List of All Articles with Tag 'tech'

By Graham Keeley and Tim Hepher MADRID (Reuters) -Spanish company PLD Space launched its recoverable Miura-1 rocket early on Saturday

Since the 1960s, one scholar has dedicated his career to arguing that Jesus was not a living man, but in fact a mushroom. John Marco Allegro was one of the first scholars permitted to decipher the ancient documents now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, that were discovered in 1947 in the Judean Desert. They contained the oldest surviving versions of books that would later be incorporated into the biblical canon. Allegro and his colleagues were the first to go about making sense of the documents, as they were obviously discovered untranslated, eventually publishing the texts after hard work and disagreements. Allegro then went on to write two more books on the subject in 1958, The Dead Sea Scrolls and The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which remain extremely influential. Then in 1970 and again in 1979, Allegro published two more books. These expanded on his idea that Christianity was a cover for a secret cryptic sex cult generated by people under the influence of Amanita muscaria, more commonly known as Fly agaric. And that Jesus was a metaphor for the fungus and its influences. Using etymology, Allegro argued that early Christianity was created by an Essene cult that recorded their practices through the texts of the New Testament. And that evangelists misunderstood the text's true meaning when they transcribed it. There was never a man called Jesus, only a cult that used mushrooms to have hallucinations. He also argued that the God of the Old Testament was "a mighty penis in the heavens who in a thunderous climax of the storm ejaculated semen upon the furrows of Mother Earth." Allegro's views were not well received, with some believing he created the argument as revenge against Christian critics who dismissed his earlier translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, whilst some believed he just ran away with the wrong idea. 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.

Planet-like objects in the Orion Nebula have been revealed for the first time in images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The Orion Nebula, one of the brightest nebulae in the night sky, has long presented astronomers with an abundance of celestial objects to study. It is identifiable as the sword in the Orion constellation and is located 1,300 light-years from Earth. Astronomers managed to discover unprecedented details by capturing mosaics of the Orion Nebula in short and long wavelengths of light. Whilst searching for low-mass objects, astronomers Samuel G. Pearson - a European Space Agency research fellow at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands - and Mark J. McCaughrean - senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency - came across something they had never before seen. Their discovery appears to defy some fundamental astronomical theories: pairs of planet-like objects with masses between 0.6 and 13 times the mass of Jupiter. They have been dubbed Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs. "Although some of them are more massive than the planet Jupiter, they will be roughly the same size and only slightly large," said Pearson. The astronomers found 40 pairs of JuMBOs, and although they exist in pairs, the objects are typically about 200 astronomical units apart, or 200 times the distance between Earth and the sun. This means it can take between 20,000 and 80,000 years for the objects to complete an orbit around each other. McCaughrean and Pearson have written two research papers based on their discoveries in the Orion Nebula. The preliminary findings are available on a preprint site called arXiv whilst the studies have been submitted to academic journals for publication. But many questions about JuMBOs remain. "Scientists have been working on theories and models of star and planet formation for decades, but none of them have ever predicted that we would find pairs of super low mass objects floating alone in space - and we're seeing lots of them," Pearson said. "The main that we learn for this is that there is something fundamentally wrong with either our understanding of planet formation, star formation, or both." 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.

MUMBAI (Reuters) -India has sent notices to social media platforms X, formerly known as Twitter, YouTube and Telegram asking them

An orcas diet consists of Chinook salmon and can eat up to two dozen fish a day - so why is it that the killer whales like to bully porpoises despite them not being part of their diet? That's the question which has left scientists scratching their heads, as the study published in Marine Mammal Science seeks to add further understanding to this subject. Around 78 cases of orcas targeting porpoises were noted by researchers from the UK, USA and Canada. It was said to be happening in the Salish Sea (located in the Canadian province of British Columbia and the U.S. state of Washington). Some of the orcas' bullying tactics include pushing the porpoise along with their nose, holding the porpoise in their mouth, balancing the porpoise above water, slapping the porpoise with their tail, and raking the porpoise with their teeth, according to Science Alert. Killer whales also use porpoises as playthings as they catch them before letting them and proceeding to chase them once more - and they even play toss them around in a 'pass the porpoise' game, say whale watchers. That's some textbook tormenting. Out of these sightings, 28 of them have ended in the harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) or a Dall's porpoise being suspected to have been killed, though there's no record of the porpoises being eaten by the orcas. In terms of size, the porpoise is said to be fairly small being a similar size to a Chinook salmon - a large fish species that can grow up to 1.5 meters (5 feet). There are three theories that have been considered by the experts. Firstly, the bullying is all about creating coordination, and cohesion within the group of orcas, or alternatively that the orcas do this as a form of hunting practice. The final theory is that orcas could be trying to look after weak porpoises as if they were their own aka 'displaced epimeletic behaviour.' This mismothering behaviour – also known as 'displaced epimeletic behaviour' to scientists – might be due to their limited opportunities to look after youngsters as the stat shows. "Our research has shown that due to malnutrition, nearly 70 per cent of Southern Resident killer whale pregnancies have resulted in miscarriages or calves that died right away after birth." It seems that orcas are not the only bullies of the seas, as smaller dolphins e.g. bottlenose have similarly been seen harassing and killing for no clear reason. 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.

An anonymous hacker is claiming to be selling “millions” of genetic profiles cobbled together from hijacked 23andMe customer

By Raphael Satter WASHINGTON A hacker is advertising millions of "pieces of data" stolen from the family genetics

They are playing at home which could be an advantage but also a pressure point, writes Suresh Menon.

By Joey Roulette WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Amazon's first pair of prototype satellites for its planned Kuiper internet network were launched into

(Reuters) -Investigators at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission's enforcement division have concluded that the co-founder of Voyager Digital broke

Spotify is preparing to launch a new “Supremium” tier, with extra features for a higher price, according to new rumours. The membership will cost $19.99 – twice the current price – and offer a variety of new features. Chief among them is expected to be lossless audio, which is already offered for free on rival Apple Music. But the extra tier will also offer advanced playlist mixing tools that allow people to choose songs by tempo, feel, activity and more. It will have new listening stats, the inclusion of audiobook listening and AI playlist generation tools, according to technology expert Chris Messina, who found mentions of the update within Spotify. Spotify has focused heavily on artificial intelligence tools in recent months. They have included the addition of an AI DJ that not only automatically selects songs but also introduces them, and AI-powered translation that allows people to listen to podcasts in other languages but with realistic-sounding voices. Spotify’s HiFi tier has been in the works for years. The company first announced it at the beginning of 2021, but it has not arrived since, and there have been rumours about it ever since. The new leaks suggest that the upgrade will bring 24-bit lossless audio. That bitrate matches the high-quality offering on other music streaming services, such as Apple Music. A number of streaming services have launched HiFi or lossless tiers in recent months, even as most people listen with Bluetooth headphones that are unable to actually play music at high enough quality. Amazon has a lossless plan that costs $14.99 per month, for instance, and Tidal offers its HiFi plan at $19.99. It is unclear whether Spotify will offer any more revenue to artists from the extra cost of the higher-priced lossless plan. The company has received sustained criticism for the relatively small fees it pays to musicians when their music is streamed. The leaked code is the latest suggestion that Spotify will use the “Supremium” branding for its higher-priced tier. Previously, it had called it “HiFi”, and a survey sent to subscribers last year referred to it as “Platinum”. Read More Spotify clarifies position on whether it will ban AI-powered music Spotify makes voice clones of podcasters and uses them to speak other languages Slack has stopped working

(Reuters) -Several U.S. regulators have requested Kazakhstan-based Freedom Holding for information, a company spokesperson told Reuters on Friday, adding that