Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Antarctica


Rhinos once lived in Canada

Popular Science

A newly discovered species of Arctic rhino lived 23 million years ago. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. About 23 million years ago, a rhinoceros stomped across the Canadian High Arctic . Now extinct, a team of scientists from the Canadian Museum of Nature (CMN) have found a new species of the enigmatic "Arctic rhino." First uncovered almost 40 years ago in lake deposits in Haughton Crater on Devon Island, Nunavut, was more petite than many of its modern descendants.


Prunella Scales: From Fawlty Towers to Great Canal Journeys

BBC News

Prunella Scales, who died at the age of 93, was one of Britain's finest comic actors. But despite a long and distinguished career on stage and screen, she will inevitably be remembered as Sybil Fawlty in the 1970s TV comedy, Fawlty Towers. It was Sybil's mission in life to keep tabs on her stick insect husband Basil - played by John Cleese - between cigarette-fuelled phone conversations with her friend, Audrey. It fell to her to placate guests who had been shouted at, totally ignored or, in some cases, throttled by Basil when in one of his more manic moods. Her nightmarish laugh, gravity-defying hairdo and ferocious temper were part of a carefully constructed character that ranks as a comic masterpiece.


NHS to offer same-day prostate cancer diagnosis

BBC News

Men with suspected prostate cancer will be able to get a diagnosis from the NHS within a day, under a new trial hailed as a potential game changer for identifying and treating the disease. The 15 hospitals taking part will use AI technology to interpret MRI scans and spot areas of abnormal tissue within minutes, according to NHS England. Scans showing a high-cancer risk will be triaged as priority review for a radiologist and patients will be booked for a same-day biopsy. Around one in eight men will develop prostate cancer in their lives, according to Prostate Cancer UK, with research showing it has overtaken breast cancer as the most commonly diagnosed form of the disease in the UK. But unlike breast cancer, there is currently no national screening programme for prostate cancer.


Amazon prepares for major layoffs among office workers, media reports say

BBC News

Amazon is planning major job cuts among its corporate workers as soon as this week, multiple media outlets have reported. The online retail giant plans to lay off as many as 30,000 employees as part of cost-cutting measures led by chief executive Andy Jassy, according to the Wall Street Journal and Reuters. Each cited sources stating the same number of layoffs. Amazon declined to comment when contacted by the BBC. If confirmed, the layoffs could be one of the largest seen in recent months.


How a Hollywood tour guide discovered an unknown celebrity grave

BBC News

Ever since her death in 1986, it was taken as common knowledge that Elsa Lanchester - who became a horror movie icon by playing the title character in the Bride of Frankenstein - had been cremated and her ashes sprinkled in the ocean. But then Scott Michaels, the founder of Dearly Departed Tours, discovered that her cremated remains were interred in a rose garden under her married name, Elsa Lanchester Laughton. For almost 40 years no one had made the connection - until now, he says. Mr Michaels, 63, is a historian who specialises in the dark side of Hollywood. A go-to for programmes about dead Hollywood celebrities and murder, he has consulted for Quentin Tarantino's Manson murder film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.


Turing AI Institute boss denies accusations of 'toxic internal culture'

BBC News

Turing AI Institute boss denies accusations of'toxic internal culture' The Alan Turing Institute Chair has told the BBC there is no substance to a number of serious accusations which rocked the organisation in the summer. In August, whistleblowers accused the charity's leadership of misusing public funds, overseeing a toxic internal culture, and failing to deliver on its mission. They said the Turing Institute, the UK's national body for artificial intelligence (AI), was on the brink of collapse after Peter Kyle, the then technology secretary, threatened to withdraw its ยฃ100m funding. But speaking exclusively to the BBC, Chair Dr Doug Gurr said the whistleblower claims were independently investigated by a third party which found them to have no substance. I fully sympathise that going through any transition is always challenging, he said.


These robots can clean, exercise - and care for your elderly parents. Would you trust them to?

BBC News

These robots can clean, exercise - and care for your elderly parents. Would you trust them to? Hidden away in a lab in north-west London three black metal robotic hands move eerily on an engineering work bench. We're not trying to build Terminator, jokes Rich Walker, director of Shadow Robot, the firm that made them. Bespectacled, with long hair and a beard and moustache, he seems more like a latter-day hippy than a tech whizz, and he is clearly proud as he shows me around his firm.


ChatGPT shares data on how many users exhibit psychosis or suicidal thoughts

BBC News

OpenAI has released new estimates of the number of ChatGPT users who exhibit possible signs of mental health emergencies, including mania, psychosis or suicidal thoughts. The company said that around 0.07% of ChatGPT users active in a given week exhibited such signs, adding that its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot recognizes and responds to these sensitive conversations. While OpenAI maintains these cases are extremely rare, critics said even a small percentage may amount to hundreds of thousands of people, as ChatGPT recently reached 800 million weekly active users, per boss Sam Altman. As scrutiny mounts, the company said it built a network of experts around the world to advise it. Those experts include more than 170 psychiatrists, psychologists, and primary care physicians who have practiced in 60 countries, the company said. They have devised a series of responses in ChatGPT to encourage users to seek help in the real world, according to OpenAI.


Some People Can't See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound

The New Yorker

Ebeyer published posts about famous people who had realized that they were aphantasic: Glen Keane, one of the leading Disney animators on "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast"; John Green, the author of "The Fault in Our Stars," whose books had sold more than fifty million copies; J. Craig Venter, the biologist who led the first team to sequence the human genome; Blake Ross, who co-created the Mozilla-Firefox web browser when he was nineteen. Ebeyer also wanted the Aphantasia Network to be a place where aphantasics could find recent scientific research. For instance, estimating the strength of a person's imagery had been thoroughly subjective until Joel Pearson, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, devised tests to measure it more precisely. In a paper from 2022, Pearson reported that when people with imagery visualized a bright object their pupils contracted, as though they were seeing a bright object in real life, but the pupils of aphantasics imagining a bright object stayed the same. Another study of his had shown that, although aphantasics had the same fear response (sweating) as typical imagers to a frightening image shown on a screen, when exposed to a frightening story they barely responded at all.


In Russia's 'blitz' of Ukraine, the question of appeasement is back

BBC News

In Russia's'blitz' of Ukraine, the question of appeasement is back Following another week of intensive and lethal Russian bombardment of Ukraine's cities, a composite image has been doing the rounds on Ukrainian social media. Underneath an old, black-and-white photo of Londoners queuing at a fruit and vegetable stall surrounded by the bombed-out rubble of the Blitz, a second image - this time in colour - creates a striking juxtaposition. Taken on Saturday, it shows shoppers thronging to similar stalls in a northern suburb of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, while a column of black smoke rises ominously in the background. Bombs can't stop markets, reads the caption linking the two images. The night before, as the city's sleep was interrupted once again by the now all-too-familiar booms of missile and drone strikes, two people were killed and nine others injured.