TL;DR: A lifetime license to Microsoft Office Professional for Windows is on sale for £23.70,

MrBeast made a comparison between the Reddit community participation and the YouTube comments area

Elon Musk has threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for billions of dollars after quixotically blaming the Jewish rights organisation for spreading antisemitism on his social media platform X. The self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist”, who has amplified and reinstated neo-Nazi and far-right accounts since acquiring X, formerly known as Twitter, for $44bn last year blamed the ADL for “destroying” $22bn in the company’s value in a series of posts on Monday. “Since the acquisition, The ADL has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic,” Mr Musk wrote. He claimed that the site’s United States advertising revenue was down 60 per cent “primarily due to pressure on advertisers by ADL”. “If this continues, we will have no choice but to file a defamation suit against, ironically, the ‘Anti-Defamation’ League.” An ADL spokesperson told The Independent in a statement that it did not comment on legal threats, but added that Mr Musk was helping to boost a coordinated “Ban the ADL” campaign being waged by self-declared antisemites. “ADL is unsurprised yet undeterred that antisemites, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and other trolls have launched a coordinated attack on our organisation. This type of thing is nothing new,” the ADL spokesperson said. “Such insidious efforts don’t daunt us. Instead, they drive us to be unflinching in our commitment to fight hate in all its forms and ensure the safety of Jewish communities and other marginalised groups.” Mr Musk’s threats to sue the ADL, a century-old NGO that describes itself as the “leading anti-hate organisation in the world”, were met with anger and disbelief from some commentators on X. “In his pursuit of some kind of utopian free speech universe, Elon Musk has turned Twitter / X into a free-for-all for Neo Nazis and White Extremists to unleash a torrent of unprecedented antisemitism and Jew hatred,” wrote Israeli human rights lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky. NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted: “So it's the Jews manipulating others. Elon Musk that is so original!” Since Mr Musk’s takeover, advertisers have fled the platform or reduced their ad spend as hateful content was allowed to spread unchecked. Mr Musk, the world’s richest person with an estimated net wealth of $248bn, fired an estimated 80 per cent of its workforce, including most of its content moderators, and reinstated previously banned accounts. X’s US advertising revenue over a five-week period from April to May this year came to $88m, a 59 percent decrease from one year ago, according to the New York Times. In August, X filed a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) after it published a report showing that moderators had failed to take action on 99 out of 100 examples of harmful content by verified “blue check” users that the organisation had flagged. “Musk is trying to ‘shoot the messenger’ who highlights the toxic content on his platform rather than deal with the toxic environment he’s created,” CEO Imran Ahmed said in a statement. “CCDH has no intention of stopping our independent research – Musk will not bully us into silence.” The Independent attempted to reach Mr Musk through X, Tesla and via a personal email address but did not hear back. Read More Elon Musk calls Burning Man ‘best art on Earth’ amid chaos that saw thousands stranded and one dead Elon Musk promotes transphobic content as hate speech surges on his far-right platform X threatens to sue researchers who accused Twitter of allowing ‘hate to prosper’ on platform

The US has been buying “large” amounts of commercially available data on internet users for

By Munsif Vengattil NEW DELHI India will start a pilot project this week to establish itself as an

Scientists have finally found a “demon” subatomic particle that was predicted to exist nearly seven decades ago and speculated to play an important role in the behaviours of a range of metals and alloys, including superconductors. Physcist David Pines in 1956 theorised that electrons, which normally have a mass and negative electric charge, can under some conditions combine to form a composite “demon” particle that is massless, neutral and does not interact with light. These theorised interesting properties, however, made these particles elude detection – until now. After a nearly 70-year search for these subatomic entities, researchers, including those from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, have finally found signatures of Dr Pines’ “demon” particles in the metal strontium ruthenate. “Demons have been theoretically conjectured for a long time, but experimentalists never studied them. In fact, we weren’t even looking for it. But it turned out we were doing exactly the right thing, and we found it,” study co-author Peter Abbamonte said. Electrons – which are distributed in different energy bands within atoms – are known to lose their individuality in solids with electric interactions making the particles combine to form collective units. With some threshold energy, studies have also shown electrons can form composite particles called plasmons with a new charge and mass. However, the mass is so large that these plasmon particles cannot form with the kind of energies available at room temperature. Revelations on room-temperature semiconductors are considered to be one of the “holy grails” of physics. But Dr Pines theorised that if a solid has electrons in more than one energy band, as many metals do, their respective plasmons may combine in an out-of-phase pattern to form a new plasmon that is massless and neutral – a demon. Since these special particles are massless, he argued they can form with any energy and may exist at all temperatures – leading to speculation that the demons have important effects on the behaviour of some metals with multiple energy bands. “The vast majority of experiments are done with light and measure optical properties, but being electrically neutral means that demons don’t interact with light,” Dr Abbamonte explained. So a completely new experiment was needed to detect them. In the research, scientists were studying the compound strontium ruthenate as it is similar to high-temperature superconductors – a special kind of material where electrical resistance vanishes. For a survey of the metal’s electronic properties, they synthesised high-quality samples of the metal. They then applied a technique to study the metal that uses energy from electrons shot into the metal to directly observe the metal’s features, including plasmons that form. During their observation of the electron interactions, scientists found something unusual – an electronic mode with no mass. “At first, we had no idea what it was. Demons are not in the mainstream. The possibility came up early on, and we basically laughed it off. But, as we started ruling things out, we started to suspect that we had really found the demon,” Ali Husain, another author of the study, said. Researchers then sought to calculate how electrons are distributed across bands inside strontium ruthenate. Predictions by Dr Pines indicate there are specific conditions when “demons” are likely to form, and it remained unknown whether strontium ruthenate would have the particle. “We had to perform a microscopic calculation to clarify what was going on. When we did this, we found a particle consisting of two electron bands oscillating out-of-phase with nearly equal magnitude, just like Pines described,” found Edwin Huang, another author of the study. “Our study confirms a 67-year-old prediction and indicates that demons may be a pervasive feature of multiband metals,” scientists wrote in the study. Read More Superconductor breakthrough could represent ‘biggest physics discovery of a lifetime’ – but scientists urge caution LK-99: Excitement rises over possibly revolutionary ‘miracle material’ – but there is still no good reason to believe it exists Superconductivity: The technology that could change everything if we just knew how it worked ‘Vampire child’ with padlocked ankle unearthed in Polish ‘necropolis’ Two new kinds of mole discovered in mountains of Turkey Scientific discovery casts doubt on our understanding of human evolution

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 29, 2023--

Regulators have revealed when they expect to approve a launch license to SpaceX for the next major flight test of its Starship rocket. The head of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) commercial space division said a mishap investigation from the last test in April had been concluded and a license would likely be granted “somewhere in mid to late October”, assuming SpaceX make the necessary changes. Starship is the biggest rocket ever built, measuring 394 feet (120 metres) and capable of producing 5,000 metric tons of thrust, however it is yet to make it to orbit. An attempt on 20 April, 2023, saw it blow up just over three minutes into a 90 minute flight. The debris that came down in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as from the destroyed launchpad in Texas, became the subject of an FAA investigation. The federal agency said SpaceX would need to take 63 corrective actions before another launch license is approved. Kevin Coleman, the FAA’s associate administrator for commercial space transportation, told SpaceNews this week that 27 of the 63 corrective actions are related to public safety. “So one thing that we’ll need to see before the next operation is evidence that shows that the company has closed out the corrective actions that are specifically tied to public safety,” he said. “We’re on a pretty good schedule. It probably set us somewhere in mid to late October for conclusion of the safety review.” A separate environmental review from the US Fish and Wildlife Service is also required in order to comply with the Endangered Species Act, though Mr Coleman said he hoped it would be wrapped up by the time the safety review is complete. Earlier this month, SpaceX boss Elon Musk said Starship is “ready to launch” after it was pictured on the launchpad of the firm’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas. The tech billionaire plans to build hundreds of the rockets in order to establish a permanent human colony on Mars before 2050. SpaceX has already secured a multi-billion dollar contract with Nasa to develop the craft for use in the US space agency’s Artemis programme, which aims to return humans to the surface of the Moon this decade. Read More ‘It’s becoming like an airport’: How SpaceX normalised rocket launches Elon Musk makes prediction for imminent Starship launch SpaceX launch of Starship rocket on hold amid ‘mishap investigation’ India’s solar mission completes key manoeuvre, slingshots towards Sun

By Raphael Satter WASHINGTON The Federal Bureau of Investigation has warned Americans that criminals are increasingly using artificial

The Warzone Season 4 BlackCell Battle Pass offers players premium rewards, including Operator Io and 20 tier skips, for $29.99.

Bitcoin dropped 7.2% to $26,634 at 21:45 GMT on Thursday, losing $2,067 from its previous close. Bitcoin, the

Apple fell nearly 4% on Thursday and sparked a rout in U.S. equities after reports that China has