T-Mobile on Thursday announced it plans to lay off 5,000 employees, or around 7% of its total staff, over the next five weeks.

Alaska Native villages have long been caught on the wrong side of the digital divide with no internet connections or a sluggish link at best

Pennsylvania state government will prepare to use artificial intelligence in its operations, as states are increasingly trying to gauge the impact of AI and how to regulate it

By Kanishka Singh WASHINGTON New York City on Wednesday banned TikTok on government-owned devices, citing security concerns, joining

The happy little paper clip made Microsoft Office users absolutely miserable. Naturally, that didn't stop the internet from writing erotica about him.

PlayStation 5 buyers can save when they shop at GameStop.

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

By Renju Jose and Byron Kaye SYDNEY (Reuters) -State-sponsored cyber groups and hackers have increased assaults on Australia's critical infrastructure,

The Apple Watch Series 9, announced just days ago, is old news already. Let's talk

Twitter has backtracked to the older, freely accessible version of its TweetDeck platform just days after launching what the company claimed to be a “new, improved version”. “We have just launched a new, improved version of TweetDeck,” Twitter announced last week, adding that in 30 days, only users subscribed to the platform’s premium subscription service Twitter Blue would have access to the tool. However, the social media company restored its old TweetDeck version along with free API access with no announcement of its return from either Elon Musk or Twitter’s new chief Linda Yaccarino. TweetDeck is an app using Twitter’s API which enables users to view multiple feeds in customisable columns. While it was launched as a free-to-use independent app in 2008, it was then acquired by Twitter, and was recently turned into a paid feature. Several third-party apps such as “Harpy” shut down after the social media company began charging for access to its API – the system used to communicate with other services – as part of efforts to generate new revenue sources. “Without free access to the Twitter api, Harpy will stop working on February 9th. This includes access using a (free) custom api key. Thanks for using harpy,” the app’s Twitter account noted. TweetDeck’s new version, which also uses Twitter’s API, experienced a temporary outage last week, after Twitter decided to limit the number of tweets users can view. Twitter users also noted that while the new version of TweetDeck came with added tools like a Tweet composer and video docking, it didn’t have an Activity Tab which is deemed an important feature. Now, following the launch of Meta’s rival app Threads last week, many users have flagged that the old TweetDeck is back along with its legacy API working, which would allow the platform’s third-party apps to work again. However, without any official announcement of Twitter backtracking to the old TweetDeck, it remains unclear for how long the freely accessible “better” version would remain. Developers such as Roberto Doering, creator of the Harpy app, say Twitter is “most likely” to shut down access to their legacy API again. “Please note that this doesn’t mean that Harpy will be maintained again, seeing as Twitter will most likely shut down access to their legacy API (again) soon and third-party apps are still against their [terms of service],” Mr Doering wrote on Harpy’s GitHub page. Read More Threads: What is it, can it rival Twitter and what are the risks? Tweetdeck down: Major Twitter client not working amid chaos on site New Meta app Threads ‘first credible threat’ to Twitter Account tracking Elon Musk’s jet is now on Threads after Twitter suspended it Elon Musk says ‘Zuck is cuck’ as Threads inches closer to 100m users Threads hits 70 million sign-ups on its second day

Netflix is a popular streaming platform with over 250 million subscribers, but there's one feature that the majority of users do not use at all. The streaming services are not only home to thousands of TV series and films, but there are also plenty of video games to play. Gaming studios such as Night School Studios, which developed the Oxenfree games were acquired by the company. Despite the development of Oxenfree 2 exclusively for Netflix, the statistics show that most subscribers are not aware of or just don't use this feature that comes free with their subscription. There are up to 70 games on the app which are on the Netflix app under the 'Mobile Games' section, where there are games based on the most popular shows such as Squid Game, Stranger Things, The Queen's Gambit, Black Mirror, and reality shows such as Love Is Blind and Too Hot To Handle. Other award-winning titles also include Immortality, Kentucky Route Zero and Before Your Eye. Only 2.2 million Netflix subscribers (0.88 per cent approximately) play one of the streamer’s games daily, as per a CNBC report. But it appears there is a struggle to get subscribers to return to the video games after trying them, since more than 70 million subscribers at some time have downloaded a game. Perhaps, this issue could be due to games taking up more download space, and commitment for users. Although stats show subscribers are not playing video games, the streaming giant has been splashing the cash in this area since in the last year, the quantity of games available has tripled. But Co-CEO Greg Peters, says this is all part of the "crawl, walk, run" strategy that has successfully worked in the past. “This trajectory is not dissimilar from what we’ve seen before,” Peters said on the company’s prerecorded earnings call on Wednesday, CNBC reported. “When we’ve launched a new region, or when we launched new genres, like unscripted” we had to “crawl, walk, run, but we see a tremendous amount of opportunity to build a long-term centre value of entertainment.” How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel 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.

WESTMONT, Il.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 30, 2023--