British antitrust regulators have extended their deadline to issue a final order blocking Microsoft’s $69 billion plan to buy video game maker Activision Blizzard

MILPITAS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 14, 2023--

Scientists have been studying a “space ghost” which could be due to explode in just a few decades, changing the night sky forever – if it hasn’t already, that is. The object in question is a large star called Betelgeuse and the scientific community is divided over whether or not it’s already become a supernova. One theory states that the light from Betelgeuse takes so long to reach Earth it could mean the huge explosion has already taken place. Betelgeuse has been a supergiant red star for an estimated 40,000 years, but that could change relatively soon. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Michael Shara is the curator of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. He told the US Sun: "Betelgeuse lies somewhere between about 450 and 550 light years from Earth." He went on to say: "Betelgeuse’s position appears to change slightly, as seen from Earth, between June and December, when the Earth is on opposite sides of its orbit around the Sun. "That tiny change in position is a direct measure of the distance to Betelgeuse." He went on to expand on the theory by saying: "Let's assume that Betelgeuse is precisely 500 light years distant. "If Betelgeuse exploded as a supernova anytime in the past 499 years, the light from that event has not yet had enough time to reach Earth…so we have no way of knowing if Betelgeuse has already blown up. "If, for example, Betelgeuse blew up in 1600 AD, we won’t know about it until the year 2100. But if it blew up on August 1, 1523, then on August 1, 2023 it will become about as bright as the full Moon. "The only naked eye supernova of the past century occurred in 1987… all astronomers would be thrilled and delighted if Betelgeuse (or another dying star) graced our night sky with a supernova in the coming decades." 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.

Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, many controversial users who were previously banned from the platform have been allowed back on and are flourishing. Users such as Andrew Tate have regained a platform to spout his harmful views to millions of users. But, while it may feel satisfying to troll such users, engaging with their tweets actually earns them money. Here’s why: Twitter recently announced it was paying out thousands of dollars in advertising revenue to users to “benefit” from their high engagement on tweets, earning more money the higher their engagement is. As part of Twitter’s Ad Revenue sharing program, users require “5M+ Tweet impressions in each month for the last 3 months”. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter On Thursday (13 July), some eligible users began receiving notifications of how much money they would receive. The highest earner, Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus, known online as Shibetoshi Nakamoto, earned $37,050. Tate also revealed in a tweet that he earned $20,379 from ad revenue generated in the reply threads under his posts. The money comes from the ad revenue generated in their replies below the content they post on the platform, and is paid out via the Stripe account that the user registered for creator subscriptions with. Twitter staffer, Patrick Traughber, said: “Excited to start sending our first payments to creators for ads revenue sharing today. “Creators are the lifeblood of this platform, and it's great to see so many creators I follow getting paid today. The program will be expanding soon—more to come!” The cash payouts come just a week after Meta launched its rival text-based platform, Threads. 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.

In New York, an Upper East Side enclave is fighting city plans for curbside 5G towers, calling them

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 14, 2023--

CAMBRIDGE, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 14, 2023--

LONDON Britain's competition regulator on Friday extended the date by which it would consider Microsoft's submissions relating to

Doctors have performed a minor miracle after re-attaching a “'decapitated” boy’s head after he was hit by a car. The miraculous surgery occurred after Suleiman Hassan, a Palestinian boy from the West Bank, was severely injured after being hit by a car while out riding his bike. He was airlifted to Hadassah Ein Kerem’s Trauma Unit in Jerusalem and went straight to surgery. He suffered what is known as an internal decapitation – this occurs when the base of the skull and top of the spine become detached by the skin remains intact. This extremely rare injury can occur when a strong, sudden impact on the head results in the muscles and ligaments that hold the head in place to sever, accounting for less than one per cent of spinal injuries. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Doctors explained that Hassan’s head was “'almost completely detached from the base of his neck” before he underwent painstaking surgery taking several hours. The procedure involves reattaching the skull and spinal column using technology such as screws, rods, plates and bone grafts. One of the surgeons who operated on Hassan, Dr Ohad Einav, told The Times of Isreal: “We fought for the boy’s life.” Dr Einav continued: “The procedure itself is very complicated and took several hours. While in the operating room, we used new plates and fixations in the damaged area… “Our ability to save the child was thanks to our knowledge and the most innovative technology in the operating room.” Surgeries such as the one that saved Hassan’s life are only possible if internal decapitation victims have their major blood vessels intact, keeping the brain alive. Hassan’s surgery took place in June but has only recently been made public as the boy continues to recover at home with rehabilitation. Miraculously, Hassan can walk unaided and has no neurological problems following the shocking injury. 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.

It is possible for human beings to hear silence, according to a team of philosophers and psychologists, in a huge win for 1960s crooners Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. In a study published on Monday by Johns Hopkins University researchers, the team decided that it’s not just sound that human hears pick up: silence is, indeed, something we can hear too. Rui Zhe Goh, a Johns Hopkins graduate student in philosophy and psychology who was the study’s lead author, wrote: "We typically think of our sense of hearing as being concerned with sounds. But silence, whatever it is, is not a sound — it's the absence of sound. Surprisingly, what our work suggests is that nothing is also something you can hear.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Per the study, published in the journal PNAS, researchers had participants listen to an array of audio illusions. They also periodically substituted the noise for pure nothingness, the measure whether people’s brains would react in the same way. “Philosophers have long debated whether silence is something we can literally perceive, but there hasn’t been a scientific study aimed directly at this question,” said study co-author Chaz Firestone, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences and the director of the Johns Hopkins Perception & Mind Laboratory. “Our approach was to ask whether our brains treat silences the way they treat sounds.” "If you can get the same illusions with silences as you get with sounds, then that may be evidence that we literally hear silence after all." The 1,000 participants’ responses were measured across seven different tests. Across all of them, their brains reacted the same way to silence as they did to noise. “We show that silences can 'substitute' for sounds in event-based auditory illusions,” said the study. “Seven experiments introduce three 'silence illusions,' adapted from perceptual illusions previously thought to arise only with sounds.” “In all cases, silences elicited temporal distortions perfectly analogous to their sound-based counterparts, suggesting that auditory processing treats moments of silence the way it treats sounds. Silence is truly perceived, not merely inferred,” it said. “The kinds of illusions and effects that look like they are unique to the auditory processing of a sound, we also get them with silences, suggesting we really do hear absences of sound too,” added study co-author Ian Phillips, a John Hopkins philosopher and psychologist. Hello darkness my old friend… 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.

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

China has published new rules for generative artificial intelligence (AI), becoming one of the first countries in the world to regulate the technology that powers popular services like ChatGPT.