Octopus Energy to spin off $8.65bn tech arm Kraken Octopus Energy is set to spin off its Kraken Technologies arm as a standalone company after a deal to sell a stake in the platform valued it at $8.65bn (£6.4bn). The energy giant, Britain's biggest gas and electricity supplier, has sold a $1bn stake in the AI-based division to a group of investors led by New York-based D1 Capital Partners. The move paves the way for Kraken to be demerged from Octopus, and for a potential stock market flotation for the business in the future. Octopus founder and chief executive Greg Jackson told the BBC there was every chance Kraken would list its shares in the medium term, with the location of the flotation between London and the US. Kraken uses AI to automate customer service and billing for energy companies and can manage when customers use energy, rewarding them for reducing consumption at peak times. It was initially built for use by Octopus but has since picked up a raft of other utilities clients, including EDF, E.On Next, TalkTalk and National Grid US.

Andrew Jackson's White House once hosted a cheese feeding frenzy The seventh president's farewell party featured 1,400 pounds of cheddar. In 1835, a New York dairy farmer sent President Andrew Jackson a 1,400-pound cheddar cheese to celebrate the president's second inauguration. Two years later, it was finally eaten. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It's February 1837, and the White House is about to bear witness to one of the greatest feeding frenzies in this nation's proud history of competitive consumption.

In the past 20 years, mice with glowing cables sprouting from their heads have become a staple of neuroscience. They reflect the rise of optogenetics, in which neurons are engineered to contain light-sensitive proteins called opsins, allowing pulses of light to turn them on or off. The method has powered thousands of basic experiments into the brain circuits that drive behavior and underlie disease. As this research tool matured, hopes arose for using it as a treatment, too. Compared with the electrical or magnetic brain stimulation approaches already in use, optogenetics offers a way to more precisely target and manipulate the exact cell types underlying brain disorders.

They gathered together on a sunny July evening, between the churchyard's trees and leaning tombstones, to give thanks for the heat pump. Facing the newly installed system, in its large green metal box, they sang hymns and said prayers. "To thank God, really, for being able to work His wonders in mysterious ways," says Karen Crowhurst, who is part of a committee that helps to run St. The previous month, a flatbed truck carrying a hefty new heat pump system had eased itself onto the church grounds. By late July, the device was fully installed, and soon followed an outdoor thanksgiving service .

Prior to the Baltimore Ravens' win over the Chicago Bears, Lamar Jackson ordered the locker room stripped of video games, ping pong tables and cornhole boards.

Harry Jackson went into Kathmandu as a tourist. He ended up being one of the main international sources of news on Nepal's Gen Z protests. When Harry Jackson pulled his small motorcycle into Kathmandu on September 8, he had no idea the city was exploding in protests. He didn't even know there was a curfew. People in Nepal, largely driven by Gen Z youth, had taken to the streets, and that day riots broke out when nearly two dozen people were shot and killed by authorities.

Understanding crucial crop's genes can help feed a hungry world. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Despite the 15 billion bushels grown in the United States last year alone, we still don't know much about corn's stem cells . That may seem like a minor issue, but these cells play a huge role dictating the important plant's growth, health, and hardiness . Identifying the specific genes responsible for these and other factors could help agricultural scientists craft more robust crops--a vital need in the face of food insecurity and climate change.

Mark Jackson is playing a computer game with his mind. As he reclines in bed, three blue circles appear on a laptop screen a few feet away. One turns red: the target. Jackson is in control of a white circle, which he needs to steer into the target without running into the blue obstacles. The game is a bit like Pac-Man.

HBO's The Last of Us showed viewers in season one that it would lean heavily on the source video games for major plot points and general direction of the season while expanding on the universe, and season two has followed that to the most extreme end possible. Episode two sees Tommy and Maria lead the town of Jackson Hole against a massive wave of Infected, the likes of which we haven't seen in the show (or video games) yet. This was a complete invention for the show, one that gives the episode Game of Thrones vibes, or calls to mind a battle like the siege of Helm's Deep in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. It's epic in scale, with the overmatched defenders showing their skill and bravery against overwhelming odds; there is loss and pain but the good guys eventually triumph. That mass-scale battle is paired with the most intimate and brutal violence we've seen in the entire series so far, as Joel's actions finally catch up with him.

Local governments around the world are making consequential decisions on behalf of their constituents, and these constituents are responding with requests, advice, and assessments of their officials at public meetings. So many small meetings cannot be covered by traditional newsrooms at scale. We propose PUBLICSPEAK, a probabilistic framework which can utilize meeting structure, domain knowledge, and linguistic information to discover public remarks in local government meetings. We then use our approach to inspect the issues raised by constituents in 7 cities across the United States. We evaluate our approach on a novel dataset of local government meetings and find that PUBLICSPEAK improves over state-of-the-art by 10% on average, and by up to 40%.