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By Josh Ye HONG KONG TikTok owner ByteDance has been meeting up with potential buyers for a sale

Sperm can “defy the laws of physics”, according to new research. The laws of motion have helped us to comprehend the behaviours of the natural world for centuries, but sperm appears to go against one of the laws set down by Isaac Newton. Kenta Ishimoto and his fellow mathematical scientists from Kyoto University have revealed new research which suggests that sperm actually display qualities which don't follow Newton’s third law of motion. Science enthusiasts will know that the third law states that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”. However, sperm seems to go against this. According to their research, the tails of sperm known as “flagella” have an “odd elastic” quality which makes them able to travel through viscous fluids without losing much energy. While scientists would normally expect them to be slowed down by the viscous fluids, they’re able to propel themselves forward much easier than researchers would have predicted – and seemingly avoid coming into contact with an equal and opposite reaction. "From solvable simple models to biological flagellar waveforms for Chlamydomonas and sperm cells, we studied the odd-bending modulus to decipher the nonlocal, nonreciprocal inner interactions within the material,” the team behind the study said. "Odd elasticity is not a generic term for activity in solids, but rather a well-defined physical mechanism that generates active forces in solids or in other systems in which a generalized elasticity can be defined without using an elastic potential." Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel 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

BELLINGHAM, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 1, 2023--

The Apple Watch has been water-resistant since its introduction to the market, with later models

Microsoft will pay legal damages on behalf of customers using its artificial intelligence (AI) products if they are

Narendra Modi arrives in the US on his first official state visit with India’s geopolitical clout higher than

The environmental activist group Greenpeace has suggested that the next deadly heatwave to hit the planet should be named after an oil CEO after one person dies in the extreme heat. The heatwave, or area of high pressure is named Cerberus, after the three-headed dog that guarded the gates of the underworld in Dante's Inferno and Greek mythology. Temperatures have soared to a dangerously high 60C in Spain, according to satellite recordings, which on heat maps have turned red areas black. Highs of 40c were also experienced in France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy on Wednesday, the latter of which saw a 44-year-old worker die after collapsing while painting a zebra crossing just outside of Milan in the midday heat. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter As the heat rises to unprecedented levels, Greenpeace had its unique take on the matter. On Twitter, the organisation wrote: "The extreme heatwave sweeping Southern Europe has been named HEATWAVE CERBERUS - in reference to the dog that guards the underworld in Greek mythology. Can we name the next heatwave after an Oil CEO please instead?" They then added an illustration of the mythological monster, by artist Luciano Komorizono with three major oil companies (BP, Shell and Exxon Mobil) attached to each of the dog's heads. Greenpeace also attached a petition to the tweet calling for an end to the fossil fuel industry and their role in the climate crisis. The heatwave is expected to remain in the Mediterranean for the next two weeks. Heatwaves only started to be named in August 2022, with 'Zoe' hitting Seville, Spain with temperatures of over 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Only the highest tier of heatwaves, category C, have received names so far. 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.

If there’s one thing the Covid pandemic taught us, it’s that viruses shouldn’t be underestimated. People are, therefore, taking note after scientists discovered a whole new range of giant virus-like particles (VLP) that have taken on “previously unimaginable shapes and forms.” The microscopic agents, resembling everything from stars to monsters, were found in just a few handfuls of forest soil. The sample was collected from Harvard Forest, near Boston in the US back in 2019, and flown over to Germany’s Max Planck Institute. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter There, its contents were carefully examined and, at the end of last month, the findings were finally released. The team of researchers behind the investigation said that their discoveries “question our current understanding of the virosphere” and “imply that giant viruses employ a much wider array of [...] structures and mechanisms to interact with their host cells than is currently known.” In other words, the results prove how little we actually know about the universe of viruses that exist here on Earth. They also noted that the origins and functions of the different viral structures they found remain unknown – so there’s still plenty of mystery left to solve. The team at the Max Planck Institute, led by Dr Matthias Fischer, were amazed to find “an astounding diversity of virus-like particles (VLP)," in such a small sample. "Amazingly, we found that a few hundred grams of forest soil contained a greater diversity [of the structures] than that of all hitherto isolated giant viruses combined," they wrote. These included one type that resembled a supernova: Another that the teamed named the “haircut”: Another called the “turtle” morphotype: Another christened the “Christmas star”: And another called the “Gorgon” – named after the sisters with snakes for hair from Greek mythology: To clarify, VLP are molecules that closely resemble viruses, but they differ from them in one crucial way: they are non-infectious. This is because they contain no viral genetic material. Still, as virus-host systems, they are key to better understanding their potentially noxious counterparts. “[Our] findings imply that giant viruses employ a much wider array of [...] structures and mechanisms to interact with their host cells than is currently known,” the authors wrote. They ended their paper: “This fascinating window into the complex world of soil viruses leaves little doubt that the high genetic diversity of giant viruses is matched by diverse and previously unimaginable particle structures, whose origins and functions remain to be studied.” Clearly, there’s still plenty of work to be done. 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.

TL;DR: As of June 17, you can get a refurbished 13" MacBook Air for just

About 20 per cent of US academic respondents in a survey have reported that they, or someone they know, have seen unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Over a third of the nearly 1,500 respondents are interested in conducting research into such unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), suggested the results of the survey, published in the journal Humanities and Social Science Communications. The US government has undertaken new hearings, reports and investigations into UAP, with a report by the Pentagon suggesting there were over 500 reports about UFOs with the agency as of August 2022. In the current research, scientists, including those from the University of Louisville, surveyed 39,984 academics, including professors, associate professors and assistant professors from 144 US universities across 14 different disciplines. Despite the stigma associated with the topic, researchers said these developments merit asking university faculty about their perceptions on the sightings of UFOs. Researchers asked the 4 per cent of individuals who responded to the survey about their perceptions of, experiences with and opinions of UAP. Nearly a tenth of the participants worked in political science, another tenth in physics, 10 per cent in psychology and 6 per cent in engineering. About 276 of the respondents – or 19 per cent of participants – reported that they or someone they knew had witnessed UAP. A further 9 per cent said they or someone they knew “may have witnessed” UAP, according to the study. Thirty-nine percent of all the participants said they did not know what the most likely explanations for UAP were, but a fifth of them attributed the sightings to natural events and 13 per cent to devices of unknown intelligence. About 4 per cent of participants said they had conducted academic research related to UAP, and over a third said they had some degree of interest in conducting research in this area. Among the respondents, 37 per cent ranked the importance of further research into UAP as either “very important” or “absolutely essential”, while nearly two-thirds of them considered academia’s involvement in UAP-related research to be “very important or absolutely essential”. The findings hinted that many American academics across disciplines consider academia’s involvement in research into UAP to be important. “Results demonstrated that faculty think the academic evaluation of UAP information and more academic research on this topic is important,” scientists wrote in the study, adding that curiosity on the topic “outweighed scepticism or indifference”. Researchers also suggested many may be cautiously willing to engage with UFO research if others they consider to be reputable within their field also do so. However, they said more surveys among larger and diverse cohorts are needed to understand attitudes of academics towards UAP. Read More Some strange ‘highly manoeuvrable’ UFOs seem to defy laws of physics, scientists say UFOs, UAPs and ETs: Why some people believe aliens are visiting us right now Nearly 200 recent UFO sightings in US remain unexplained, Pentagon says Ancient galaxy discovered 25 million light years away Watch: Axiom Mission 2 arrives at the International Space Station Nearly 350 licences issued to UK space companies

By Luc Cohen and Jody Godoy NEW YORK FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is set to retake the witness