BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 16, 2023--

The biggest US lenders expect to pay almost $8.9 billion to help replenish the US government’s bedrock Deposit

Elon Musk has unveiled a new black and white “X” logo to replace Twitter’s famous blue bird as he follows through with a major rebranding of the the social media platform he bought for $44 billion last year

A rare planet has been discovered hundreds of light years away, and it could prove key to our understanding of planetary formations out there in the universe. There have been more than 5,300 exoplanets discovered, but few match the description of the newly recorded TOI-733b. Found 245 light-years away, TOI-733b is almost twice the size of Earth and orbits a sun slightly smaller than our Sun. While there are many exoplanets, there are a surprisingly small number which sit between one and a half and two times the radius of the Earth, and it's the size that makes it so interesting to scientists. Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter The research was conducted by a team of astronomers led by Iskra Georgieva of Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. It was accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The team focused on TOI-733b after data on the planet was collected by NASA's telescope TESS. The density of the planet suggests two things – it’s either totally covered in water, or it’s lost its atmosphere altogether. Clues point to the idea of TOI-733b’s atmosphere slowly depleting. That’s due to the proximity of the planet to its star, which it orbits in the space of just 4.9 days. If the atmosphere is being burned away, it means it could soon be transformed into a rock planet. The other possibility points to the planet having lost its hydrogen and helium, while retaining an atmosphere packed with water vapour. "Answering the question of whether TOI-733b has a secondary atmosphere or is an ocean planet boils down to differentiating between a Neptune-like planet that lost its ∼10 per cent of H/He to leave behind a steam atmosphere of heavier volatiles, and one that formed and remained relatively the same throughout its evolution," the research reads. "While being beyond the scope of this paper, finding an answer to this question will have broad implications on our understanding of exoplanets." The team went on to write: "By all accounts TOI-733 b looks to be an interesting planet and holds the potential of being a small but key piece to solving big puzzles in exoplanet science. "With ever increasing in-depth theoretical analyses and the promise of high-precision follow up by present and upcoming facilities, we seem to be well on the way to finding answers to major questions relating to planet formation and evolution." 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.

By Steve Holland and Doina Chiacu HELSINKI President Joe Biden said on Thursday he expects Republicans to stand

By Andrew Osborn and Kevin Liffey LONDON (Reuters) -Rebellious Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Saturday he had taken

The Milwaukee Brewers have placed right-hander Adrian Houser on the 15-day injured list with right elbow stiffness

Palestinian medics evacuated 31 premature babies from Gaza City's war-torn Al-Shifa hospital Sunday in a high-risk operation, the UN said, pledging to also move patients...

Trade deal negotiations between European Union and Australia have collapsed despite earlier optimism, with the two sides exchanging blame on...

The headquarters of Twitter was left with a sign saying “ER” after San Francisco Police interrupted the physical rebrand of the social media platform’s offices. The new name, “X”, was later projected onto the building as night fell. The operation to take down the old sign was put on hold on Monday afternoon after Mr Musk didn’t obtain the correct permits for the crane that had been placed on the street, blocking traffic, according to a witness. “Welp, @twitter name so coming off the building right now but @elonmusk didn’t get permit for the equipment on the street so @SFPD is shutting it down,” Wayne Sutton tweeted from the scene. A San Francisco Police Department spokesperson told The Daily Beast that they had responded to “a report of a possible unpermitted street closure. Through their investigation officers were able to determine that no crime was committed, and this incident was not a police matter”. The name change has led to the social media platform dropping in value by between $4bn and $20bn, according to Bloomberg. The move has also been mocked as uninspired. “The old Twitter logo was open, accessible, instantly recognisable around the world. This new one looks like the logo of a seedy suburban strip club. Devoid of colour, bland, generic... BORING! This is branding suicide!” CM Kosemen wrote. “Taking one of the most recognizable brand names in the world and changing it to X is unfathomably dumb. Sounds like a porn site and the logo looks like the emblem to a bad Call of Duty gamebattles team from 2008,” YouTuber Charlie White wrote. “Gonna be honest this new widget design looks like an app for a membership-only human trafficking gentlemen’s club headquartered in Budapest,” one user said. “Musk doesn’t have the money or the staff to meaningfully update or even fix Twitter, so he’s making the cheapest, smallest tweak he can – literally swapping out a GIF file - that grabs the biggest headlines. It’s nothing but a cheap, meaningless play to get his name in the press,” comedian Adam Conover added. Mr Musk wrote on Sunday about wanting “a good enough X logo,” prompting his supporters to offer their suggestions. Sawyer Merritt posted several, with Mr Musk choosing one of them, saying: “Going with minimalist art deco on the upper right. Probably changes later, certainly will be refined.” The new logo is very similar to a generic Unicode character, which is an international symbol that would be impossible to trademark, the founder of Bellingcat, Eliot Higgins, noted. Meta, the operator of X competitor Threads, and Microsoft both own versions of the X symbol, which could possibly lead to legal disputes. “Twitter Japan apparently legally cannot change their rebranding to ‘X Japan’ because the Jrock band X JAPAN owns the rights to the name. How funny would it be if Yoshiki is the one who saves us all from this awful rebranding move? LOL,” one user noted. “I’m not a [copyright] lawyer but I think he should have figured out if he owned the name before changing it,” Vanity Fair special correspondent Molly Jong-Fast wrote. “Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app,” Mr Musk wrote on Monday. “This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing. The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.” Mr Musk claimed that users would soon have the “ability to conduct your entire financial world” on the app. “The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird,” he said. Mr Musk has reportedly been fond of the letter X for decades, co-founding an online bank called x.com in 1999, which later merged and grew into what is now PayPal. Read More Elon Musk’s ‘X’ already trademarked by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta for ‘social networking services’ TikTok launches text-only posts as social media innovation race heats up Twitter to X: Why Elon Musk rebranded the social networking platform Elon Musk’s ‘X’ is already trademarked by Mark Zuckerberg Twitter to X: Why Elon Musk rebranded the social networking platform Twitter rebrands to X as Elon Musk loses iconic bird logo

(Corrects reference to international companies in paragraph 7 to show that two of them, not one, were removed from the

A 15th century Chinese box which went unnoticed for decades has sold for £288,000 (about $358,000), smashing its expected price at auction.