Access to Twitter’s own TweetDeck client will be limited to paid subscribers from August, cutting off free users

Antarctica might be the only continent on Earth with no natural human habitation, but it’s emerged that an “Antarctica accent” is very much a thing. Despite having no locals, thousands of scientists have made up an ever-changing population in research stations over the years. The continent is so isolated and the level of interaction between researchers is so intense, that a common accent is beginning to emerge there despite people coming from different parts of the world. At its busiest points in the year during the summer, Antarctica is home to around 5,000 people. Only around 1,000 people live there during the winter months. The idea of accents changing due to human interaction on Antarctica is no different to the phenomenon seen throughout history at a glacial pace. However, given the very specific sample size, it’s an opportunity for scientists to study it at a much quicker rate and on a much smaller scale. Experts at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich published a study in 2019 which focused on the change in accents observed in 11 people who took part in the British Antarctic Survey. @human.1011 There’s an Antarctic Accent! #language #linguistics #english #antarctica Of the 11 who were studied, eight came from England, one from the US, one from Germany and one from Iceland. Their voices were recorded every six weeks, and the team found that over time they developed longer vowel sounds. There was a physical change too, with participants pronouncing the “ou” sound in the front of their mouths rather than the back of their throats. Speaking to IFL Science, Jonathan Harrington, study author and Professor of Phonetics and Speech Processing at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich said: "The Antarctic accent is not really perceptible as such – it would take much longer for it to become so – but it is acoustically measurable. "It's mostly an amalgamation of some aspects of the spoken accents of the winterers before they went to Antarctica, together with an innovation. It's far more embryonic [than conventional English accents] given that it had only a short time to develop and also, of course, because it's only distributed across a small group of speakers.” 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.

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Apple’s new headset is expensive, not “magical” and is fundamentally different from Meta’s vision for the future, Mark Zuckerberg has said. The Vision One headset was revealed during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this week. The company showed off both the hardware and a new idea for “spatial computing”, which will be available next year. Apple’s headset costs $3,500, and comes with a range of features including detailed displays and cameras that allow people to see out into the real world while they are using it. It also puts Apple in competition with Meta, which has been producing its own Quest headsets for years. Its headsets are considerably cheaper – with the upcoming Meta Quest 3 costing $499 – though are lacking in some of the same features. Now Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has responded to the launch of that headset, saying that it represents a “vision of the future of computing” that is “not the one I want”. He also said that Meta had already explored all of the technology in Apple’s headset. It had opted to avoid using some of that technology in its own products in part because of the high cost that would be required to do so, he told staff in a meeting that was first reported by The Verge. Mr Zuckerberg suggested that was one of a range of philosophical differences between Meta’s approach to the headset and Apple’s. He also pointed to Meta’s aim to feature social features at the heart of its own headsets, as well as fitness features. “From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of,” he said. “They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for. “But look, I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important. We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests. “More importantly, our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. It’s about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways. Our device is also about being active and doing things. By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want. “There’s a real philosophical difference in terms of how we’re approaching this. And seeing what they put out there and how they’re going to compete just made me even more excited and in a lot of ways optimistic that what we’re doing matters and is going to succeed. But it’s going to be a fun journey.” While Meta and Apple work together in many ways, they have occasionally clashed. Apple’s introduction of privacy features has in recent years curtailed the tracking required for Facebook’s ad business, for instance, which has occasionally to friction between the two.

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U.S. government officials on Wednesday started cracking down on co-founders of the virtual currency mixer Tornado Cash, just days after a federal judge decided that the government had the authority to sanction them