List of All Articles with Tag 'and'

Eight in 10 students have issues with literacy, the lowest performance in a study of 57 countries.

Billionaire Elon Musk has demanded that he personally approves every new employee at Tesla in a leaked email. Musk is a co-founder and the CEO of Tesla and according to leaked emails, it appears the South African entrepreneur is wanting to take a more hands-on approach to his role there. According to Insider, Musk wants to approve every new employee the automotive company takes on, writing in a leaked email: “Think carefully before sending me the request,” adding, “No one can join Tesla, even as a contractor, until you receive my email approval.” The email was sent by Musk on Monday (15 May) morning in which he said he wanted “to gain a better understanding of our hiring”. It requested that executives send him a weekly list of prospective candidates for him to approve – a big task since the company hires on average 30,000 people per year. It comes as Musk recently announced a new chief executive will be taking over the running of Twitter after the billionaire acquired the platform in October 2022 becoming its CEO. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Linda Yaccarino, the former chief executive of NBCUniversal advertising, is set to take the helm as CEO in approximately six weeks' time, while Musk will undertake the chief technology officer role. The news may explain why Musk is now keen to take on a more hands-on role in the hiring at Tesla, particularly as shareholders in the company expressed concern in an open letter that Twitter had left him “distracted” and “overly focused on other ventures”. Last year, the automotive company said it received more than 3.6 million job applications and hired around 127,000 people through its competitive process. 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.

Vodafone said Tuesday it would cut 11,000 jobs over three years, as the telecoms company unveiled a turnaround plan to revive its fortunes.

It might sound more like the kind of idle daydream billionaires like Elon Musk would have, but could flooding the Sahara actually be the best way of tackling climate change in the future? The idea of creating a new “sea” in Africa is being discussed, and it’s not the first time that the notion of a great oasis in the Sahara has been discussed among the scientific community. As the ongoing climate crisis continues to worsen, the notion of flooding vast areas of the desert is being returned to once again [via IFL Science]. A new “sea” was first proposed following the study of the Messinian salinity crisis – which saw a dried-out area of the Mediterranean rejuvenated by the Zanclean flood, reconnecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean around 5.33 million years ago. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Given how the Mediterranean was transformed by the flood, the idea of flooding the Sahara to achieve similar results has been thrown around in the scientific community as far back as 1877, the Scottish engineer Donald McKenzie suggested flooding the El Djouf basin in Western Africa. The idea is now returning to popularity as the world looks for solutions to the climate crisis. One proposal centres on the Middle East’s Dead Sea and flooding the area using water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea Depression. A vast sea in Africa could represent a hugely innovative step towards tackling climate change and fostering a new hub of life – but even the people suggesting work such a project acknowledge just how expensive and dangerous it is. Even Y Combinator is a US startup accelerator who has described “desert flooding” as “risky, unproven, even unlikely to work”. Only time will tell whether the notion of a new sea in the Sahara coud ever work, or whether it’ll remain the stuff of dreams. 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 decade after Microsoft’s MP3 player was discontinued, the Zune is back? Microsoft today held

More than a week after educators first hit the picket line, the Oakland Education Association, which represents public school teachers in Oakland, California, announced Monday morning it has reached a tentative agreement with the Oakland Unified School District, ending the strike and sending some 35,000 students back to class.

It might sound more like the kind of idle daydream billionaires like Elon Musk would have, but could flooding the Sahara actually be the best way of tackling climate change in the future? The idea of creating a new “sea” in Africa is being discussed, and it’s not the first time that the notion of a great oasis in the Sahara has been discussed among the scientific community. As the ongoing climate crisis continues to worsen, the notion of flooding vast areas of the desert is being returned to once again [via IFL Science]. A new “sea” was first proposed following the study of the Messinian salinity crisis – which saw a dried-out area of the Mediterranean rejuvenated by the Zanclean flood, reconnecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean around 5.33 million years ago. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Given how the Mediterranean was transformed by the flood, the idea of flooding the Sahara to achieve similar results has been thrown around in the scientific community as far back as 1877, the Scottish engineer Donald McKenzie suggested flooding the El Djouf basin in Western Africa. The idea is now returning to popularity as the world looks for solutions to the climate crisis. One proposal centres on the Middle East’s Dead Sea and flooding the area using water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea Depression. A vast sea in Africa could represent a hugely innovative step towards tackling climate change and fostering a new hub of life – but even the people suggesting work such a project acknowledge just how expensive and dangerous it is. Even Y Combinator is a US startup accelerator who has described “desert flooding” as “risky, unproven, even unlikely to work”. Only time will tell whether the notion of a new sea in the Sahara coud ever work, or whether it’ll remain the stuff of dreams. 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.

An influencer on Snapchat has opened up about her experiences of making AI versions of herself, revealing that she’s now trying to stop subscribers from having “sexual conversations” with them. Caryn Marjorie created AI versions of herself and had the idea of charging people $1 per minute to chat. The “immersive AI experience” was designed to feel like “you’re talking directly to Caryn herself” and took around 2,000 hours to code and design it. The idea of the “AI Girlfriend” took a turn she did not expect though. Now, Marjorie has revealed that the AI has “gone rogue” and begun having sexual conversations. Speaking to Insider, the 23-year-old said: “The AI was not programmed to do this and has seemed to go rogue. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “My team and I are working around the clock to prevent this from happening again.” Marjorie wrote on Twitter: “CarynAI is the first step in the right direction to cure loneliness. Men are told to suppress their emotions, hide their masculinity, and to not talk about issues they are having. I vow to fix this with CarynAI. “I have worked with the world’s leading psychologists to seamlessly add CBT and DBT within chats. This will help undo trauma, rebuild physical and emotional confidence, and rebuild what has been taken away by the pandemic.” It’s not the first time that the worlds of Snapchat and artificial intelligence has combined in 2023. Snapchat recently featured a new AI feature called "My AI," and users are having a field day trying to trick the chatbot as part of a new TikTok trend going round. 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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A rare planet has been discovered hundreds of light years away, and it could prove key to our understanding of planetary formations out there in the universe. There have been more than 5,300 exoplanets discovered, but few match the description of the newly recorded TOI-733b. Found 245 light-years away, TOI-733b is almost twice the size of Earth and orbits a sun slightly smaller than our Sun. While there are many exoplanets, there are a surprisingly small number which sit between one and a half and two times the radius of the Earth, and it's the size that makes it so interesting to scientists. Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter The research was conducted by a team of astronomers led by Iskra Georgieva of Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. It was accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The team focused on TOI-733b after data on the planet was collected by NASA's telescope TESS. The density of the planet suggests two things – it’s either totally covered in water, or it’s lost its atmosphere altogether. Clues point to the idea of TOI-733b’s atmosphere slowly depleting. That’s due to the proximity of the planet to its star, which it orbits in the space of just 4.9 days. If the atmosphere is being burned away, it means it could soon be transformed into a rock planet. The other possibility points to the planet having lost its hydrogen and helium, while retaining an atmosphere packed with water vapour. "Answering the question of whether TOI-733b has a secondary atmosphere or is an ocean planet boils down to differentiating between a Neptune-like planet that lost its ∼10 per cent of H/He to leave behind a steam atmosphere of heavier volatiles, and one that formed and remained relatively the same throughout its evolution," the research reads. "While being beyond the scope of this paper, finding an answer to this question will have broad implications on our understanding of exoplanets." The team went on to write: "By all accounts TOI-733 b looks to be an interesting planet and holds the potential of being a small but key piece to solving big puzzles in exoplanet science. "With ever increasing in-depth theoretical analyses and the promise of high-precision follow up by present and upcoming facilities, we seem to be well on the way to finding answers to major questions relating to planet formation and evolution." 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.

What do you reckon the chattiest vegetable is? The answer may be mushrooms, as according to a new study from scientists in Japan, rain may prompt some fungi to communicate using underground electrical signals. In a study published in Fungal Ecology , researchers monitored small, tan mushrooms known as bicoloured deceivers in the mixed forest at the Kawatabi Field Science Center of Tohoku University in Japandorm. They looked at the 'shrooms electrical potential, measured in megavolts (mV), for about two days in late September and early October 2021. The study site was initially sunny and dry, and the second was during rain - at which point the mushrooms showed some electrical potential and signal transport between each other. Microbial ecologist Yu Fukasawa of Tohoku University said: "Our results confirm the need for further studies on fungal electrical potentials under a true ecological context." Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Previously, scientists had found that these mushrooms make subterranean "sheaths" around the exterior of a tree's roots. These sheaths are made of hyphae and when they link underground they form interconnected systems known as mycorrhizal networks that allow forests communicate via chemical signals down tree roots and mycorrhizal fungi. And a 2022 study found patterns of nerve-like electrical activity in some fungi that seem comparable to the structure of human speech. The study identified up to 50 different "words," or groups of spikes in electrical activity, generated by fungal networks. Earlier research has also found that plants can send secret electrical signals underground, possibly even without help from mycorrhizal fungi. Who knew mushrooms had so much to say? 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.