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The company behind an industrial park in central Indonesia that is becoming a nickel production powerhouse says it

Sergio Aguero has been hit with a ban that is the biggest of his career since his forced retirement. It comes after the Argentian football player was banned on the streaming platform Twitch following his venture into content creation. The former Manchester City legend was forced to retire from football in 2021 after being diagnosed with a cardiac arrhythmia, or irregular heartbeat. The end of his footballing career saw the beginning of a new journey into streaming as Aguero earned a strong number of followers on streaming site Twitch largely sharing football-based content. Now, however, users attempting to access his profile (slakun10) are being met with the service’s generic message about “copyright” issues. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The message reads: “Content from this channel has been removed at the request of the copyright holder.” While no specific information has been given about his indefinite ban, it is likely that it could be due to Aguero using content that he was not permitted to. Due to the timing of the ban, some have hypothesised that Aguero may have live-streamed part of his former side Manchester City’s 4-0 Champions League semi-final second-leg win over Real Madrid on Wednesday 17 May. It is the first time the former football player has been banned from Twitch since many of his on-field fans followed him to the site to view his content, including watching him play FIFA video games, both old and new. Despite having won 12 major trophies with Manchester City and scoring 260 goals for the club, he is perhaps best known for his last-ditch winner against Queens Park Rangers during the 2011/2012 season which help City win their first league title since 1968. 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.

There's nothing like the look and smell of freshly cut grass. But unless you're paying

When the Apple Watch first launched back in 2015, there were 10 Watch faces. Now, there are more than 50. The newest among these is the Snoopy Watch face, designed in conjunction with the Charles Schulz Studio. The Independent sat down to talk to Gary Butcher, human interface designer at Apple, Eric Charles from Apple Watch product marketing and Paige Braddock, chief creative officer at Charles M Schulz Creative Associates to discover everything about the new Watch face. This is not the first time Snoopy has been on watches and he’s even appeared on high-end models like the Omega Speedmaster. As Eric Charles explains, “There’s a deep horological legacy of Snoopy appearing on watch faces from his early as the 1950s, and on Apple Watch, we’ve been able to bring Snoopy to life in whole new ways.” There 148 different animations for the Watch, which would run for 12 minutes if you played them one after the other; it’s tempting to try. They were all developed from an intense brainstorming session. Braddock, who was hired back in 1999 by Charles Schulz himself to work as an illustrator at the studio, reveals the creative dynamic: “Both Apple and peanuts have strong identities and a strong desire to connect in an authentic way with fans. “At the Schulz studio, we wanted to be authentic to Snoopy’s DNA and simultaneously explore the Apple Watch technology. Everyone knows that Peanuts is a comic strip that exists in a different decade: there are no smart phones or iPads in the comic strip. “But with mutual respect, it is possible to coexist as a modern tech company and a comic strip with a rich historic legacy. I always feel like a true collaboration is not one thing eclipsing the other, it’s finding a balance and working with contributors’ strengths.” As Braddock points out, there’s something about Snoopy for the Watch that’s a great fit. “If you look at a comic strip like this, it’s basically a four-panel storyboard. Even the aspect ratio from the comic to the watch face is almost the same. We sourced numerous animated sequences directly from Schulz’s original comic strips.” Snoopy’s look has evolved over the decades, from the fifties when he walked on all fours, to the sixties when he discovered he could do it on two legs. The shape of his canine head also changed. The collaborators had to decide whether the animation should be two-dimensional like the comic strip or 3D like the Snoopy Show. This led to a style that looks anything but electronic. Braddock again: “Ultimately, we chose to keep the watch animations as close as possible to the original Schulz drawings. Charles Schulz had a very specific and rare pin nib that he used. It was a nib that you had to dip in the ink bottle each time to fill it with ink and it meant he could create a varied line from thin to thick. “This sort of active drawing gives the character life. It’s obvious when you see these drawings that they’re handmade and not digital, and this is the feel that we wanted to preserve in the Watch animations.” But then Apple’s engineering kicks in. When you look at Snoopy on the Watch face, there’s a level of subtlety that you only notice after a while. Sometimes his activity is based on the weather, sometimes on what you’re doing. For instance, when you go swimming, so does Snoopy. Sometimes he even interacts with the Watch face itself, specifically with the minute hand. Gary Butcher expands on this: “One of the things we were especially excited to do is to have Snoopy and Woodstock interact with the minute hand of the watch. He can lean on it, He can throw things that bounce off of it. He can kick it when he wants to be fed. And he can jump up on it to wave to Woodstock on the other side.” This is one of the things that might mean you find yourself checking the time more than you actually need to. One time, he’ll peep out from behind the minute hand, his body magically hidden. Next, he’ll be skating and bounce off the minute hand because it’s in just the wrong place. Another time, a flying Woodstock will drop a bone for a recumbent Snoopy, which will bounce off the minute hand into his mouth. Then… look, you’re going to have to discover these things for yourself. On your birthday, Snoopy will celebrate. He’ll decorate his dog house for Christmas, or dress up for Halloween. In the creative process, they realised that with a little ingenuity, they could make these animations appear at different times. “To maximise the chances you’ll see those animations,” Butcher says, “we figured out we could simply rotate certain animations. I say simply rotate but under the hood is a really sophisticated scene layout engine being driven by an equally sophisticated decision engine.” Sometimes the rotation only needs to affect certain frames of the animation. If Snoopy is standing on the minute hand, he’s affected only when he’s up top, and his free fall into leaves below is unchanged and he falls naturally downwards, otherwise he’d shoot off sideways. “Each animation is only five seconds long, but by looping the whole animation or even just a few frames at the end, We’re able to keep certain scenes alive for much longer,” Butcher says. There’s more detail yet. Look closely and you’ll see the backgrounds are made up of dots – just the way it used to look in newsprint. Monday to Saturday has a half-tone dot background, but then bursts into colour for Sundays, again, just like it appeared in newspapers. This is called the Sunday Surprise. Eric Charles comments, “What I love about the way we’ve designed this watch face is that you may never see all of them. Because I live in California, I may not see the winter animations. I may never see the icy ones. I hopefully will never see the stormy ones either.” The team wanted to surprise and delight. Charles goes on to explain that they sought to find more and more content, all day long: “Those two words, surprise and delight, were basically the mantra of how we looked at this project. A certain animation can show up at 10.09 but when you raise your wrist again and it is still 10.09, what else can we serve you? What else can we present to you?” The mission to present Snoopy to the world was key to the endeavour, it seems. Paige Braddock says, “I don’t want the generation that uses modern devices to miss out on this really fantastic character. And I think Apple Watch is a bridge for some of those fans to discover – or rediscover – Snoopy.” Read More The Apple Watch has a major issue but Apple is working on a fix Don’t believe your eyes: how tech is changing photography forever Police to trial use of drones as first responders to emergencies Don’t believe your eyes: how tech is changing photography forever Police to trial use of drones as first responders to emergencies SpaceX launches world’s most powerful rocket – and then it disappears

Many of us look to the stars for answers to life’s most complex questions. But actually, some of the greatest mysteries lie beneath our very feet. One might think we’d know the Earth pretty well by now but, in fact, our planet’s core remains shrouded in enigma. Indeed, there are two gigantic blobs located beneath Africa and the Pacific Ocean that occupy around six per cent of the world’s entire volume. And yet, we’re still not entirely sure what they’re made of or where they came from. There are a number of hypotheses, including that they are piles of oceanic crust that have accumulated over billions of years. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter But a more interesting theory is that they are huge chunks of an ancient planet that hit the Earth around 4.5 billion years ago. To give an indication of just how massive these things are, the structure under Africa – an area known as Tuzo – is thought to be around 800km (497 miles) tall – the equivalent of some 90 Mount Everests stacked on top of one another, as IFLScience notes. The problem with determining the origin of these monster formations is that there are no direct ways of observing the Earth’s core. The deepest hole humans have ever dug – branded the "entrance to hell" – reached a pretty staggering 12,263m (40,230ft), but that doesn’t even come close to breaking through the crust to the layers beneath. Our most effective tool for analysing what lies beneath the ground is a technique called seismic tomography, which looks at how waves of energy travel when earthquakes occur. Since rocks and liquids have different densities, the waves move through them at different speeds. By measuring the tremors from different points on the surface, geologists can determine what kind of material the waves are travelling through and, in so doing, map out the Earth’s interior. It was by using this technique that the two unusual structures – known as large low shear velocity provinces (LLSVPs) – were found. Waves travel more slowly in these areas – fondly known as “blobs” – than through the surrounding lower mantle, indicating that they’re made of something different. We can’t tell what this material is based on seismic tomography data alone, but some scientists like to believe that they are the remnants of an ancient planet called Theia – an idea known as the “giant impact hypothesis”. According to this hypothesis, around 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized object collided with the Earth. This impact not only created the planet we call home today, but also threw off enough rock to form the moon that lights up our night skies. Some scientists suggest that some of Theia’s leftovers also sunk to the bottom of the planet, probably settling somewhere above the core – thereby forming at least one of the two LLSVPs. More Updates About Strange Blob Structures Inside Planet Earth youtu.be Experts have been investigating the area for decades but there’s still no way of knowing for sure just what these two giant blobs are. Still, studies into Theia have offered important insights into how the possible collision might have kickstarted key plate tectonic and mantle motion inside our planet – crucial processes for establishing the world on which we live. It’s also a useful reminder that we still have so much to learn about our planet and where we came from. 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.

A certified cat trainer suggests reasons why a cat won’t use its litter box—and offers some possible solutions.

By Joyce Lee and Heekyong Yang SEOUL (Reuters) -South Korea's SK Hynix said on Wednesday the memory chip market was