The biggest oil producer in the United Arab Emirates awarded contracts worth almost $17 billion to develop an

Nintendo 3DS and Wii U will both be offline online by April 2024.

'Hitman: Blood Money - Reprisal' is coming to mobile and Nintendo Switch.

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Eager to scrap its Rust Belt reputation, a new US Midwest coalition is seeking $1 billion in federal

For centuries we’ve been told that the Moon is made of cheese but now, it turns out, the Earth is more like butter. Or, at least, its inner core is. A new study led by experts at the University of Texas (UT) and collaborators in China found that iron atoms at the very centre of our world move around much more than previously thought, and the implications could be huge. Scientists have long sought to dissect the insides of our planet but it isn’t easy, given that we have no way of directly exploring its core. The deepest hole humans have ever dug – branded the "entrance to hell" – extended an impressive 12,263m (40,230ft) down, but even that doesn’t come close to breaking through the crust to the layers beneath. Still, thanks to techniques like seismic tomography – which analyses how waves of energy travel through different materials during earthquakes – we’ve been able to map out the world’s interior. Now, researchers have used lab experiments and AI algorithms to shed a striking new light on the heart of the planet. "Seismologists have found that the centre of the Earth, called the inner core, is surprisingly soft, kind of like how butter is soft in your kitchen," Youjun Zhang, a Sichuan University professor who co-led the investigation, said in a statement shared with Phys.org. "The big discovery that we've found is that solid iron becomes surprisingly soft deep inside the Earth because its atoms can move much more than we ever imagined. This increased movement makes the inner core less rigid, weaker against shear forces." The findings are significant because they could help explain the role that the inner core plays in generating the world’s magnetic field. They could also help us understand a number of the inner core’s key properties, which have long flummoxed experts. "Now, we know about the fundamental mechanism that will help us with understanding the dynamic processes and evolution of the Earth's inner core," Jung-Fu Lin, one of the study's lead authors, explained. Given that it is impossible for scientists to directly extract specimens from the inner core, Lin and his colleagues recreated it in miniature. They took a small iron plate, shot it with a fast-moving projectile, and collected the resulting temperature, pressure and velocity data, which they then fed into an AI computer model. Using this machine learning system, they were able to scale up the sample iron atoms configuration to mimic the atomic environment within the inner core. At this beefed-up scale, the researchers observed groups of atoms moving about while still maintaining their overall structure. Inner Core iron atom motion model University of Texas This movement could explain why seismic measurements of the inner core reveal an environment that's softer and more malleable than would be expected at such pressures, Prof Zhang explained. Around half of the energy that goes into generating the Earth's magnetic field can be attributed to the inner core, with the rest coming from the outer core, according to the UT team. Thanks to Zhang, Lin and their colleagues, we now have a clearer understanding of the inner core’s machinations at an atomic level, which could help inform how energy and heat are generated at the heart of the planet. This could also shed light on how the inner and outer core work together to generate the Earth’s magnetic field – a key ingredient in making a planet habitable. 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.

The makers of the latest in the stealth action series have put Arabic front and centre of the project.

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Facebook users have shared images of cartoon characters wielding weapons, naked celebrities, and child soldiers – all created using the app’s new AI-generated sticker feature. Parent company Meta unveiled the new feature last week, allowing Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Instagram users to generate stickers with artificial intelligence by writing prompts. “I don’t think anyone involved has thought anything through,” 3D artist and illustrator Pier-Olivier Desbiens wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, who used the tool to create stickers with the prompts ‘Waluigi rifle’, ‘child soldier’, ‘Karl Marx large breasts’ and ‘Trudeau buttocks’. “We really do live in the stupidest future imaginable,” he wrote. Another user shared an AI-generated sticker of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones kissing a dog. “It’s completely unhinged,” they wrote. The Independent has reached out to Meta for comment. The new AI stickers are currently only available to a limited number of English-language users, with Meta yet to confirm whether a wider roll out is planned. “Using technology from Llama 2 and our foundational model for image generation called Emu, our AI tool turns your text prompts into multiple unique, high-quality stickers in seconds,” Meta announced in a blog post last week. “This new feature... provides infinitely more options to convey how you’re feeling at any moment.” Meta claims that billions of stickers are sent by Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp users each month, having first introduced the feature in 2013. Other AI-generated image tools, such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, have limits in place to prevent misuse. Users are unable to generate images featuring violent content or real people, though other generative AI platforms exist that do not place limitations on the ways content can be generated. In its blog post announcing the new feature, Meta noted that there was a chance that AI tools could be misused, which is why their introduction is being done on a “step by step” basis. “In keeping with our commitment to responsible AI, we also stress test our products to improve safety performance and regularly collaborate with policymakers, experts in academia and civil society, and others in our industry to advance the responsible use of this technology,” the post stated. “We’ll continue to iterate on and improve these features as the technologies evolve and we see how people use them in their daily lives.” Read More Pixel 8: Google unveils ‘AI-centred’ iPhone rival Facebook and Instagram users face monthly fee for ad-free version Zuckerberg says Metaverse can bring back the dead – virtually Meta just took a step towards its dream of the metaverse

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(Reuters) -Belgian officials are looking into risks around the presence of China's Alibaba Group Holding at a cargo airport in

The company is burning through cash–it sold trucks at an average loss of $33,000 in the second quarter.