them sweating. When you put cooked leftovers in the fridge, let them cool down first to avoid raising its temperature. That reduces the fridge's effectiveness and encourages the growth of mold - which could get on to food and be harmful- as well as wasting money.