Twitter has threatened Meta with legal action over its new social media platform “Threads,” claiming that they have created a “copycat” platform and hiring former Twitter staff to do so. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook led by Mark Zuckerberg, revealed Threads on Wednesday, a text-based app partnering with Instagram that is similar to Twitter and other apps. More follows...

Scientists have achieved a major breakthrough using a so-called ‘miracle material’ to boost the efficiency of solar panels. Two separate studies published on Thursday demonstrated how the material perovskite could push the power conversion efficiency rate of photovoltaic (PV) solar cells above 30 per cent – beyond the theoretical limit of 29 per cent for traditional silicon (PV) solar cells. “Overcoming this threshold provides confidence that high-performance, low-cost PVs can be brought to the market,” wrote material science researchers Stefaan de Wolf and Erkan Aydin, who were not involved in the research, in an article published in the journal Science. Perovskite has emerged in the past 15 years as a material capable of transforming an array of industries, from renewable energy, to ultra high-speed communications. Materials science professor Zeev Valy Vardeny from the University of Utah described perovskite in 2017 as “unbelievable, a miracle material”, after it was able to radically improve the sunlight-to-energy efficiency of solar cells. Perovskite’s properties allow it to harvest energy from a greater range of the light spectrum, however until recently it was too unstable to be used outside of laboratory conditions. By stacking a layer of perovskite on top of silicon into a tandem device, the researchers were able to significantly boost the efficiency of commercial PV technologies while retaining the industry standard configuration. “Tandem solar cells are the most straight-forward route toward decreasing the levelized cost of electricity, well beyond what is possible for single-junction solar cells,” wrote Professor de Wolf and Aydin. The teams from China and Japan who were behind the latest breakthrough claim the latest design will pave the way for the mass production of ultra-efficient solar panels. The current efficiency record for this next-generation solar cell is 33.7 per cent, achieved by engineers at the KAUST Solar Center in Saudi Arabia earlier this year, having risen from under 4 per cent efficiency in 2009. Last month, a startup in China announced that it planned to begin production of tandem solar cells, with the abundance of perovskite cutting costs to “just one 20th of traditional solar cells”, according to Professor Tan Hairen from Nanjing University. The scientists behind the latest research believe their approach could ultimately achieve an efficiency rate “well above 35 per cent”, though more work needs to be done on making the tandem cells more durable in real-world conditions, as well as scaling them up to the size of traditional solar panels. “Arguably, the most critical factor lies in the annual degradation rate under actual outdoor conditions, which for perovskite-silicon tandems remains largely unknown,” the Perspective noted. “To be commercially viable, this degradation should be on par with mainstream PV technologies, which is less than 1 per cent relative per year.” The research was detailed in two separate papers published in the journal Science. Read More Massive mineral deposit discovery could meet global battery and solar panel demand ‘for next 100 years’

Robots took part in a UN session examining how artificial intelligence can be beneficial for healthcare. At the "Robots that assist and care: developing socially intelligent robots for good" event as part of the 2023 AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, speakers explored and demonstrated how robotics can be used for socially assistive functions such as recovery and wellness. The panel also examined how robot dogs for comfort and support, robot medical assistants, expressive robots for human communication, and robot dogs that keep people safe in industrial settings and public safety operations can be used. Key issues of community acceptance, policy, and ethics were also covered. The speakers list included Ben Goertzel, CEO and Founder of SingularityNET, Maja Matarić, Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California, Will Jackson, CEO and Founder at Engineered Arts, Brendan Schulman, Vice President of Policy & Government Relations for Boston Dynamics, and Cindy L Bethel, Professor and Director of the Social, Therapeutic & Robotic Systems Lab at Mississippi State University. Read More AI rise will be ‘most profound’ shift seen in our lifetimes, Google UK boss says ‘Miracle material’ smashes solar panel efficiency threshold Mark Zuckerberg trolls Elon Musk with Spider-Man meme after launching Twitter rival

TikTok and a group of five content creators who are suing the state of Montana over its first-in-the-nation law to ban the video sharing app are now asking a federal judge to block implementation of the law while the case moves through the courts

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Threads, Meta’s text-based app seemingly built to rival Twitter, is live

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Ten self-driving electric Volkswagen buses will soon cruise the streets of Austin, Texas, testing autonomous driving technology. The automaker said it plans to launch commercial services in Austin by 2026.

The setbacks just keep coming for Twitter owner Elon Musk. After outages and daily view limits prompted users to flock to other platforms, and Mark Zuckerberg posted his first tweet in 11 years to savagely roast him, the individual behind the ‘Elon Jet’ account has set up a profile on rival app Threads. The text-based social network, run by Instagram, looks to build “an open, civil place for people to have conversations” and was released to the public on Thursday. As is to be expected, Musk isn’t exactly keen on Threads coming along and scooping up disgruntled Twitter users and has already criticised the app over the type of data it may collect from users. But if Zuckerberg isn’t enough of a headache for the businessman (the Tesla founder has challenged the Meta CEO to a cage fight), then a man who set up a Twitter account to track Musk’s private jet - in real-time, using publicly available data – setting up shop on Meta-managed Threads could well be. Jack Sweeney, who managed the account while studying at the University of Central Florida, soon angered Musk over the initiative, as he claimed the tweeting of public information was “becoming a security issue”. Unable to resist a dig at Musk on Threads, Sweeney created a Threads account on Thursday, with his second post (after the initial announcement) reading: “@Zuck will I be allowed to stay?” At the time of writing, @ElonMuskJet has more than 8,300 followers, and Zuckerberg is yet to comment. In January last year, Musk offered Sweeney $5,000 to take down the account, and when the then teenager got back to him asking for $50,000, the free speech “absolutist” went on to block him on Twitter. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Then, as talk continued to build of the tech mogul finally taking over the social media network, Sweeney tweeted in April that the move “doesn’t mean the end of ElonJet”, sharing links to the bot on other platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Telegram. After buying Twitter in October – to the tune of $44bn – Musk took just two months to suspend the ‘ElonJet’ Twitter account, changing the platform’s rules to prohibit real-time location sharing. In a move which also saw several journalists temporarily banned, Musk tweeted in December: “Any account doxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info. “Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else.” Sweeney’s account was reinstated on the same day it was banned, with Musk making clear that sharing locations “on a slightly delayed basis” is OK as it “isn’t a safety problem”. It was relaunched as ‘ElonJet but Delayed’, with a 24-hour delay affecting tweets, and remains active on the platform to this day. 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.

Meta’s new Threads app will not let people leave without deleting their whole Instagram account, its rules warn. The app launched just hours ago and appears to have already received tens of millions of signups. It came at a particularly difficult time for Twitter – which has been limiting how many posts people can see – and has tight integration with Instagram, which makes it easy to sign up. However, people are not able to reverse that signup process once it has happened, users have found. If someone starts using Threads, and then wants to leave again, they will be forced to delete their entire Instagram account. Threads users can “deactivate” their profile, which will stop posts and interactions with other people’s posts from being shown. But that data will continue to live on parent company Meta’s servers, and will remain connected to the Instagram account it came from. Users can also delete all of their individual posts on Threads. As on most social networks, that has to be done one-by-one, with a user scrolling through their own account and deleting each post individually. But it is not possible to fully delete it without getting rid of all Instagram data. “Your Threads profile is part of your Instagram account, and may be deleted at any time by deleting your Instagram account,” a supplemental privacy policy published for Threads warns. Meta has said that it is working on the problem, presumably with a view to allowing people to get rid of their Threads account without deleting all of their data. The issue is just one of a range of problems that users have identified on the first day with Instagram’s Threads app. Many other users have complained, for instance, that there is no way to see only posts from accounts that they have actually followed. Instagram has built Threads to recommend posts from other accounts it thinks users are interested in, too – presumably in an attempt to ensure that the news feed is full up even when users start using the app. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has also confirmed on Threads that the company is working on that feature too. Mr Mosseri faced sharp criticism in recent months over the increasing amount of algorithmically chosen content being pushed into users feeds on the normal version of Instagram. Read More Threads: What it’s like to use Instagram’s new Twitter rival How to get and use ‘Threads’, the biggest new social app Mark Zuckerberg launches his ‘Twitter killer’ app called Threads

Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads app has become the leading Twitter competitor within hours of launching, attracting three times as many users as all other rivals combined. Parent company Meta, which also controls Facebook and Instagram, saw 22 million people sign up to its latest app offering within 12 hours of releasing it on Thursday. The text-based social media app is designed to offer an alternative to Twitter, which has been blighted with issues and controversies since Elon Musk took it over last year. Other Twitter rivals, including Donald Trump’s Truth Social, are yet to reach a critical mass to make them serious contenders in the space. The former US president’s app has around 2 million monthly active users, while Bluesky, Mastodon, Parler and Tribel have an estimated 4.5 million users combined. It took Twitter roughly three years to reach the number of users that Threads achieved in its first day, however Mr Musk’s app still has more than 10-times the number of active users. Thread’s user growth puts it in line to become the fastest growing app of all time, with no other launch seeing as many users sign up in a single day. Early adopters of Threads include singer Jennifer Lopez, NFL star Tom Brady and adventurer Bear Grylls. Despite this success, it remains a long way off the number of Twitter users, which had an estimated 330 million monthly active users in the first half of the year. It is unclear how many of the new Threads users were already Twitter users, and whether they will make the switch permanently if they were regular users of Mr Musk’s platform. Some analysts believe Threads could potentially become the most popular text-based social media app, given that it arrives at a time of growing dissatisfaction with Twitter among some users. “Threads looks set to be the Twitter killer, and comes at the worst possible time for Elon Musk’s doomed social network,” said Drew Benvie, chief executive of consultancy firm Battenhall. “The long anticipated alternative to Twitter will offer Instagram’s two billion users a more reliable and useful way of using social media that Twitter used to do so well. But with Twitter becoming more unreliable, costly and unsafe than ever, I expect users will vote with their fingers.” Read More Threads: What is it, can it rival Twitter and what are the risks? Watch live: Robots take part in UN discussion on AI in healthcare Threads: What it’s like to use Instagram’s new Twitter rival Meta’s new Twitter rival app Threads gets over 10 million sign-ups