Meta's Layoffs Leave Supernatural Fitness Users in Mourning Users of the VR fitness service are distraught that Supernatural has had its staff cut and won't receive any more content updates. I hear a stranger's heavy breathing through the rollicking dude-bro anthem blasting my eardrums, courtesy of the pop-rock band Imagine Dragons. Me and two people I just met are punching digital blocks that fly at our heads in the VR workout platform Supernatural . My new friends have nameplates floating above their heads that say Chip and Alisa. That's all I know about them.

Whether we like to admit it or not, many of us have probably questioned if a bump in the night was actually a ghost at some point or another. And if you're really unlucky, you might even believe you've see a spirit in the flesh. But what exactly makes us feel like we are in the presence of something beyond the grave? Exploding head syndrome, sleep paralysis and even mould can be the source of a chill down your spine or the inkling that someone is watching. So, brace yourselves, as MailOnline explores five possible scientific explanations behind experiences of paranormal activity.

The anthropologist and famed love expert Helen Fisher seemed ready to dash into oncoming traffic. We were on a sidewalk in Manhattan, opposite the American Museum of Natural History, and nowhere near a safe place to cross the street. She wanted me to stare down the yellow cabs and charge off the curb, though she knew I wouldn't do it: I'd recently taken the personality questionnaire she wrote 17 years ago for a dating website, which produced the insight that I am a cautious, conventional rule follower. She, however, is an "explorer"--she has visited 111 countries, including North Korea--but also, being high in estrogen, a "negotiator" who will use the crosswalk for my benefit. "I am horribly empathetic," she told me. I look into baby carriages and worry about their future with love." This is how Fisher, the 77-year-old chief scientific adviser for Match.com and one of the best-known, most-often-quoted experts on romance and "mate choice," understands life: Personality is a cocktail of ...

Loab was created entirely by artificial intelligence. An AI-generated character might not sound so remarkable in an era of deepfakes and all manner of digital alchemy. Generated by accident, she leaves an indelible trace on every image associated with her persona. She's often accompanied by extreme gore and violence, and it's not clear why. Not even those who understand this tech can explain what she's doing here. WARNING: The following content may be distressing for some viewers. Loab (pronounced "lobe") was first discovered in April this year by 31-year-old artist Steph Swanson, known online as Supercomposite.

Inspiration for the ads came from an unlikely source: artificial intelligence. Kayak worked with New York advertising agency Supernatural Development LLC, whose internal AI platform combines marketers' answers to questions about their business with consumer data drawn from social media and market research to suggest campaign strategies, then automatically generates ideas for advertising copy and other marketing materials. Supernatural's AI found that Kayak should target its campaign largely toward young, upper-income men, who it said would respond to humor about Americans' inability to agree on basic facts in politics and pop culture, said Michael Barrett, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Supernatural. CMO Today delivers the most important news of the day for media and marketing professionals. "That gave us a good amount of license to zig where the category was zagging and to be more relevant, more provocative," Mr. Clarke said of the AI findings.

The drawbacks for Supernatural are surprisingly few. Beyond the relative expense of the subscriptions, the biggest is the space required, which can be a challenge for those living in close quarters. Depending on your height, you'll need a circular space between 5 and 7 feet in diameter, with enough space overhead to allow you to fully extend your arms. This is a limitation of most good VR games and apps, however. The main mode for Supernatural, in which you swat a pair of batons at the orbs a la Beat Saber, requires a bit of space, but the recently incorporated boxing mode makes this less of an issue (and takes a low ceiling out of play).

"It was really clear to us that the solution to the problem, as it has been in industry after industry, was technology," said Barrett, the chief strategy officer. "We needed to take a radically new approach of the application of technology to the problem of creativity, so we are building machines that humans can use in order to make better advertising faster. If you think of advertising like building a house, you can build a house with hand tools or you can build it with power tools. What we're trying to do is build the power tools. While many agencies tout their artificial intelligence or machine learning capabilities, the founders of Supernatural believe their offering is different because it serves as the agency's nucleus. "So many agencies say they have some kind of version of this, but what they're talking about is an AI algorithm that tests ads after they are already out, or an AI copywriting thing," Caiozzo said. "The entire agency, every single person, collaborates with the platform we're building -- before the ads are made, not after.

Chiara Marletto is a research fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Her research is in theoretical physics – especially quantum computation, thermodynamics and information theory. Her broader interests include theoretical biology, epistemology and Italian literature. It is her first non-academic book. You argue for a radically different approach to physics, which you call the science of can and can't.

We're now told that AI in general might have a mystical side. A professor of Philosophy, Classics, Religion, and Environmental Studies tells us that "Technology could be part of some bigger plan to enable us to perceive other dimensions." But he asks, "will we believe our machines when that happens?" Specifically, he wonders, What if your Siri claimed to have had a spiritual experience, or, as he puts it a "deeper-than-5G connection"?: As our machines come closer to being able to imitate the processes of our own minds, Pascal's story raises some important questions. First, can a machine have a private experience that is important to the machine but that it is reluctant to talk about with others?

Let's put aside for a moment the metaphysical question of whether the divine exists or not. Blaise Pascal, the philosopher and author of the "wager" argument, says that there's evidence for both sides, but nothing that tips the scales completely for or against the existence of God. Let's approach this as Pascalian agnostics. What if Siri really did make a deeper-than-5G connection? Pascal himself once had a mystical experience he couldn't put into words, so he wrote a few words on a piece of paper.