President Joe Biden’s signature economic legislation promised to create a wave of demand for made-in-America electric vehicles by

PORTLAND, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 6, 2023--

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How often do you think about your belly button health? Probably not enough, at least according to Dr Karan Raj. Dr Raj is one of the most popular health experts on TikTok, regularly keeping his 5.2 million followers updated with videos discussing all manner of things in the medical world. One of his clips has exposed just how dirty our belly buttons can get – and highlighted just how dirty they can become if not properly cleaned. The video is informative – but you might want to look away if gross stuff makes you queasy. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter As he explained that if not properly maintained, the body can produce a “belly button stone” made up of all sorts of gunk. @dr.karanr #duet with @crinc_3 natural ornaments! #schoolwithdrkaran The video begins with a short section from fellow TikToker @crinc_3 which features the caption: "My partner told me they'd never cleaned their belly button because it hurt. So I cleaned it." "All flesh holes can build up with sweat, dead skin cells, oils, clothing fabric, bacteria and forbidden cheese,” Dr Raj said, commenting on the footage. "If not washed out on a regular basis, this material can accumulate and harden into an omphalolith – a belly button stone.” He added: "Belly button stones come in a wide array of colours, it's usually black but can be a light brown." The clip sparked a big reaction from TikTok users, with one writing: “I didn't have a fear of belly buttons until I saw the one behind your head.” Another said: “who else is checking their belly button right now LOL.” One more added: "Not me cleaning my belly button straight after watching this.” 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.

A new technique is a dramatic breakthrough in the search for alien life, astronomers say. Researchers at the Breakthrough Listen project based at the University of California, Berkeley say they have developed a new way to be sure that any potential signal is really coming from space – and not from something more boring. Astronomers spend vast amounts of time looking for radio signals that might have come from alien civilisations as part of work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. But they have in the past been fooled by very human technology, such as cellphones, microwaves and car engines, that can produce a blast of radio signals that look as if they have come from distant worlds. One way to check whether signals are really alien is to point the telescope elsewhere and then repeatedly return to the same spot, with the hope of seeing the signal again and ensuring that it is not a false alarm. But that is not foolproof – and only works if the signal sticks around. Some of the most promising radio signals might only be detectable once. The so-called “Wow!” signal, for instance – a radio signal detected in 1977 that was so shocking the astronomer who found it wrote the exclamation on a printout – has not been detected since, and astronomers still do not know whether it was an alien message or just a mistake. Now scientists have devised a new test that can be used to see whether a signal has really passed through interstellar space, which should help show that it is not from elsewhere on Earth. It works by looking for “scintillation” – the changes in amplitude of a signal as it is affected by the cold plasma of space. “The first ET detection may very well be a one-off, where we only see one signal. And if a signal doesn’t repeat, there’s not a lot that we can say about that. And obviously, the most likely explanation for it is radio frequency interference, as is the most likely explanation for the Wow! signal,” said Andrew Siemion, principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen and director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center, which operates the world’s longest running SETI program. “Having this new technique and the instrumentation capable of recording data at sufficient fidelity such that you could see the effect of the interstellar medium, or ISM, is incredibly powerful.” Dr Siemion called the breakthrough “one of the biggest advances in radio SETI in a long time” and said that it would be the first time researchers would be able to differentiate a real signal from a false alarm, even if it was only detected once. The technique can only be used for signals that have travelled 10,000 light years or more to Earth, researchers note. If it was closer to us, the scintillation effect cannot be seen because they are not travelling through enough of the interstellar medium, or ISM. The research is described in a new paper, ‘On Detecting Interstellar Scintillation in Narrowband Radio SETI’, published in The Astrophysical Journal. Read More Battery breakthroughs are about to trigger a transport revolution Huge asteroid nearly crashes into Earth – and is only spotted days later ChatGPT rival with ‘no ethical boundaries’ sold on dark web

Nothing is preparing to launch what it called Phone (2), the successor to its pioneering, see-through device. Like the first version, it features a transparent design that means the insides of the phone can be seen. But it improves on that same design, adding new options for the “Glyph Interface” that uses LEDs in the back of the phone to show information. On the new phone, that interface can go brighter or dimmer, and adjusts based on the ambient light. New patterns, which the company calls visual ringtones, can also be composed on the device. Nothing suggests the interface is intended in part to make people have to pay less attention to their phones, by offering important information at a glance and without having to view the screen. It also brings a new, faster chip, upgraded camera hardware, and a new much higher price. The first model of the phone costs £399 or $390, compared with £579 or $599 for the second phone. Nothing offers the new phone in two colours, white or grey. The colour option decides the hue of those internal components – since the case itself is transparent. The second version of the phone comes almost exactly a year after the first device. It also sits alongside the earphones, which Nothing calls Ear and are also transparent. Nothing, as its name suggests, has looked to make transparent devices its calling card, and says it is doing so to bring the fun back to technology. Its influence already appears to be clear: other companies such as Beats have released their own transparent devices, too. Read More £10 phone with e-wallet and streaming can bridge India ‘digital divide’, experts say ‘Diverse organic matter’ found on Mars by Nasa Microsoft’s attempt to buy Call of Duty developer reaches huge new development

Antarctica might be the only continent on Earth with no natural human habitation, but it’s emerged that an “Antarctica accent” is very much a thing. Despite having no locals, thousands of scientists have made up an ever-changing population in research stations over the years. The continent is so isolated and the level of interaction between researchers is so intense, that a common accent is beginning to emerge there despite people coming from different parts of the world. At its busiest points in the year during the summer, Antarctica is home to around 5,000 people. Only around 1,000 people live there during the winter months. The idea of accents changing due to human interaction on Antarctica is no different to the phenomenon seen throughout history at a glacial pace. However, given the very specific sample size, it’s an opportunity for scientists to study it at a much quicker rate and on a much smaller scale. Experts at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich published a study in 2019 which focused on the change in accents observed in 11 people who took part in the British Antarctic Survey. @human.1011 There’s an Antarctic Accent! #language #linguistics #english #antarctica Of the 11 who were studied, eight came from England, one from the US, one from Germany and one from Iceland. Their voices were recorded every six weeks, and the team found that over time they developed longer vowel sounds. There was a physical change too, with participants pronouncing the “ou” sound in the front of their mouths rather than the back of their throats. Speaking to IFL Science, Jonathan Harrington, study author and Professor of Phonetics and Speech Processing at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich said: "The Antarctic accent is not really perceptible as such – it would take much longer for it to become so – but it is acoustically measurable. "It's mostly an amalgamation of some aspects of the spoken accents of the winterers before they went to Antarctica, together with an innovation. It's far more embryonic [than conventional English accents] given that it had only a short time to develop and also, of course, because it's only distributed across a small group of speakers.” 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.

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FRANKFURT (Reuters) -Siemens Energy and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) said on Tuesday they were among victims of