Donald Santini is facing first-degree murder charges for killing Cynthia Wood in 1984

BRUSSELS NATO's support for Ukraine is making a difference on the battlefield, said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct 9, 2023--

Pakistan investors are bracing for a sudden jolt as former premier Imran Khan’s showdown with the powerful military,

Republican colleagues call Steve Scalise a fighter, but the nominee for House speaker may be in for a brawl

South Korean police have arrested two people and questioned more than a dozen American soldiers on suspicion of smuggling and distributing synthetic cannabis after raiding two US army bases.

Best deals on robot mops this week Despite the enthusiasm of actors in Swiffer commercials,

Tomás Ostrák scored in between penalty-kick goals by Eduard Löwen and Nicholas Gioacchini as St. Louis City breezed to a 3-0 victory over the Houston Dynamo

It turns out that human ancestors and dinosaurs could have actually co-existed, according to new research. Scientists have produced a study which suggested that placental mammals were around before the asteroid that brought an end to the Cretaceous period hit Earth 66 million years ago. A new paper published in the journal Current Biology claims that fossil records of placental mammals suggests that our ancestors roamed the Earth before the extinction event, and later flourished due to the lack of competition from dinosaur species afterwards. According to the research, primates evolved shortly before the asteroid hit. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Lead author Emily Carlisle of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences said: “We pulled together thousands of fossils of placental mammals and were able to see the patterns of origination and extinction of the different groups.” Carlisle added: “Based on this, we could estimate when placental mammals evolved.” “The model we used estimates origination ages based on when lineages first appear in the fossil record and the pattern of species diversity through time for the lineage,” co-author Daniele Silvestro from the University of Fribourg shared. While we don’t have a full picture of what human ancestors looked like at that time, it’s thought they “were small and squirrely”. Carlisle said: “Unfortunately we don’t know what our placental mammal ancestors would have looked like back then. “Many of the earliest fossils of placental mammals are quite small creatures such as Purgatorius – an early ancestor of primates – which was a small burrowing creature a bit like a tree shrew. So it’s likely that many of our ancestors were small and squirrely.” 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.

Japan has launched a rocket with an X-ray telescope that will explore the origins of the universe

MINNEAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov 22, 2023--

Omegle, a popular website used to video chat with strangers, is shutting down after almost 15 years. The closure comes amid increasing criticism that the site endangered its users, with reports of child sexual abuse and other crime on the platform. Omegle allowed users to sign up and then be launched into a video chat with another stranger using the site. The two could chat for as long as they wished – until they ended that conversation and embarked on a new one. The app was launched in 2009, and became popular almost straight away. Its founder said that its popularity was a result of “meeting new people being a basic human need”. Quickly, however, it became known for explicit and other criminal content. Leif K-Brooks, the company’s founder, admitted that Omegle had been misused, “including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes”. The site attempted to introduce new features to stop that misuse, such as “monitored chats” that would allow moderators to try and stop criminals using the site. But they did not work, and the site continued to receive criticism for its lack of safety. Now Mr K-Brooks has said that the criticism has become too much, and Omegle will shut down. The intensity of the fight over use of the site had forced him to decide to shut it down, he said, and it will stop working straight away. “As much as I wish circumstances were different, the stress and expense of this fight – coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse – are simply too much. Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s,” wrote Leif K-Brooks, who has run the website since founding it. Omegle saw a huge surge in popularity during the pandemic, as people not only flocked to the site but recorded their interactions and shared them on social media. But that popularity also brought more awareness of the problems on the site, and increased criticism of it. Mr K-Brooks acknowledged that criticism. But he also suggested that at least some of it was in bad faith, and that it was intended to force the site to shut down. “In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users,” he wrote. He said that the site had been shut down on the basis of “fear”. “If something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what’s next?”, he wrote, comparing the end of Omegle to “shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there – or perhaps more provocatively, destroying the universe because it contains evil”. The decision to shut down Omegle comes amid increasing concern about regulation of the internet and how best to protect its users. It comes just days after the introduction of the UK’s Online Safety Act, for instance, which aims to hold platforms to account for crimes on their platform, including online grooming.