RESTON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 19, 2023--

MrBeast's latest Twitter antic involved asking Jeff Bezos for an enormous sum

Twitch, known for its lack of transparency, previously banned PewDiePie's channel in May without any explanation

Scientists have built a breakthrough device that can clean dirty water and turn it into clean hydrogen fuel. The “simple” device could be used in areas without resources or places where people live off the grid. And it is just one example of the many solutions that will be required to respond to pollution and give people access to both clean fuel and water, the researchers behind it say. The system is inspired by photosynthesis, the process where plants turn light into food. But previous versions of those “artificial leaves” have required clean water sources – whereas the new device can be used with polluted water and even produce clean drinking water at the same time. As such, scientists believe that it could help solve two problems at once: making green fuel and cleaning water so that it is ready to drink. “Bringing together solar fuels production and water purification in a single device is tricky,” said Chanon Pornrungroj from the University of Cambridge, the paper’s co-lead author. “Solar-driven water splitting, where water molecules are broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, need to start with totally pure water because any contaminants can poison the catalyst or cause unwanted chemical side-reactions.” The system uses a carbon mesh to absorb light and heat, creating water favour that is then turned into hydrogen for fuel by a photocatalyst. That carbon mesh also repels water, so that the system can float and its important parts can be kept from being damaged by water. The device is also able to harness more of the Sun’s energy than previous examples, which have used only a small portion of the spectrum of light. The new system has a white layer on top to absorb UV rays, with the rest being used lower down to vaporise the water. “This way, we’re making better use of the light – we get the vapour for hydrogen production, and the rest is water vapour,” said Dr Pornrungroj. “This way, we’re truly mimicking a real leaf, since we’ve now been able to incorporate the process of transpiration.” The researchers behind the breakthrough noted that the system was simple to make, and was especially able to deal with very polluted water. As such, it could be a key way of working towards a sustainable future, they said – even though it is just a proof of concept for now. “The climate crisis and issues around pollution and health are closely related, and developing an approach that could help address both would be a game-changer for so many people,” said Cambridge’s Erwin Reisner, who led the work. The device is described in a new paper, ‘Hybrid photothermal-photocatalyst sheets for solar-driven overall water splitting coupled to water purification’, published in Nature Water today. Read More First carbon capture plant opens in the US to help avoid climate catastrophe Breakthrough solar system outperforms military-grade diesel generator Solar panel world record smashed with ‘miracle material’

Elon Musk has stopped X, formerly Twitter, from showing information about links posted to the site. Until the last day, when someone posted a link on X, it showed as an image and the article’s headline, allowing people to see what they would be reading when they clicked. Now, however, that description has been removed. Instead, the article shows up as a normal picture, with the name of the website showing up small in the corner to show that it is a link. The update prompted confusion from many readers, who said that it was unclear whether a post included a link and what that might be a link to. Many news organisations publicly complained that it had forced them to change their strategy for posting on the site, given they could previously depend on Twitter to show the headline of posts. Many tweets that had included links and were posted before the change instantly became incomprehensible, since they had been written to respond to the headline that had pulled through from the article. Mr Musk has said that he ordered the change to improve the site. When the update was first rumoured, in a Forbes report in August, he responded by saying that it was “coming from me directly” and that it will “greatly improve the esthetics”. But it may also be an attempt to encourage users to stay on the site for longer, rather than clicking away to links. Since Mr Musk took over Twitter around a year ago, he has often focused on increasing the amount of time that users spend in its feed. “Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away,” Mr Musk wrote in a recent tweet. “Best thing is to post content in long form on this platform.” It is also one of a range of recent decisions that looks to put Mr Musk in conflict with news sites. Earlier this year, for instance, X appeared to have added a delay when users clicked on some news sites and other rivals such as Instagram and Blue Sky. Users found that pages would not load for five seconds. Read More Musk confirms he is cutting election integrity staff from X/Twitter ahead of 2024 Reddit will start paying people to post X is shutting down feature to send posts to select people after privacy concern

SAN CLEMENTE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 19, 2023--

A European Union regulator hit Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok with a 345-million-euro fine over child data breaches on Friday, in the bloc's latest salvo against...

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There are eight planets in our solar system – plus poor old Pluto, which was demoted in 2006 – but what if there were more? Turns out that might be the case. Astronomers have calculated there is a 7 per cent chance that Earth has another neighbour hiding in the Oort cloud, a spherical region of ice chunks and rocks that is tens of thousands of times farther from the sun than we are. “It’s completely plausible for our solar system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” said Nathan Kaib, a co-author on the work and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Hidden worlds like this are “a class of planets that should definitely exist but have received relatively little attention” until now, he said.. If a planet is hiding in the Oort cloud, it’s almost certainly an ice giant. Large planets like Jupiter and Saturn are generally born as twins. They have huge gravitational pulls of their own, however, and sometimes destabilise one another. That could have led to a planet to be nudged out of the solar system entirely – or exiled to its outer reaches, where the Oort cloud resides. “The survivor planets have eccentric orbits, which are like the scars from their violent pasts,” said lead author Sean Raymond, researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory. That means that the Oort cloud planet could have a significantly elongated orbit, unlike the near-perfect circle Earth tracks around the sun. Trouble is, when things are that far away, they’re pretty difficult to spot. “It would be extremely hard to detect,” added Raymond. “If a Neptune-sized planet existed in our own Oort cloud, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t have found it yet,” said Malena Rice, an astronomer at MIT not involved in this work. “Amazingly, it can sometimes be easier to spot planets hundreds of light-years away than those right in our own backyard.” Time to crack out the telescope. 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.

The popular Netflix series is getting a mobile game next month.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System has turned over thousands of pages of documents in recent months to