China’s solar sector is accelerating an already world-beating pace of installations as costs tumble and demand keeps rising,

Hisense has been consistently producing inexpensive, value-loaded TVs over the past few years, with its

NASA's Perseverance rover picked up some intriguing-looking objects on Mars this week, which prompted all kinds of speculation on social media. The photo in question was captured on 18 August as Perseverance travels over an "ancient river" and was voted the space agency's top image of the week. On X/Twitter, NASA wrote: "As promised, here’s the new Image of the Week, as voted by you! This rocky duo was spotted hanging out together in a wind-swept area. I spy a…crab claw? Shark fin?" The post was soon flooded with users' takes, with many claiming the two boulders mirrored a shark fin and a crab claw. "I don't know why, but those rocks are really satisfying to look at," one person wrote, while another joked: "I vote for coffee bean." Meanwhile, one realist responded: "That’s literally two rocks." The Perseverance rover landed on 18 February 2021, after a 7-month journey from Earth that started in the summer. The robot has since provided the world with stunning visuals – one of which captured the hearts of social media users. Last year, the rover acquired a pet rock friend on its back wheel, that continued to hitchhike months into its journey. Perseverance likely picked up the large stone in Jezero Crater, which is a 45 kilometer-wide crater thought to have once been filled with water. "The Perseverance rover has a pet rock. NASA says it's breaking hitchhiking records," one person said at the time, while another added: "There's a small rock that's been hitching a ride inside one of the metal wheels of a Mars Rover and I gotta say Perseverance's Pet Rock is a kid's book in the making." 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.

One closely-watched measure of Bitcoin mining revenue is hovering around a record low as the price of the

CHESTERBROOK, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 1, 2023--

LOS ALTOS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 6, 2023--

UPDATE: May. 9, 2023, 5:00 a.m. EDT This list has been updated with the latest

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 14, 2023--

Many of us look to the stars for answers to life’s most complex questions. But actually, some of the greatest mysteries lie beneath our very feet. One might think we’d know the Earth pretty well by now but, in fact, our planet’s core remains shrouded in enigma. Indeed, there are two gigantic blobs located beneath Africa and the Pacific Ocean that occupy around six per cent of the world’s entire volume. And yet, we’re still not entirely sure what they’re made of or where they came from. There are a number of hypotheses, including that they are piles of oceanic crust that have accumulated over billions of years. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter But a more interesting theory is that they are huge chunks of an ancient planet that hit the Earth around 4.5 billion years ago. To give an indication of just how massive these things are, the structure under Africa – an area known as Tuzo – is thought to be around 800km (497 miles) tall – the equivalent of some 90 Mount Everests stacked on top of one another, as IFLScience notes. The problem with determining the origin of these monster formations is that there are no direct ways of observing the Earth’s core. The deepest hole humans have ever dug – branded the "entrance to hell" – reached a pretty staggering 12,263m (40,230ft), but that doesn’t even come close to breaking through the crust to the layers beneath. Our most effective tool for analysing what lies beneath the ground is a technique called seismic tomography, which looks at how waves of energy travel when earthquakes occur. Since rocks and liquids have different densities, the waves move through them at different speeds. By measuring the tremors from different points on the surface, geologists can determine what kind of material the waves are travelling through and, in so doing, map out the Earth’s interior. It was by using this technique that the two unusual structures – known as large low shear velocity provinces (LLSVPs) – were found. Waves travel more slowly in these areas – fondly known as “blobs” – than through the surrounding lower mantle, indicating that they’re made of something different. We can’t tell what this material is based on seismic tomography data alone, but some scientists like to believe that they are the remnants of an ancient planet called Theia – an idea known as the “giant impact hypothesis”. According to this hypothesis, around 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized object collided with the Earth. This impact not only created the planet we call home today, but also threw off enough rock to form the moon that lights up our night skies. Some scientists suggest that some of Theia’s leftovers also sunk to the bottom of the planet, probably settling somewhere above the core – thereby forming at least one of the two LLSVPs. More Updates About Strange Blob Structures Inside Planet Earth youtu.be Experts have been investigating the area for decades but there’s still no way of knowing for sure just what these two giant blobs are. Still, studies into Theia have offered important insights into how the possible collision might have kickstarted key plate tectonic and mantle motion inside our planet – crucial processes for establishing the world on which we live. It’s also a useful reminder that we still have so much to learn about our planet and where we came from. 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.

OKLAHOMA CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 18, 2023--

Microsoft's Pavan Davuluri will lead a team focused on Windows software, devices portfolio and semiconductor chips, the company