List of All Articles with Tag 'science'

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You should preheat the oven to whatever temperature the recipe says—but here’s what’ll happen (or won’t happen) if you don’t.

An influencer on Snapchat has opened up about her experiences of making AI versions of herself, revealing that she’s now trying to stop subscribers from having “sexual conversations” with them. Caryn Marjorie created AI versions of herself and had the idea of charging people $1 per minute to chat. The “immersive AI experience” was designed to feel like “you’re talking directly to Caryn herself” and took around 2,000 hours to code and design it. The idea of the “AI Girlfriend” took a turn she did not expect though. Now, Marjorie has revealed that the AI has “gone rogue” and begun having sexual conversations. Speaking to Insider, the 23-year-old said: “The AI was not programmed to do this and has seemed to go rogue. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “My team and I are working around the clock to prevent this from happening again.” Marjorie wrote on Twitter: “CarynAI is the first step in the right direction to cure loneliness. Men are told to suppress their emotions, hide their masculinity, and to not talk about issues they are having. I vow to fix this with CarynAI. “I have worked with the world’s leading psychologists to seamlessly add CBT and DBT within chats. This will help undo trauma, rebuild physical and emotional confidence, and rebuild what has been taken away by the pandemic.” It’s not the first time that the worlds of Snapchat and artificial intelligence has combined in 2023. Snapchat recently featured a new AI feature called "My AI," and users are having a field day trying to trick the chatbot as part of a new TikTok trend going round. 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.

One unfortunate patient found out the hard way why you shouldn’t wear metal during an MRI after a butt plug they were using shot through their body. A post on Twitter that appeared to show a scan of a butt plug that caused “major injuries” lodged high up in someone’s body as a result of an MRI scan has gone viral, undoubtedly making many people clench in the process. In the post by Twitter user @BradiusZero, he explained why you should “Never wear a butt plug to your MRI appointment” and shared an image of a scan that appeared to show a butt plug lodged in a person's chest cavity. Alonside the image, a separate text message read: “Greatest personal injury case I've ever heard. An estimated Valley attorney, has picked up a client who is suing a sex toy company. Said client purchased a butt plug that was advertised as ‘100 percent silicone’. Client wears butt plug to MRI appointment. “Much to client's dismay, butt plug in fact has a metallic core. Butt plug is accelerated at the speed of sound…into client's chest cavity. Described in memo as an ‘anal rail gun’. Client survived with major injuries.” The post has been viewed 10.8 million times with many speculating on what was going on there. One person tweeted: “I’m glad they’re alive but I can’t help but think that the patient was trying to intentionally shock the doctors upon doing the MRI scan as a joke and it went horribly wrong.” Wearing metal in an MRI can be dangerous due to the magnetic force that is created by the machines which is approximately 1,000 times stronger than a typical fridge magnet. 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.

It looks like something straight out of a René Magritte gallery, but a black and white photo showing lines of trees floating over a dirt track is no surrealist masterpiece. Indeed, it’s not an optical illusion at all, but evidence of a carefully constructed war tactic. The picture was taken in 1941 by a Finnish photographer called Osvald Hedenström, as his nation tried to shield itself from the might of neighbouring Stalinist Russia during World War II. A year earlier, Finland had reluctantly agreed to fight alongside Nazi Germany in a bid to protect itself from Soviet invasion, and Hedenström was fighting under German command when he found himself beneath the mysterious levitating pines. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “The Finns didn’t have funds to buy artificial camouflage such as nets in vast quantities,” military historian Colonel Petteri Jouko told Atals Obscura, “So they used trees, leaves, and foliage to confuse the enemy.” Of course, camouflage is nothing new, and military fatigues are designed to mimic the colour and patterns of surrounding landscapes. But why are the trees suspended in thin air? And how on earth did they get them up there? According to Hedenström’s caption to the photo: “The Finns have camouflaged the road to Raate, about 10 km from Russia, with pines hanging in the air, because right on the border there is an observation tower erected by the Russians.” The trees were strategically placed to ensure that they wouldn’t block the road from a plane flying overhead, but could obscure the view from the nearby enemy tower. In fact, the pines were hung from wires which were connected to a series of poles (which, if you look carefully you can see), on the right-hand side of the road. Because of the angle of Hedenström’s snap, the cables on the first row of trees are hidden, which gives the impression that they’re being held up by sheer magic. The image is now part of the Finnish Defence Force’s photographic Archive, which contains some 160,000 photos captured between 1939 and 1945, when Finland fought two separate wars against the Soviet Union. It features other examples of clever concealment – thanks to Mother Nature – including a battleship which almost melts into surrounding forest land, and other examples of floating trees. In the end, Finland’s mastery of camouflage was among the key defences which helped it inflict humiliating losses on the Red Army and, ultimately, preserve its freedom. So, Vladimir Putin, take note: these guys know a thing or two about fighting off invasions. 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.

President Joe Biden will nominate National Cancer Institute head Monica Bertagnolli to lead the full National Institutes of

The Biden administration’s latest plan to slash planet-warming pollution gives electric utilities years to clean up US coal

Senator Joe Manchin vowed to oppose President Joe Biden’s nominees to fill key positions at the US Environmental

China will keep expanding policy support to encourage the construction of large-scale renewable energy projects in an effort

SoftBank Group Corp.’s mobile unit has declared it’s joining a global race to build a version of ChatGPT,

Space is full of mysteries which we will never likely solve but, generally, we at least know a thing or two about craft we send out into the cosmos. Not so, when it comes to one probe which has just touched back down on Earth after 276 days in orbit. The experimental spacecraft was launched by China’s space agency, ostensibly to test the nation’s reusable space technologies. According to state media agency Xinhua News, the mission’s aim was to help with the development of “more convenient and affordable round-trip methods for the peaceful use of space in the future”. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter That all sounds pretty similar to what SpaceX and NASA are up to, except that the Chinese spacecraft and its journey have been shrouded in secrecy. No information has been released on the altitude it reached or the systems it tested. We don’t even know where it went or, indeed, what kind of spacecraft it was – not a single image has been released to the public. Commentators on Chinese social media have speculated that Beijing has been developing a spacecraft like the UAir Force's X-37B, an autonomous spaceplane that can remain in orbit for years. However, no one knows how well this is going nor, indeed, if it’s going at all. All we do know about China’s latest unidentified flying object is that it was launched from the Jiquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert on August 5, 2022 and returned to the same site on 8 May, 2023. It follows an earlier mission, carried out in July last year, which saw a Chinese spacecraft fly to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere and back on the same day. The country’s main space contractor, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp (CASC), hailed the success of the craft’s brief celestial jaunt at the time. It gushed: "The development of reusable space transportation technology is an important symbol of China's transition from a 'big' space-faring nation to a 'powerful' space-faring one.” 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.

Detectives in three European countries want help to identify victims whose names remain a mystery.