Artificial intelligence startup OpenAI has closed an investment fund, according to a Securities a Exchange Commission filing. The

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On Threads, Meta Platforms Inc.’s Twitter copycat, users have been asking for weeks for a version that works

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If you’re anything like us, the first coffee of the day is the only thing that can get us up on a morning – and it turns out, there’s real science behind it. Everyone knows that coffee can give us a welcome caffeine hit, but it’s now been revealed that the drink also gives us an extra ‘special boost’ too. Scientists have claimed that the act of drinking a cup of joe gives the body a lift, making us more alert, which can’t be replicated merely with caffeine. In fact, new research shows that drinking hot coffee activates additional areas of the brain. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Scientists from the University of Minho in Portugal and elsewhere looked into the effects of coffee outside of just caffeine content as part of a study – and they found that plain caffeine didn’t have the same impact. In fact, a cup of coffee also influenced working memory and goal-directed behaviour. “There is a common expectation that coffee increases alertness and psychomotor functioning. When you get to understand better the mechanisms underlying a biological phenomenon, you open pathways for exploring the factors that may modulate it and even the potential benefits of that mechanism,” study co-author Nuno Sousa explained. Experts said that drinking coffee actually increased the connectivity in the brain’s more advanced nerve network controlling vision, and other parts involved in working memory, cognitive control and goal-directed behaviour – something not found when participants only took caffeine. Researchers also said that if subjects wanted to not just feel alert but ready to go, caffeine alone might not do the job. “Acute coffee consumption decreased the functional connectivity between brain regions of the default mode network, a network that is associated with self-referential processes when participants are at rest,” study co-author Maria Picó-Pérez said. “The subjects were more ready for action and alert to external stimuli after having coffee,” she added. 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.

As Twitter users get increasingly disgruntled with a platform owned by a controversial billionaire which has imposed temporary reading limits and has suffered countless outages, the CEO of the social media network has insisted the site’s community is “irreplaceable” as individuals flock to rival apps. After Mastodon, Post and Bluesky all stepped up to the plate to try and pull people away from the bird app, Instagram’s text-based alternative Threads has proven to be the next high-profile competitor – so much so, that Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg revealed 10 million people had signed up in the first seven hours of it going live this week. And Twitter’s certainly alarmed by its growing popularity. Owner Elon Musk has criticised the amount of data the app may collect on users and accused it of “cheating” amid reports of a lawsuit against Meta, and now, CEO Linda Yaccarino has stressed “everyone’s voice matters” on Twitter. The ex-NBCUniversal advertising chair – who was appointed to the top job back in May and didn’t issue a single tweet during the platform’s ‘rate limit exceeded’-related outage earlier this month – wrote on Thursday: “Whether you’re here to watch history unfold, discover real-time information all over the world, share your opinions, or learn about others – on Twitter you can be real. “You built the Twitter community. And that’s irreplaceable. This is your public square. “We’re often imitated – but the Twitter community can never be duplicated.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Although the post makes no explicit reference to Threads, it was shared just hours after the rival app landed on Google Play and the App Store, and Yaccarino’s mention of “real-time information” comes as the initial version of Threads’ home feed is non-chronological and instead generated by an algorithm. However, sharing a screenshot of a tweet from Musk in which he claimed a “closed-source, algorithm-only system” means “manipulation” of information is “essentially undetectable”, Instagram head Adam Mosseri clapped back: “If anyone was asking, both Instagram and Facebook have chronological feeds options, so yes, we’re going to bring one to Threads too.” So that’s that, then. And looking at the replies to Yaccarino’s tweet, many aren’t convinced by her argument – not even the blue ticks paying a monthly fee for additional features: Oh, and if all of this wasn’t bizarre enough, there’s talk of a cage fight between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Yes, really. No, we can’t believe it either. 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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By Dan Levine and Hyunjoo Jin An attorney suing Tesla over a fatal accident cited an internal safety

A battery startup is aiming to be the first company in the world to mass produce electric vehicle batteries with a range of 1,000km – roughly double the current standard. China-based Gotion High Tech, which is a supplier to Volkswagen, unveiled its new L600 LMFP Astroinno battery at its annual technology conference, claiming that mass production will begin in 2024. The lithium-manganese-iron-phosphate (LMFP) battery has already passed all necessary safety tests, the company said, and has a life cycle of 4,000 charge-discharge cycles – making it suitable for everyday electric cars. The 1,000km range from a single charge gives the battery a potential lifetime range of 4 million kilometres, far exceeding the average lifespan of a car. Its single-charge range is also equivalent to records set by customised electric prototypes, such as the Mercedes-Benz Vision EQXX that broke a range record by travelling from Germany to the UK on a single charge last year. It took 10 years of in-house research to make the technology commercially viable, using new electrolyte additives and state-of-the-art technology to overcome previous issues with this type of battery. Until now, LMFP materials have suffered low conductivity, low compaction density and manganese dissolution at high temperatures, meaning they were too inefficient and unwieldy to use in EVs. Despite these challenges, the enormous potential of the technology has drawn the attention of researchers and industry watchers. “In recent years, lithium iron phosphate (LFP) technology has regained the recognition of the market with market share continuing to increase,” said Dr Cheng Qian, executive president of the International Business Unit of Gotion High-Tech. “Meanwhile, the energy density growth of mass-produced LFP batteries has encountered bottlenecks, and further improvement requires an upgrade of the chemical system, so [our system] was developed.” The company also made other breakthroughs with the battery’s design, which reduced the number of structural parts by 45 per cent and lowered their weight by nearly a third. Wiring for the battery pack has also dropped from 303 metres to just 80 metres thanks to the innovative design. It is not clear which vehicles the battery will first appear in, though Gotion High Tech is planning a $2.3 billion battery factory in the US. Read More Solar panel efficiency to increase 50% with first production of ‘miracle’ tandem cells Apple is making a ‘mixed reality’ headset. Here’s what that future might look like WhatsApp will let people change messages after they are sent ‘RIP photoshop’: New AI can alter any photo with the click of a mouse

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The founder of the protest group that interrupted Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s speech in New York on