TL;DR: As of August 13, get the Bellboy 5-in-1 Portable Wireless Charging Station for only

We use letters every day of our lives, but apparently, there's one lowercase letter that we do not recognise. Psychologists at Johns Hopkins University have discovered that most people aren't aware that there are two types of the lowercase letter g. One of them is the open tail 'g' which most of us would have written out by hand with its image comparable to "a loop with a fishhook hanging from it. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Then, there is the loop tail 'g' which appears in print form e.g. books and newspapers as well as in Serif fonts such as Times New Roman and Calibri - we've all seen this type of letter millions of times, but it seems remembering it is an entirely different challenge altogether. There were 38 volunteers in the study published by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance and they were asked to list letters that they thought had two variations in print. In the first experiment, "most participants failed to recall the existence of looptail g" while only two people could write looptail g accurately. "They don't entirely know what this letter looks like, even though they can read it," co-author Gali Ellenblum said. Next participants were asked to look for examples of the looptail g in the text and were asked to reproduce this letter style after this and in the end, only one person could do this while half the group wrote an open tail g. Finally, those taking part in the study were asked to identify the letter g in a multiple-choice test with four options of the letter where seven out of 25 managed to do this correctly. So how can we know a letter but not recognised it? It could be to do with the fact we are not taught to write this kind of 'g," according to Michael McCloskey, senior author of the paper. "What we think may be happening here is that we learn the shapes of most letters in part because we have to write them in school. 'Looptail g' is something we're never taught to write, so we may not learn its shape as well," he said. "More generally, our findings raise questions about the conditions under which massive exposure does, and does not, yield detailed, accurate, accessible knowledge." In a play-along video on John Hopkin's YouTube channel, four different g's labelled from one to four appear on the screen where it asked viewers to guess which is the correct looptail 'g'. (*Spoiler ahead*) The correct answer is number 3. Meanwhile, this study has also led research to question the impact that writing less and using more devices has on our reading abilities. "What about children who are just learning to read? Do they have a little bit more trouble with this form of g because they haven't been forced to pay attention to it and write it?" McCloskey said. "That's something we don't really know. Our findings give us an intriguing way of looking at questions about the importance of writing for reading..." 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.

Meta said it will start allowing users to delete or deactivate their Threads accounts without also closing down their Instagram accounts. Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said in a Threads post that the change is rolling out on the platform. Threads was launched in the summer as a rival to Twitter, with Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg hoping to scoop up Twitter users unhappy with Elon Musk’s changes to and management of the app, which is now known as X. Despite early success, with millions of people signing up, many voiced their frustration due to Threads requiring an Instagram account to complete registration, which also meant anyone wishing to delete their Threads account also had to shut down their Instagram account. We heard feedback that you want more control over the experience, so we’re rolling out a way to opt out of being featured outside Threads Instagram boss Adam Mosseri Mr Mosseri said in the weeks after launch that Meta was looking to changing the requirement, and in a post to Threads, the Instagram boss confirmed a new option in the app’s settings will enable users to close their Threads profile only. He said the update is “based on feedback from our Threads community”. He said a second update is also rolling out to users, which will allow them to switch off a recent feature that sees Threads post also appear on the feeds of other Meta apps – Facebook and Instagram. “We heard feedback that you want more control over the experience, so we’re rolling out a way to opt out of being featured outside Threads,” Mr Mosseri said.

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Tech companies should help to reimburse the victims of social media purchase scams, bosses at Barclays have said. It comes as data from the bank revealed a jump in the number of social media scams affecting British shoppers. Purchase scams, where people buy good which never arrive or are not as advertised, now account for two thirds of all reported scams, according to the research. Barclays said that 88% of these scams, which cause victims to lose £1,000 on average, start on social media platforms. The bank has called for more to be done in order to prevent these scams, demanding further action from social media companies and politicians. It has called for a victim reimbursement fund to be financed by all firms whose systems and platforms are used to perpetrate scams, including tech companies and banks, as part of four recommendations. Currently victims are only reimbursed by funding from banks, Barclays said. The banking giant also called for the creation of a cross-Government group within the Home Office to deal with the issue in order to coordinate regulators, policy makers, industry groups, and companies across different sectors. The prevention of scams should also be made mandatory, particularly for tech companies, in a shift from current voluntary measures, it added. Barclays also urged the Government to make organisations publish their scams data in order to inform consumers of the risks involved in using their platforms. Matt Hammerstein, chief executive officer of Barclays UK, said: “With so much of everyone’s lives now being online, from staying connected with friends and family, to shopping, it’s important that people feel safe on the platforms they use. “Our data shows that tech platforms, particularly social media, are now the source of almost all scams. “However, there is no current legislative or regulatory framework obliging the tech sector to support the prevention of these crimes, as there rightly is for banks. “We can only drive back this epidemic, and protect UK competitiveness, by stopping scams at their source, preventing the flow of funds to organised crime.” Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Hozier would consider striking over AI threat to music industry Snapchat experiences ‘temporary outage’ as My AI chatbot posts own Story Crime victims’ data revealed by two police forces in FoI responses

BEIJING More than 70 large artificial intelligence language models with over 1 billion parameters have been released in