The US Federal Trade Commission urged an appeals court to delay Microsoft Corp.’s $69 billion takeover of Activision

“Ghost” stars are aligned in beautiful structures near the centre of our galaxy, scientists say – and they might finally be getting to know why. Researchers discovered the unusual alignment of these planetary nebulae ten years ago, when Manchester doctoral student Bryan Rees spotted them. But it has remained a mystery how they came to be that way. Now scientists have been able to confirm that unusual alignment. But they have also made a breakthrough in finding out why they are there, after they found that a particular group of stars known as binary stars is responsible. Planetary nebulae are gas clouds that are thrown out from stars when they come to the end of their life. Our own star, the Sun, will do the same in about five billion years. Those ejected clouds are like ghosts of their dying stars, and assemble themselves in beautiful shapes, researchers say, such as an hourglass or butterfly. Researchers studied a range of planetary nebulae that are near the centre of our Milky Way. Though they are not related and come from different stars and different times, many of their shapes are similar, lining up in the same way and on the same plane. In the new study, scientists found that the alignment happens when those ghosts have a close companion star. The companion orbits around the main star, at the centre of the planetary nebulae, at a very close orbit. Without such a companion star, the nebulae do not line up in the mysterious pattern. That suggests that the alignment is linked to the splitting of the binary components when the star is born. “This finding pushes us closer to understanding the cause for this mysterious alignment,” said Albert Zijlstra, co-author and professor in astrophysics at The University of Manchester. “Planetary nebulae offer us a window into the heart of our galaxy and this insight deepens our understanding of the dynamics and evolution of the Milky Way’s bulge region. “The formation of stars in the bulge of our galaxy is a complex process that involves various factors such as gravity, turbulence, and magnetic fields. Until now, we have had a lack of evidence for which of these mechanisms could be causing this process to happen and generating this alignment. “The significance in this research lies in the fact that we now know that the alignment is observed in this very specific subset of planetary nebulae.” Researchers looked at 136 confirmed planetary nebulae in the galactic bulge, or the thickest section of our Milky Way. They used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, and then looked at 40 more of them using images from the Hubble Space Telescope. The findings are reported in a new paper, ‘When the Stars Align: A 5 σ Concordance of Planetary Nebulae Major Axes in the Centre of our Galaxy’, in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Read More Euclid: UK-backed mission ready to uncover mysteries of the dark universe Jeff Bezos’ rocket exploded and he didn’t tell anyone Nasa unveils ‘astrovans’ to carry Artemis moon mission astronauts Jeff Bezos’ rocket exploded and he didn’t tell anyone Nasa unveils ‘astrovans’ to carry Artemis moon mission astronauts Nasa releases James Webb telescope image on one-year anniversary

AMSTERDAM--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 13, 2023--

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The United States will not pay reparations to developing countries hit by climate-fueled disasters, John Kerry, the U.S.

OpenAI has lost another board member with the departure of former Texas representative Will Hurd, who announced at

Google has been accused of “secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet” in order to train its AI chatbot Bard. The class-action lawsuit filed in California alleges that Google and its AI division DeepMind used data from millions of Americans without their knowledge or consent to build its generative AI products. “Personal data of every kind, especially conversational data between humans, is critical to the AI training process,” the lawsuit notes. “This is how products like Bard develop human-like communication capabilities. Creative and expressive works are just as valuable because that is how AI products learn to ‘create’ art.” Google updated its online privacy policy earlier this month, stating that it can use publicly available data to train its artificial intelligence tools. According to the latest lawsuit, this change was designed to “double-down on its position that everything on the internet is fair game for the company to take for private gain and commercial use, including to build and enhance AI products like Bard”. Beyond freely available data, the lawsuit claims that Google illegally accessed “at least 200 million materials explicitly protected by copyright”, including the text from books and articles behind paywalls. Among those copyrighted materials is allegedly a book written by one of the plaintiffs named in the legal action. Many of the other plaintiffs named are listed solely as users of Google products like Search and Gmail, as well as other online platforms like TikTok. The lawsuit alleges that Google scraped “the entire internet to take anything it could, whether contributed on Google platforms or not, and without regard for the privacy, property, and consumer protection interests of hundreds of millions of Americans who shared their insights, talents, artwork, data, personally identifiable information, and more, for specific purposes, not one of which was to train large language models to profit Google while putting the world at peril with untested and volatile AI products”. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which features similar capabilities to Google’s Bard, also has a proposed class action lawsuit filed against it, which accuses the chatbot of drawing on “massive amounts of personal data from the internet”. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Independent, but a spokesperson told Reuters that the allegations were “baseless”. Read More Google’s AI chatbot Bard can now talk Elon Musk reveals plan to use AI to reveal mysteries of the universe

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A U.S. appeals court on the West Coast opened a docket on Thursday on the U.S. Federal Trade

By Chibuike Oguh NEW YORK Shares in Viasat plunged by as much as 36% to about a one-year

The world just had its hottest June ever for land and sea, with ocean temperatures setting new highs

Nearly 25% of the US population is facing high, wilting temperatures that show no sign of abating anytime

A federal judge ruled that the Ripple Labs Inc. token is a security when sold to institutional investors

The chair of the Federal Trade Commission has defended her aggressive legal strategy toward the country’s biggest technology companies as she appeared before the House Judiciary Committee