LONDON (Reuters) -YouTube said on Tuesday it had blocked Russell Brand from making money from his online channel after the

Scientists have finally found a “demon” subatomic particle that was predicted to exist nearly seven decades ago and speculated to play an important role in the behaviours of a range of metals and alloys, including superconductors. Physcist David Pines in 1956 theorised that electrons, which normally have a mass and negative electric charge, can under some conditions combine to form a composite “demon” particle that is massless, neutral and does not interact with light. These theorised interesting properties, however, made these particles elude detection – until now. After a nearly 70-year search for these subatomic entities, researchers, including those from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, have finally found signatures of Dr Pines’ “demon” particles in the metal strontium ruthenate. “Demons have been theoretically conjectured for a long time, but experimentalists never studied them. In fact, we weren’t even looking for it. But it turned out we were doing exactly the right thing, and we found it,” study co-author Peter Abbamonte said. Electrons – which are distributed in different energy bands within atoms – are known to lose their individuality in solids with electric interactions making the particles combine to form collective units. With some threshold energy, studies have also shown electrons can form composite particles called plasmons with a new charge and mass. However, the mass is so large that these plasmon particles cannot form with the kind of energies available at room temperature. Revelations on room-temperature semiconductors are considered to be one of the “holy grails” of physics. But Dr Pines theorised that if a solid has electrons in more than one energy band, as many metals do, their respective plasmons may combine in an out-of-phase pattern to form a new plasmon that is massless and neutral – a demon. Since these special particles are massless, he argued they can form with any energy and may exist at all temperatures – leading to speculation that the demons have important effects on the behaviour of some metals with multiple energy bands. “The vast majority of experiments are done with light and measure optical properties, but being electrically neutral means that demons don’t interact with light,” Dr Abbamonte explained. So a completely new experiment was needed to detect them. In the research, scientists were studying the compound strontium ruthenate as it is similar to high-temperature superconductors – a special kind of material where electrical resistance vanishes. For a survey of the metal’s electronic properties, they synthesised high-quality samples of the metal. They then applied a technique to study the metal that uses energy from electrons shot into the metal to directly observe the metal’s features, including plasmons that form. During their observation of the electron interactions, scientists found something unusual – an electronic mode with no mass. “At first, we had no idea what it was. Demons are not in the mainstream. The possibility came up early on, and we basically laughed it off. But, as we started ruling things out, we started to suspect that we had really found the demon,” Ali Husain, another author of the study, said. Researchers then sought to calculate how electrons are distributed across bands inside strontium ruthenate. Predictions by Dr Pines indicate there are specific conditions when “demons” are likely to form, and it remained unknown whether strontium ruthenate would have the particle. “We had to perform a microscopic calculation to clarify what was going on. When we did this, we found a particle consisting of two electron bands oscillating out-of-phase with nearly equal magnitude, just like Pines described,” found Edwin Huang, another author of the study. “Our study confirms a 67-year-old prediction and indicates that demons may be a pervasive feature of multiband metals,” scientists wrote in the study. Read More Superconductor breakthrough could represent ‘biggest physics discovery of a lifetime’ – but scientists urge caution LK-99: Excitement rises over possibly revolutionary ‘miracle material’ – but there is still no good reason to believe it exists Superconductivity: The technology that could change everything if we just knew how it worked ‘Vampire child’ with padlocked ankle unearthed in Polish ‘necropolis’ Two new kinds of mole discovered in mountains of Turkey Scientific discovery casts doubt on our understanding of human evolution

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 12, 2023--

A man who died after driving his car off a collapsed bridge was following Google Maps directions, according to a lawsuit. The family of Philip Paxson, who drowned on 30 September last year while driving home from his daughter’s ninth birthday party, is suing the technology giant for negligence, claiming that it had been informed of the collapse but failed to update its navigation system. Paxson, a medical device salesman and father of two, drove his Jeep Gladiator off the derelict bridge into Snow Creek in Hickory, North Carolina. He was driving through an unfamiliar neighbourhood when Google Maps directed him to cross a bridge that had collapsed nine years prior and was never repaired, a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Wake County Superior Court alleges. “Our girls ask how and why their daddy died, and I’m at a loss for words they can understand because, as an adult, I still can’t understand how those responsible for the GPS directions and the bridge could have acted with so little regard for human life," said his wife, Alicia Paxson. State troopers who found Paxson's body in his overturned and partially submerged truck had said there were no barriers or warning signs along the washed-out roadway. He had driven off an unguarded edge and crashed about six metres (20 feet) below, according to the lawsuit. The North Carolina State Patrol had said the bridge was not maintained by local or state officials, and the original developer’s company had dissolved. The lawsuit names several private property management companies that it claims are responsible for the bridge and the adjoining land. Multiple people had notified Google Maps about the collapse in the years leading up to Paxson's death and had urged the company to update its route information, according to the lawsuit. The Tuesday court filing includes email records from another Hickory resident who had used the map's “suggest and edit” feature in September 2020 to alert the company that it was directing drivers over the collapsed bridge. A November 2020 email confirmation from Google confirms the company received her report and was reviewing the suggested change, but the lawsuit claims Google took no further actions. A spokesperson for Google, which is headquartered in California but maintains a registered office in Raleigh, said: “We have the deepest sympathies for the Paxson family. Our goal is to provide accurate routing information in Maps and we are reviewing this lawsuit.” In a post on Facebook, Paxson’s mother-in-law wrote that it was dark and rainy on the night that he died. “He will be greatly missed by his family and friends,” she wrote. “It was a totally preventable accident. We are grieving his death.” Additional reporting from agencies Read More Google Maps prank sees school renamed 'Hell on Earth' Google’s powerful ‘Bard’ AI can now get into your email BBC reviews Russell Brand’s time at corporation as YouTube demonetises content Google announces huge breakthrough step in finding genes that cause disease

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Google has announced that its apps and services will now be “passwordless by default” in an effort to make all users switch to passkeys. The move is part of a broader consensus among the tech industry to ditch passwords, which have been around since the 1960s, and switch to a safer and more efficient format to verify a person’s identity. Passkeys combine a code with biometric information like a fingerprint or facial recognition, making them easier to remember and harder to be stolen. Google apps like YouTube, Search and Maps all support the new format after it was first introduced earlier this year, though take up has been slower than expected. The tech giant said the push to get users to adopt passkeys coincided with Cybersecurity Awareness Month, claiming that the new technology is faster and more secure. “They are 40 per cent faster than passwords – and rely on a type of cryptography that makes them more secure,” Google product managers Sriram Karra and Christiaan Brand wrote in a blog post explaining the move. “We’ll continue encouraging the industry to make the pivot to passkeys – making passwords a rarity, and eventually obsolete.” Google users who do not already use passkeys will receive a prompt to set one up the next time they sign into their account. Passkeys have already been enabled by other online platforms, including eBay and Uber, as the tech industry looks to completely transition away from traditional passwords. “We’ve seen great results from launching passkeys across our apps and encourage all users to adopt passkeys,” said Ramsin Betyyousef, a senior director of engineering at Uber. “Ultimately this is a win-win for Uber and Uber’s customers.” Google, which counts billions of users across all of its platforms, acknowledged that “new technologies take time to catch on”, and have therefore given people the option to temporarily opt out of passkeys and use passwords wherever possible. The company did not set a date for when passwords will be phased out entirely, but some security experts contend that their death is inevitable while hackers continue to exploit their vulnerability. Helping implement the transition is the FIDO (Fast Identity Online) Alliance, which has been working with Apple, Google, Microsoft and hundreds of tech companies to develop the new login standard. “The complete shift to a passwordless world will begin with consumers making it a natural part of their lives,” said Alex Simons, who heads Microsof’s Identity Program Management team. “By working together as a community across platforms, we can at last achieve this vision and make significant progress toward eliminating passwords.” Read More Pixel 8: Google unveils ‘AI-centred’ iPhone rival Google to trial AI in UK traffic light systems to reduce stop-and-go emissions Pixel 8: Google unveils DeepMind-powered iPhone rival China’s discovery of never-before-seen ore could propel battery technology

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The name “core” suggests something hard and fixed but, it turns out, the Earth’s core is leaking. That is, at least, according to a team of top scientists, who drew the conclusion after analysing 62-million-old Arctic rocks. Geochemists from the California Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution detected record concentrations of helium 3 (3He) and helium 4 (4He) isotopes in the rocks, which suggest a slow trickle up from the very heart of our planet. They believe there could be reserves of the elusive gas buried some 2,900km underground. Helium is a surprisingly rare element on the Earth’s surface and experts have yet to establish just how much of it remains trapped deep beneath our feet. However, the new discovery has provided them with a fresh insight into the most mysterious region of our world. Understanding the presence of these helium isotopes could illuminate key processes in the core, such as how the Earth generated its life-protecting magnetic field. Most helium in the universe dates back to the Big Bang which occurred 13.8 billion years ago. The Earth swallowed up some of this as an infant planet, but mostly burped it all away during its 4.6 billion-year-long formation, as Science Alert reports. This means that any traces of helium found in volcanic rock – such as the samples unearthed in the Arctic – are believed to come either from pockets of mantle that are yet to release their helium, or from a vast, slow-leaking reserve. Basaltic lavas on Canada's Baffin Island contain some of the world's highest ratios of 3He to 4He, which geologists believe indicates that the gas's presence is not to do with the atmosphere, but rather the sign of deeper terrestrial origins. Several years ago, geochemist Forrest Horton uncovered helium isotope ratios of up to 50 times that of atmospheric levels in samples collected from Baffin's lava fields. This unusual concentration was also detected in lavas collected from Iceland. Horton and his team wondered if the helium in both samples may have derived from an ancient reservoir deep within the crust. And, it seems, their hunch may have been right. Their latest analysis – including specimens of the mineral olivine taken from dozens of sites across Baffin and surrounding islands – has delivered the highest ratio of 3He to 4He ever recorded in volcanic rock – measuring nearly 70 times anything previously detected in the atmosphere, as Science Alert notes. The team also considered ratios of other isotopes in order to rule out factors that may have altered the helium’s composition post-volcanic eruption, and found that the ratio of isotopes in the gas neon also matched the conditions present during the Earth’s formation. Despite advances in geology, the Earth’s core remains a great mystery, 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. And carefully crafted simulations, based on the thermodynamics and pressures of our planet’s innards, suggest reserves of noble gases (like helium and neon) trapped in the core could have been protected as the Earth grew before seeping into the surrounding mantle over time. If the core is leaking, this could teach us a thing or two about how planets like ours form and how life, eventually, emerges. 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

As the auto industry grapples with how to make affordable EVs, the task may get easier by one