The Apple iPad doesn't get the credit it deserves for essentially creating the modern tablet

Artificial intelligence has unrealistic and often dangerous ideas of what the “perfect” man and woman look like, according to a new study. Chiselled features, olive skin and eight-pack abs are among the features that kept cropping up when three leading AI image generators were tasked with creating “ideal” male and female bodies. The challenge was put to the popular programmes Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney by eating disorder awareness group the Bulimia Project, which separated its request into two parts. First up, it asked the generators to come up with pictures of men and women based specifically on beauty standards set by social media. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Although it churned out quite a few different options, it showed a number of noticeable biases. Nearly all of the images featured petite women – with Midjourney named as the worst culprit – and all of the men looked like photoshopped versions of bodybuilders. The three AI favoured women with blonde hair and men with brown hair, and nearly half of the male images had facial hair. After analysing their findings based on social media, the Bulimia Project team broadened the scope of the task. This time, they asked the programmes to base their creations on images from across the internet. The main difference between the two categories was that the social media set was “far more sexually charged”, according to the study’s authors. The social media images also featured “largely disproportionate body parts”, which the Bulimia Project described as “unsettling”. “We can only assume that the reason AI came up with so many oddly shaped versions of the physiques it found on social media is that these platforms promote unrealistic body types, to begin with,” it said. “In the age of Instagram and Snapchat filters, no one can reasonably achieve the physical standards set by social media. So, why try to meet unrealistic ideals? It’s both mentally and physically healthier to keep body image expectations squarely in the realm of reality.” 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 South Korean battery maker tapped by the US to help it catch China in the clean-car market

Binance's global head of product and design, Mayur Kamat, has resigned amid a string of executive exits and

Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. has imposed conditions to access the national grid on 1,850 megawatts worth of projects

Investors in carbon offsets are sounding the alarm as millions of tainted units look set to enter the

Large parts of Germany will be hotter than normal through this week, driving up energy demand for cooling

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 14, 2023--

Apple said Thursday that its revenue slipped 1% to $81.8 billion for its quarter ending July 1, marking the third consecutive year-over-year drop in quarterly revenue for the world's most valuable company.

By Ian Ransom HANGZHOU, China (Reuters) -North Korea's Ri Song Gum set a weightlifting world record at the Asian Games

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

If you weren’t scared of the ocean already, you probably will be after seeing this... A ‘death pool’ has been discovered at the bottom of the Red Sea that instantly kills everything that swims inside it. The pool was found by University of Miami researchers and measures a whopping 107,00 square feet. It’s a long way down, having been discovered 1.1 miles beneath the surface of the inlet of the Indian Ocean found between Africa and Asia. It has been there for an awfully long time, too. The pools are thought to have been formed from pockets of minerals which were deposited up to 23 million years ago. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter The reason it’s so deadly? It contains no oxygen. Instead, it’s filled with brine and the salt solution is deadly to most things that enter it. Researcher Sam Purkis told Live Science: “Any animal that strays into the brine is immediately stunned or killed.” He also said that the pool is “among the most extreme environments on Earth.” It’s used by some creatures for food, with Purkis saying that: “Fish, shrimp and eels appear to use the brine to hunt.” Predators position themselves on the peripheries of the pool in order to “feed on the unlucky” creatures that die after swimming into it. While it’s not the first brine-filled pool under the sea discovered by scientists in the Red Sea, it is the closest to land. It can be found just 1.25miles off the coast of Egypt, while the previous closest pool was more than 15 miles away from land.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.