JERUSALEM Israel aims to parlay its technological prowess to become an artificial intelligence "superpower", the Defence Ministry director-general

Microsoft is changing its default typeface for only the second ever time. For 15 years, Microsoft Office and other software has opened with one particular typeface: Calibri. By virtue of being the default look on some of the world’s most popular software, it might have been seen more than any other set of letters. Before that, Microsoft’s documents started with Times New Roman, a typeface that itself became famous largely as a result of being the default option. Now, however, Microsoft is moving on. Microsoft said that it had taken the decision in part because the technology used to display the typeface had changed, and that it needed to update for the higher resolution screens that are used today. And it is doing so with “Aptos”, a new font that was specially commissioned for the company, in a process it described as “exciting, but also intimidating”. It had done so with a view to finding a new font that could replace Calibre and have “sharpness, uniformity, and be great for display type”. Microsoft initially commissioned five new fonts, with the hope that one of them would become the default: Bierstadt, Grandview, Seaford, Skeena, and Tenorite. It added all of them to its software and allowed people to choose them from the picker and give feedback. Based on that information, Microsoft chose “Bierstadt”, and renamed it Aptos, though it will still live on under the old name too. The other fonts that lost out will also stay in the drop-down picker. Aptos will become the default typeface on Microsoft’s software, such as 365, which itself has replaced the well known Office suite. That will mean becoming the default font on Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel and be seen by the hundreds of millions of people who use the software. The rollout will take place over the “next few months”, the company said. The font was named Aptos by its designer, Steve Matteson, after a town in Santa Cruz, where Microsoft said the “widely ranging landscape and climate epitomizes the font’s versatility”. The font was designed with “humanity”, Mr Matteson said, and with a view to allowing it to be “more universal and less mechanical or institutional”, he said in a blog post by Microsoft. For those that don’t like the new font, Microsoft has always offered the option to change the default font – including back to Calibri or Times New Roman. Read More Microsoft’s attempt to buy Call of Duty developer reaches huge new development Twitter starts making payments to its most controversial users What striking Hollywood writers and actors fear about AI replacing roles

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Frankenstein’s monsters aren’t just for Halloween, as a team of US scientists have recently discovered. The experts at Northern Kentucky University (NKU) were tasked with analysing the remains of a supposed mummified “mermaid”, and what they found was pretty gruesome. The mummy was brought to America from Japan more than 100 years ago after being donated it to the Clark County Historical Society in Springfield, Ohio. It arrived at the society in 1906 but documents supplied alongside the strange specimen suggest it dates back to the mid-1800s. This means that for some 170 years, the true identity of the wisened, 29-cm-long creature remained a mystery. However, thanks to modern technology, the team at NKU has finally worked out that the sinister-looking “siren” is, in fact, a ghoulish hybrid of monkey, fish and lizard. Joseph Cress, who led the project, told Live Science that he and his colleagues used X-ray and CT scans to investigate the creepy cadaver. "This allowed us to see [the mummy] in almost every dimension in the hopes to see what was inside it," he explained. They determined that that the “mermaid” consists of the head and torso of a monkey sewed onto the body of a fish, and its “hands” are the clawed legs of a lizard – most likely a Komodo dragon. The scans also revealed a pair of wooden stakes hidden inside the chimeric corpse – one running from head to tail and another across the shoulder blades — which were presumably inserted to keep the monster in one piece. Cress and his colleagues are currently trying to reconstruct a more detailed model of the mermaid and its individual components, according to Live Science. Once these models are complete, they plan to send them to zoos and aquariums to help confirm the different parts on a species level. However, jaw-dropping this specimen may be, it's not the only “mermaid” to be debunked in recent times. In March 2022, researchers analysed a similar example that was found in a hidden box in a Japanese temple. They also expected the creature, which was 30.5 cm long and dated back to the mid-1700s, to be a monkey-fish hybrid. However, tests conducted in February this year revealed that it was, in fact, predominantly made of cloth, paper and cotton. It had been painted with sand and charcoal and held together by metal pins, while various animal parts, including fish skin and mammal hair, had been stuck to it. Experts believe that the two “mermaids” were made to resemble "ningyo" — hideous fish-like creatures with human heads and sharp claws from Japanese mythology. According to legend, a nun named Yaobikuni lived for 800 years and retained the youthful appearance of a young woman, after eating a ningyo. Her immortality made the creatures a symbol of longevity, so it’s likely that fraudsters tried to recreate the mermaids to sell them to wealthy seekers of immortality. Still, at least the owners of these two examples didn’t make the mistake of trying to eat them. 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

The solar system is famously vast, but new data from scientists has revealed that it extends even further than once thought. It is a discovery that was made thanks to distant objects that were spotted during a scan of telescope images. They appeared to show faint signs of rock located beyond Pluto, suggesting that the material of the solar system extends further into interstellar space than was previously believed. The new method of looking at telescope images has dispelled decades of hypotheses from astronomers who believed that the Kuiper Belt, a circumstellar disc in the outer solar system, becomes suddenly more sparse from 48 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. But, belts of rubble have now been seen extending out more than twice the distance experts previously thought. The discovery was made by a team of astronomers who were led by Canada's Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre who were on a mission to find new targets for the probe “New Horizons” to explore on its way through the outer reaches of the solar system. With light at the end of the solar system in short supply, experts realised if they stacked multiple images taken at different times, they could combine the light to increase the visibility of an object, increasing its visibility. Using machine learning to help them on their way, experts trained the system before testing it with real data captured from the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. In comparison to humans, the technology identified more than double the amount of Kuiper Belt Objects, revealing to experts just how vast the solar system is. They presented their findings at the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference 2023. While the team’s results have not yet been peer-reviewed, they appear to suggest that our solar system has a minimum of two rings of material stretching as far as the distance Pluto is from planet Earth. Sign up to 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.

The heat that has set records across Texas and Mexico will be spreading across the central and southern

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 5, 2023--

Exxon Mobil Corp. fell short of analysts’ expectations with a third straight drop in profit — the longest

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