List of All Articles with Tag 'tech'

By Hannah Lang The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission should have approved an application from Grayscale Investments to

After a live worm was found wriggling around in an Australian woman’s brain recently, you could be forgiven for thanking your lucky stars you don’t have a similar parasite living inside you. But it turns out the chances are much more likely than you might think. More than 1 billion people are thought to have threadworms, a type of invertebrate also known as the pinworm, as per a 2019 study by NCBI. Threadworms grow to around 1cm in length and are specific to human hosts. They infect the small intestine, make your bottom feel itchy and can be passed from person to person. They are a common type of infection in the UK, particularly in children under the age of 10. Threadworms are white and look like small pieces of thread – they are usually spotted in people’s poo. According to the NHS website, they can make people irritable and cause them to wake up at night. When things get really bad, they can cause weight loss. The woman in Australia’s worm, by contrast, was found in her brain, and surgeons needed to get it out manually. “Everyone [in] that operating theatre got the shock of their life when [the surgeon] took some forceps to pick up an abnormality and the abnormality turned out to be a wriggling, live 8cm light red worm," said infectious diseases doctor Sanjaya Senanayake, according to the BBC. If you get threadworms, you won’t need to have brain surgery, fortunately. You can buy medicine (mebendazole) for threadworms from pharmacies, according to NHS online. This is usually a chewable tablet or liquid you swallow. The medicine kills the threadworms, but it does not kill the eggs. Eggs can live for up to 2 weeks outside the body. There are other types of worms you can catch, however. Tapeworms, roundworms and hookworms are all relatively common parasites that you can catch from eating raw or undercooked meat. They can also be caught from inadvertently touching infected poo. Roundworms look more like earthworms, tapeworms are long, pale yellow and flat and hookworms, somewhat horrifically, cause a red, worm-shaped rash beneath the skin. Vincent Ho, associate professor and clinical academic gastroenterologist at Western Sydney University in Australia, said that there are four things you can do to avoid these nasty little critters. “Avoid undercooked or raw pork. Freezing meat first may reduce risks (though home freezers may not get cold enough) and it must be cooked to a high internal temperature. Avoid pork if you are travelling in places with poor sanitation,” he said in an article for The Conversation. “Avoid jumping or diving into warm fresh bodies of water, especially if they are known to carry Naegleria fowleri. Although only a handful of cases are reported each year, you should assume it’s present. “Practise good hand hygiene to reduce the risk of rare and common infections. That means washing hands thoroughly and often, using soap, scrubbing for at least 20 seconds, rinsing and drying well. Clip and clean under fingernails regularly. “To avoid soil-borne parasites, wear shoes outside, especially in rural and remote regions, wash shoes and leave them outside.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

ChatGPT has gone offline, its creators have said. The artificially intelligent chatbot is experiencing a “major outage”, according to OpenAI, the company behind the system. It said that ChatGPT was down on both web and mobile, but that it had identified the issue and was working to fix it. Some users reported seeing a message indicating they had been “blocked” from accessing the tool. The message from web services company Cloudflare told people they were unable to access OpenAI’s site for using ChatGPT. That led many to fear that they had been specifically and personally blocked from using the service. But the issue in fact appeared to be a technical one, and the “block” message will presumably stop showing once OpenAIfixed the issue. For others, the system simply would not load properly, and refused to answer questions. “Something went wrong,” a message read, pointing users to its help site. ChatGPT has stayed largely stable since it was launched. The company says it has been up for 99.88 per cent of the last 90 days, with a few major outages that were quickly fixed. That is despite immense popularity. When it was launched at the end of November, it quickly became the fastest-growing website in the history of the internet, and it has continued to see significant daily usage. The outage came just a day after OpenAI launched an enterprise version of ChatGPT, aimed at addressing companies’ concerns about using its technology in their businesses. The new ChatGPT Enterprise includes better security and privacy, unlimited access and more powerful AI tools – though it comes at a price, which OpenAI says will depend on the company’s usage. Read More Google may soon roll out AI ‘personal life coach’ Why a scientistic breakthrough could create limitless energy and floating trains The powerful technology hidden in every iPhone – and all around you

More than a half-dozen leading tech CEOs will be among those attending a highly anticipated artificial intelligence event hosted by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer next month, according to the senator's office.

BEIJING China's gaming regulator on Tuesday granted publishing license to 58 imported online games, including titles belonging to

Scientists are shocked having found a shark normally found deep in the Arctic, 4,000 miles away in the warm Caribbean. According to findings published in the Marine Biology journal, the Greenland shark turned up off the coast of Belize in Central America while a team of researchers were out on a boat catching and tagging tiger sharks. Devanshi Kasana, a PhD student at Florida International University, was part of the crew working with local fishermen at the time when she realised that a particular fish on the end of their fishing lines looked like a "rather sluggish creature". She added: "At first, I was sure it was something else, like a six-gill shark that are well known from deep waters off coral reefs. I knew it was something unusual and so did the fishers, who hadn’t ever seen anything quite like it in all their combined years of fishing.” Kasana took a photo of the animal and sent it to her advisor, who said it appeared to be a Greenland shark, which was soon confirmed by experts on the specific species. Another expert thought it might be a hybrid between a Greenland and a Pacific sleeper shark. Omar Faux, a fisherman on the boat, said: "I am always excited to set my deep water line because I know there is stuff down there that we haven’t seen yet in Belize, but I never thought I would be catching a Greenland shark." This is the first time that the large shark has been seen in the western Caribbean, off the world's second-largest coral reef, according to the university. The half-blind Greenland shark is rarely seen and is the longest-living vertebrae animal known, with some age estimates between 250 and 500 years old. Weird... Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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 Hannah Lang The U.S. District of Columbia Court of Appeals will soon rule on whether the Securities

A man was reportedly rushed to hospital when a passionate kiss with his girlfriend resulted in a painful rupture in his ear. As per Hangzhou TV, the man and his girlfriend were locking lips for ten minutes on Chinese Valentine's Day (22 August) on the idyllic West Lake in China’s eastern Zhejiang province. It was claimed that the man's left ear suddenly became painful and he started to experience a bubbling sound, making it difficult for him to hear. The couple immediately visited the hospital where he was told his eardrum was perforated. Luckily, the man was prescribed antibiotics and was told it would take approximately two months to heal. In more serious cases, surgery may be required. According to the publication, medical professionals said passionate kissing can lead to a rapid change in air pressure inside the ear. While you may find that scenario baffling, one woman's seemingly innocent outfit soon turned into an incredibly unfortunate disaster. TikToker Sam (@imtoooldtobeonthis) ended up in the hospital after her 'wedgie' caused her sepsis. "That night, I noticed that I had a large bump where the chafing had occurred, and as time went on, it started becoming more painful. The pain was isolated to one sport and it felt like a throbbing, stabbing pain," she told Buzzfeed. Sam was rushed to the emergency room when doctors realised it was caused by developing cellulitis - a bacterial skin infection that can become deadly if left untreated. "I was shivering, very breathless, could not walk and had extreme body aches," Sam said. "They admitted me to the ICU, and that’s when I realized this was a bit more serious than I had anticipated." Fortunately, after four days of surgery and being treated, Sam was able to make a full recovery. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

A worm has been found living inside a woman’s brain, in a horror-movie-style world first. Doctors in Canberra, Australia, were left stunned after they pulled the 8cm (3in) parasite from the patient’s damaged frontal lobe tissue during surgery last year. "Everyone [in] that operating theatre got the shock of their life when [the surgeon] took some forceps to pick up an abnormality and the abnormality turned out to be a wriggling, live 8cm light red worm," said infectious diseases doctor Sanjaya Senanayake, according to the BBC. "Even if you take away the yuck factor, this is a new infection never documented before in a human being." Senanayake and his colleagues believe the parasite could have been in there for up to two months. The patient, a 64-year-old woman from New South Wales, was first admitted to her local hospital in late January 2021 after suffering three weeks of abdominal pain and diarrhoea, followed by a constant dry cough, fever and night sweats, The Guardian reports. By 2022, her symptoms extended to forgetfulness and depression, and she was referred to Canberra Hospital, where an MRI scan of her brain revealed “abnormalities” that required surgery. “The neurosurgeon certainly didn’t go in there thinking they would find a wriggling worm,” Senanayake told the paper. “Neurosurgeons regularly deal with infections in the brain, but this was a once-in-a-career finding. No one was expecting to find that.” The team at the hospital sent the worm to an experienced parasite researcher who identified it as an Ophidascaris robertsi. This type of roundworm is commonly found in carpet pythons – non-venomous snakes that are ubiquitous across much of Australia. Writing in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, Mehrab Hossain, a parasitologist, said she suspected that the patient became an "accidental host" to the worm after cooking with foraged plants. The 64-year-old was known to have often collected native grasses from around her lakeside home, Senanayake told The Guardian. He and his co-workers have concluded that the woman was probably infected after a python shed eggs from the parasite via its faeces into the grass. By touching the plants, she may then have transferred the eggs into her own food or kitchen utensils. Fortunately, the unlucky and unique patient is said to be making a good recovery. However, Senanayake told the BBC that her case should serve as an important warning to society more broadly. "It just shows as a human population burgeons, we move closer and encroach on animal habitats. This is an issue we see again and again, whether it's Nipah virus that's gone from wild bats to domestic pigs and then into people, whether its a coronavirus like Sars or Mers that has jumped from bats into possibly a secondary animal and then into humans,” he said. "Even though Covid is now slowly petering away, it is really important for epidemiologists… and governments to make sure they've got good infectious diseases surveillance around." Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

Google will likely be off the hook for paying damages to 21 million users who claim in an

Social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, is down for thousands of users in the U.S. on

By Stephen Nellis Intel on Monday said a new data center chip coming out next year will handle