GREENSBORO, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 6, 2023--

Blue eyed people listen up. Ever wondered why your eyes are the colour they are? Well wonder no more. Every blue eyed person is descended from a single European who lived around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, according to scientists. How did they work it out? Originally, all humans had brown eyes in various shades until there was a specific mutation that made the change. The mutation is a gene called HERC2 and it switches off OCA2, the gene that determines how much brown pigment we make. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter So that's why eyes become blue. As for being descended from the same person, the evidence for this is because every blue eyed person alive today has this same mutation. Scientists reckon only 8 to 10 per cent of the population have blue eyes and eyes don't fully develop in childhood meaning the brown pigment can kick in later, causing blue eyed children to end up with brown eyes in adulthood. So if you have blue eyes, now you know - your family is a lot bigger than you might have thought previously. 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.

By Anton Bridge TOKYO When SoftBank Group-owned chip designer Arm files for a Nasdaq IPO on Monday, investors

Wildfires have cost Europe an estimated €4.1 billion ($4.43 billion) in damages so far this year, as extreme

Welcome to Money Diaries where we are tackling the ever-present taboo that is money. We’re asking real people how they spend their hard-earned money during a seven-day period — and we’re tracking every last dollar.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 29, 2023--

A Chinese consortium led by Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. plans to spend $1.4 billion to build lithium extraction

Twitter owner Elon Musk says the platform, which is currently in transition to what he calls an “everything app” X, would soon only have “Dark Mode” as its theme, bidding adieu to its iconic white and blue colours. Responding to a Twitter user’s post asking what the colour of the verification checkmark on X should be, Mr Musk said the platform will soon only feature the “dark mode” theme. “This platform will soon only have ‘dark mode’. It is better in every way,” the Tesla and SpaceX chief tweeted. Mr Musk’s comment suggests ‘X’ or Twitter could soon only have the dark mode available and turned on by default with no options likely to change it. This expected change comes as the multibillionaire’s plan to build Twitter into an “everything app” X is underway. The company’s new chief Linda Yaccarino, who took charge last month, shared more details about what the new X app will be, tweeting on Sunday that this rebranding was aimed at transforming “the global town square” beyond a social network. “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” Mr Yaccarino tweeted. “For years, fans and critics alike have pushed Twitter to dream bigger, to innovate faster, and to fulfil our great potential. X will do that and more. We’ve already started to see X take shape over the past 8 months through our rapid feature launches, but we’re just getting started,” she said. The recent changes, including the replacement of the company’s iconic blue bird logo with ‘X’, indicate that the platform is heading in a different direction aimded at a different set of users might alienate its once fiercely loyal user base, according to social media experts. Following this change, Mr Musk said he wanted to change polled his followers whether they would favour changing the site’s colour scheme from blue to black, posting a picture of a stylised ‘X’ against a an outer space-themed black background. “And soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” he tweeted. Read More Elon Musk forces firms to pay X $1,000 to keep gold ticks Elon Musk takes control of @X account from user who had held it for 16 years Elon Musk’s SpaceX may have ‘punched hole’ in edge of space with rocket launch

The U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant says suspected state-backed Chinese hackers exploited a vulnerability in a popular email security appliance to break into the networks of hundreds of public and private sector organizations globally, nearly a third of them government agencies including foreign ministries

BARCELONA, Spain--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 11, 2023--

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 13, 2023--

The headquarters of Twitter was left with a sign saying “ER” after San Francisco Police interrupted the physical rebrand of the social media platform’s offices. The new name, “X”, was later projected onto the building as night fell. The operation to take down the old sign was put on hold on Monday afternoon after Mr Musk didn’t obtain the correct permits for the crane that had been placed on the street, blocking traffic, according to a witness. “Welp, @twitter name so coming off the building right now but @elonmusk didn’t get permit for the equipment on the street so @SFPD is shutting it down,” Wayne Sutton tweeted from the scene. A San Francisco Police Department spokesperson told The Daily Beast that they had responded to “a report of a possible unpermitted street closure. Through their investigation officers were able to determine that no crime was committed, and this incident was not a police matter”. The name change has led to the social media platform dropping in value by between $4bn and $20bn, according to Bloomberg. The move has also been mocked as uninspired. “The old Twitter logo was open, accessible, instantly recognisable around the world. This new one looks like the logo of a seedy suburban strip club. Devoid of colour, bland, generic... BORING! This is branding suicide!” CM Kosemen wrote. “Taking one of the most recognizable brand names in the world and changing it to X is unfathomably dumb. Sounds like a porn site and the logo looks like the emblem to a bad Call of Duty gamebattles team from 2008,” YouTuber Charlie White wrote. “Gonna be honest this new widget design looks like an app for a membership-only human trafficking gentlemen’s club headquartered in Budapest,” one user said. “Musk doesn’t have the money or the staff to meaningfully update or even fix Twitter, so he’s making the cheapest, smallest tweak he can – literally swapping out a GIF file - that grabs the biggest headlines. It’s nothing but a cheap, meaningless play to get his name in the press,” comedian Adam Conover added. Mr Musk wrote on Sunday about wanting “a good enough X logo,” prompting his supporters to offer their suggestions. Sawyer Merritt posted several, with Mr Musk choosing one of them, saying: “Going with minimalist art deco on the upper right. Probably changes later, certainly will be refined.” The new logo is very similar to a generic Unicode character, which is an international symbol that would be impossible to trademark, the founder of Bellingcat, Eliot Higgins, noted. Meta, the operator of X competitor Threads, and Microsoft both own versions of the X symbol, which could possibly lead to legal disputes. “Twitter Japan apparently legally cannot change their rebranding to ‘X Japan’ because the Jrock band X JAPAN owns the rights to the name. How funny would it be if Yoshiki is the one who saves us all from this awful rebranding move? LOL,” one user noted. “I’m not a [copyright] lawyer but I think he should have figured out if he owned the name before changing it,” Vanity Fair special correspondent Molly Jong-Fast wrote. “Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app,” Mr Musk wrote on Monday. “This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing. The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.” Mr Musk claimed that users would soon have the “ability to conduct your entire financial world” on the app. “The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird,” he said. Mr Musk has reportedly been fond of the letter X for decades, co-founding an online bank called x.com in 1999, which later merged and grew into what is now PayPal. Read More Elon Musk’s ‘X’ already trademarked by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta for ‘social networking services’ TikTok launches text-only posts as social media innovation race heats up Twitter to X: Why Elon Musk rebranded the social networking platform Elon Musk’s ‘X’ is already trademarked by Mark Zuckerberg Twitter to X: Why Elon Musk rebranded the social networking platform Twitter rebrands to X as Elon Musk loses iconic bird logo