The 48-hour Reddit "Blackout" is technically coming close to an end. However, the company's blasé

MADRID Spanish union CCOO on Monday called on 20,000 warehouse and delivery workers at Amazon's local unit to

The Copilot AI-based assistant software is scheduled to be generally available to enterprise customers on Nov. 1.

An eight billion-year-old radio signal containing extreme levels of energy has been discovered by astronomers. According to the journal Science, a “fast radio burst” was recorded as lasting for just a millisecond. The radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation was identified as FRB 20220610A, and it contained a truly staggering level of energy – releasing the same amount that the sun releases in 30 years. As CNN reports, the true nature of these blasts can often be hard to determine, given that they last for such a short length of time. It is believed, however, that they result from galaxies merging to create new stars. Furthermore, they could also be 'weighed', in order to measure the mass of the elements in the universe which are found between galaxies and unaccounted for. Coauthor Ryan Shannon said: “If we count up the amount of normal matter in the universe - the atoms that we are all made of - we find that more than half of what should be there today is missing. “We think that the missing matter is hiding in the space between galaxies, but it may just be so hot and diffuse that it’s impossible to see using normal techniques.” The huge signal was discovered using the Australian SKA Pathfinder radio telescope, before further observation was undertaken using a telescope in China – which was able to determine that the fast radio burst was the oldest and more remote example discovered to date. It comes after scientists were left baffled following the discovery of a mysterious object which sends radio waves every 21 minutes earlier this year. The really strange thing is, it’s been doing the same thing for 45 years and astronomers are still unsure about what it could be. 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

Save $37: As of August 11, the Kasa Smart Plug Power Strip is on sale

The rumors are true: The pink iPhone is back. At today's Apple Event, a hush

(Reuters) -Business software maker SAP on Wednesday reaffirmed its full-year outlook for its key cloud business revenue after slightly missing

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.

Microsoft has announced plans to build a quantum supercomputer after researchers said the next-generation machines will be able to outperform standard computers within the next two years. Quantum computers have the potential to be orders of magnitude more powerful than today’s leading supercomputers, but have so far failed to compete when it comes to practical tasks. A recent benchmark experiment from quantum computing researchers at IBM suggests that the machines will soon be able to perform useful calculations “at a scale where classical computers will struggle”, opening up a vast number of applications. “These machines are coming,” Sabrina Maniscalco, chief executive of quantum computing startup Algorithmiq, told the scientific journal Nature which published the research this month. Microsoft revealed its roadmap for building its first “quantum supercomputer” on Wednesday, following several years of research and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment into the technology. Quantum computers work by replacing traditional bits – the ‘ones’ and ‘zeros’ used to store and transfer digital data – with quantum bits, called qubits, that make use of a quantum phenomena known as superposition to exist in two states at once. This means they can serve as both a ‘one’ and a ‘zero’ simultaneously, so that each qubit added makes them exponentially more powerful than their traditional counterparts. Microsoft said it made its own breakthrough by engineering a new type of qubit, described in the journal Physical Review B on Wednesday, that is stable enough to work at scale on a quantum supercomputer. Microsoft describes a quantum supercomputer as one that can perform one million quantum operations per second, claiming its construction will be completed within the next decade. “Microsoft has achieved the first milestone towards creating a reliable and practical quantum supercomputer,” the firm wrote in a blog post detailing the roadmap. “Today marks an important moment on our path to engineering a quantum supercomputer and ultimately empowering scientists to solve many of the hardest problems facing our planet.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said it was his company’s goal “to compress the next 250 years of chemistry and materials science into the next 25.” The announcements from IBM and Microsoft follow several major quantum computing breakthroughs in recent years. In 2019, scientists at Google announced that they had achieved something known as quantum supremacy, when their Sycamore quantum computer was able to solve a problem in 200 seconds that would have taken the most powerful supercomputer in the world 10,000 years to solve. The milestone has since been repeated by researchers in China, whose quantum computer is able to perform computations nearly 100 trillion times faster than the world’s most powerful supercomputer. While impressive, neither the Chinese machine nor Google’s Sycamore had any practical use. John Martinis, one of the Google researchers behind the 2019 milestone, said the latest news made him “optimistic that this will work in other systems and more complicated algorithms”. Read More Quantum computer discovers bizarre particle that remembers its past Quantum computing adopted by airlines and car makers in hunt for world's first commercial applications Breakthrough could soon allow us to actually use quantum computers, scientists say Elon Musk confirms cage fight with Mark Zuckerberg Apple starts letting developers make apps for its upcoming headset

Morgan Stanley said it’s more than two thirds of the way towards achieving its target to finance $1

UPDATE: Aug. 8, 2023, 5:00 a.m. EDT This guide has been updated to reflect Mashable's

US grid operators are set to face their largest controlled experiment for dealing with big swings in renewable