Entertainment
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Disney Emerges Victorious After Intense BattleDisney has emerged triumphant in a boardroom clash against critics who had accused the media conglomerate of mishandling its streaming strategy and losing its innovative edge.04 April 2024Read More...
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Powerball Jackpot Reaches $975 Million Following Another Drawing Without a Big WinnerThe Powerball jackpot has surged to an estimated $975 million as no one matched the six numbers drawn on Saturday night, extending a nearly three-month period without a significant01 April 2024Read More...
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Beyoncé: Oklahoma Radio Station Reverses Decision on Country Song After Viral Backlash Over Racism AllegationAfter a fan requested a Beyoncé song on Oklahoma's KYKC radio station and was denied, citing the station's focus on country music, the situation quickly escalated.15 February 2024Read More...
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Karolina Shiino: Miss Japan Steps Down Following Affair ScandalKarolina Shiino, the Ukraine-born winner of the Miss Japan beauty pageant, has relinquished her crown after a tabloid report exposed her affair with a married man.06 February 2024Read More...
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Heart and Cheap Trick Unite for Royal Flush Tour Across North AmericaLegendary rock band Heart, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, is gearing up for an epic Royal Flush tour alongside special guests Cheap Trick. The extensive 52-city tour is29 January 2024Read More...
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Surge in American Tourism Sets Records: Switzerland Welcomes Highest Number of US Visitors in Decades
The number of American tourists staying overnight in Switzerland surged by 20% between January and October 2023 compared to the pre-pandemic year of 2019, according to RTS01 January 2024Read More... -
As Thanksgiving Approaches, Travelers Flood Roads and Airports Once AgainMillions of Americans have swarmed into airports and hit the highways on Wednesday as Thanksgiving Day approaches, marking the busiest travel day since the pandemic virtually halted the22 November 2023Read More...
Fashion
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Costco Offers Affordable Version of Anthropologie Mirror, Sparking Social Media BuzzCostco shoppers are buzzing about a floor mirror that closely resembles a luxury mirror from Anthropologie but comes with a significantly lower price tag. The Anthropologie Luisa Mirror, pricedRead More...
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City Council Commemorates Hispanic Heritage MonthThis year, the Councilors acknowledged Hispanic leaders in Boston for their hard work, leadership and commitment to their communities. Recipients were awarded the Pilares de la HispanidadRead More...
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Hermès Resolves Patent Dispute with Skechers over Shoe Soles in New YorkHermès International SCA HRMS.PA, the French luxury fashion house, has settled a lawsuit brought by Skechers USA Inc SKX.N regarding alleged patent infringementRead More...
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Diamond Prices Firm After Supply DeclinesDiamond trading was seasonally slow in December as the industry’s focus shifted to retail and as diamantaires took their end-of-year break. Sentiment received a boost from strong holidayRead More...
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Protesters target Polanski film at cinemas in BrusselsFeminist activists defaced cinemas in Brussels with angry condemnations of director Roman Polanski's latest film overnight on Tuesday and Wednesday.Read More...
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London Latino heartlands struggle for survivalWhenever London's South Americans go looking for a job, a helping hand, the flavours of home or a party with their compatriots, they head to the Latino indoor marketRead More...
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Tutankhamun sculpture’s London auction sparks Egyptian outcryA 3,000-year-old head sculpture of an eternally-young Tutankhamun — the Egyptian pharaoh known as King Tut — goes under the hammer this week in London despite an outcry from Cairo.Read More...
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Four top British authors in novel anti-Brexit European crusadeKen Follett, Lee Child, Kate Mosse and Jojo Moyes, four heavyweights of British literature, are launching a "Friendship Tour" of Europe to represent the 48 percent whoRead More...
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Zombies and women: London Men's Fashion Week wraps upModels in zombie make-up and a growing number of women on the catwalks were among the eye-catching features of Men's Fashion Week, which wrapped up inRead More...
Most Read
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- 34th Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, Millersville University of Pennsylvania
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- Game over? Computer beats human champ in strategy challenge
Technology
Days ahead of the Iowa Caucuses vote, Rhiannon Payne was on the Bumble dating app -- not to find a partner but to press her case for her candidate, Elizabeth Warren.
SpaceX announced a new partnership Monday to send four tourists deeper into orbit than any private citizen before them, in a mission that could take place by 2022
An 18-year-old man died in Belgium of respiratory failure that authorities on Thursday (Nov 14) attributed to vaping and a mixture of harmful products in an e-cigarette.
Apple went on the offensive against Brussels in an EU court on Tuesday, fighting the European Commission's landmark order that the iPhone-maker reimburse Ireland 13 billion euros
The European Medicines Agency, which is moving from Britain to Amsterdam because of Brexit, on Wednesday lost a court battle to cancel the lease on its London
Charles Darwin, Mr. Evolution himself, didn't know what to make of the fossils he saw in Patagonia so he sent them to his friend, the renowned paleontologist Richard Owen.
Owen was stumped too. Little wonder.
"The bones looked different from anything he knew," said Michael Hofreiter, senior author of a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications that finally situates in the tree of life what Darwin called the "strangest animal ever discovered".
"Imagine a camel without a hump, with feet like a slender rhino, and a head shaped like a saiga antelope," Hofreiter, a professor at the University of Potsdam, told AFP.
Macrauchenia patachonica -- literally, "long-necked llama" -- also had a long rubbery snout and with its nostrils high on the skull just above its eyes.
Analysis of a bear bone found in an Irish cave has provided evidence of human existence in Ireland 2,500 years earlier than previously thought, academics announced Sunday.
For decades, the earliest evidence of human life in Ireland dated from 8,000 BC.
But radiocarbon dating of a bear's knee bone indicated it had been butchered by a human in about 10,500 BC -- some 12,500 years ago and far earlier than the previous date.
"This find adds a new chapter to the human history of Ireland," said Marion Dowd, an archaeologist at the Institute of Technology Sligo who made the discovery along with Ruth Carden, a research associate with the National Museum of Ireland.
The knee bone, which is marked by cuts from a sharp tool, was one of thousands of bones first found in 1903 in a cave in County Clare on the west coast of Ireland.
It was stored in the National Museum of Ireland since the 1920s, until Carden and Dowd re-examined it and applied for funding to have it radiocarbon dated -- a technique developed in the 1940s -- by Queen's University Belfast.
The team sent a second sample to the University of Oxford to double-check the result. Both tests indicated the bear had been cut up by a human about 12,500 years ago.
The new date means there was human activity in Ireland in the Stone Age or Palaeolithic period, whereas previously, scientists only had evidence of humans in Ireland in the later Mesolithic period.
"Archaeologists have been searching for the Irish Palaeolithic since the 19th century, and now, finally, the first piece of the jigsaw has been revealed," Dowd said.
Three experts further confirmed that the cut marks on the bone had been made when the bone was fresh, confirming they dated from the same time as the bone.
The results were revealed in a paper published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
As well as pushing back the date of human history in Ireland, the find may have important implications for zoology, as scientists have not previously considered that humans could have influenced extinctions of species in Ireland so long ago.
"From a zoological point of view, this is very exciting," Carden said. "This paper should generate a lot of discussion within the zoological research world and it's time to start thinking outside the box? or even dismantling it entirely!"
The National Museum of Ireland noted that approximately two million more specimens are held in its collections and could reveal more secrets.
In a milestone for artificial intelligence, a computer has beaten a human champion at a strategy game that requires "intuition" rather than brute processing power to prevail, its makers said Wednesday.
Dubbed AlphaGo, the system honed its own skills through a process of trial and error, playing millions of games against itself until it was battle-ready, and surprised even its creators with its prowess.
"AlphaGo won five-nil, and it was stronger than perhaps we were expecting," said Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind, a British artificial intelligence (AI) company.
A computer defeating a professional human player at the 3,000-year-old Chinese board game known as Go, was thought to be about a decade off.
The clean-sweep victory over three-time European Go champion Fan Hui "signifies a major step forward in one of the great challenges in the development of artificial intelligence -- that of game-playing," the British Go Association said in a statement.
The two-player game is described as perhaps the most complex ever designed, with more configurations possible than there are atoms in the Universe, Hassabis says.
Players take turns placing stones on a board, trying to surround and capture the opponent's stones, with the aim of controlling more than 50 percent of the board.
There are hundreds of places where a player can place the first stone, black or white, with hundreds of ways in which the opponent can respond to each of these moves and hundreds of possible responses to each of those in turn.
"But as simple as the rules are, Go is a game of profound complexity. There are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible positions," Hassabis explained in a blog.
Such a search base is "too enormous and too vast for brute force approaches to have any chance," added his colleague David Silver, who co-authored the paper in the science journal Nature.
This Christmas, as consumers around the world hope Santa will give them a smartphone, TV or tablet computer, few people know that the lowly carrot inspired the liquid crystals at the core of such hi-tech gadgets.
And the world's leading supplier of liquid crystals is a German company, the world's oldest chemicals and pharmaceuticals maker, Merck KGaA in the western city of Darmstadt.
Merck claims it produces "more than 60 percent" of all liquid crystals sold worldwide, far ahead of Japanese rivals JNC and DIC and emerging competitors from China.
"The millions of people who own a smartphone, a flat-screen television or a computer have no idea that these contain liquid crystals," said Horst Stegemeyer, scientist and author of several books on the subject.
"And around 80 percent of all fundamental research on liquid crystals is still done at Merck", which also pioneered most of the innovations in the field, Stegemeyer told AFP.
The applications for liquid crystals include, say, the security holograms on banknotes, but by far the biggest are the high-definition screens that dominate today's consumer electronics industry.
It was the Austrian botanist Friedrich Reinitzer and the German physicist Otto Lehmann who discovered liquid crystals in 1888 when they were experimenting with the natural substances found in carrots and came across a strange phenomenon: some of the substances appeared to have not just one, but two different melting points.
At the first melting point, the substance melted into a cloudy liquid, and at the second the cloudiness suddenly disappeared, giving way to a clear transparent liquid, a new state of matter that was termed "liquid crystal".
- 'What to do with it?' -
The plague wiped out millions of people beginning in the sixth century and through medieval times, but a study Thursday suggests the illness may have existed thousands of years earlier.
A DNA analysis of human teeth from Europe and Asia showed the bacterium that causes the plague was detectable some 3,000 years earlier than previously documented.
The study in the journal Cell suggests that this bacterium, known as Yersinia pestis, was common, though it may have caused a slightly different but still devastating kind of illness.
"We found that the Y. pestis lineage originated and was widespread much earlier than previously thought, and we narrowed the time window as to when it developed," said senior study author Eske Willerslev of the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen.
"This study changes our view of when and how plague influenced human populations and opens new avenues for studying the evolution of diseases."
The bacterium is blamed for three massive outbreaks, beginning with the Justinian Plague which started in 541 AD and killed more than 25 million people over the next two centuries.
After that came the Black Death which began in China in 1334 and spread along the great trade routes to Europe where it killed around half the population.
The Third Pandemic, also known as the Modern Plague, emerged in China in the 1850s and killed some 10 million people.
Until now, scientists did not have direct molecular evidence for this bacterium from skeletal material older than 1,500 years.
The new evidence suggests that the plague "may have been responsible for major population declines believed to have occurred in the late 4th and early 3rd millennium BC," said a statement from the University of Cambridge.