Exxon Mobil Corp. said the prospect of the world reaching net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 is

Vice President Kamala Harris will travel Friday to Jacksonville in a last-minute trip to forcefully condemn a newly approved set of standards for teaching Black history by the Florida Board of Education, directly wading into one of the cultural flashpoints that have assumed new prominence ahead of the 2024 election.

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Elon Musk has stopped X, formerly Twitter, from showing information about links posted to the site. Until the last day, when someone posted a link on X, it showed as an image and the article’s headline, allowing people to see what they would be reading when they clicked. Now, however, that description has been removed. Instead, the article shows up as a normal picture, with the name of the website showing up small in the corner to show that it is a link. The update prompted confusion from many readers, who said that it was unclear whether a post included a link and what that might be a link to. Many news organisations publicly complained that it had forced them to change their strategy for posting on the site, given they could previously depend on Twitter to show the headline of posts. Many tweets that had included links and were posted before the change instantly became incomprehensible, since they had been written to respond to the headline that had pulled through from the article. Mr Musk has said that he ordered the change to improve the site. When the update was first rumoured, in a Forbes report in August, he responded by saying that it was “coming from me directly” and that it will “greatly improve the esthetics”. But it may also be an attempt to encourage users to stay on the site for longer, rather than clicking away to links. Since Mr Musk took over Twitter around a year ago, he has often focused on increasing the amount of time that users spend in its feed. “Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away,” Mr Musk wrote in a recent tweet. “Best thing is to post content in long form on this platform.” It is also one of a range of recent decisions that looks to put Mr Musk in conflict with news sites. Earlier this year, for instance, X appeared to have added a delay when users clicked on some news sites and other rivals such as Instagram and Blue Sky. Users found that pages would not load for five seconds. Read More Musk confirms he is cutting election integrity staff from X/Twitter ahead of 2024 Reddit will start paying people to post X is shutting down feature to send posts to select people after privacy concern

The Apple iPhone and the Google Pixel line share a similar ideology. Each company is

A poll showed that more than 80% of people who voted want Cardano's founder to be a part of 'The Joe Rogan Experience'

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will be allowed to supply US chip equipment to their China factories indefinitely without separate US approvals, South Korea's presidential office and the companies said on Monday.

Scientists have got to the bottom of a 5-year mystery after finally identifying a tiny sea creature captured on camera in 2018. It is the latest in a series of oceanic discoveries and experts recently observed “zombie worms” devour an alligator in an incredible experiment. For the tiny creature, the baffling question of its identity took a team of zoologists and parasitic worm specialists to solve after the small creature was pictured by an underwater photographer in 2018 off the coast of Okinawa in Japan. After photographer Ryo Minemizu captured the image, he shared it on social media asking the hive mind if they knew what the creature was, but everyone was left stumped. Minemizu was determined not to give up and instead went back to the area and was able to capture another ladybird-sized creature that was the same, or very similar, to the original one he had come across. The research team that was interested in identifying the sea creature approached him and Minemizu sent them the sample to research. Your browser does not support the video tag. Current Biology (2023) The team’s results were published in the Current Biology journal putting an end to the 5-year long mystery baffling experts. In a fascinating twist, the team found that the sample was not one, but two creatures that were clinging tightly to one another. Both were identified as types of cercariae parasitic larvae worms, with experts dubbing one as the “sailor” and the other as a “passenger” thanks to how they behave when they are connected. Passengers were much smaller than the sailors and when they were bonded together, they formed a flat-topped hemisphere shape. They squeeze their bodies together with heads facing the inside of the sphere, meanwhile, their tails latch onto one another. Experts believe the two individual creatures have created a colonial organism that suits both of their needs and according to the study's authors, “represents the first case of labor division in digenean larvae”. 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.

The Warzone Season 4 Assault on Vondel Event launches on June 14 with challenges for players to complete to earn free rewards, including the Tonfa Melee weapon.

A study detailing the habitability of a nearby exoplanet appears to have caught the attention of SpaceX boss Elon Musk. The tech billionaire has frequently spoken of his intention to transform humanity into a mult-planetary species through his private space firm, with plans to colonise Mars within the next few decades. The study of Proxima Centauri b, which sits within the so-called ‘Goldilocks Zone’ of the red-dwarf star Proxima Centauri, involved computer simulations to evaluate whether it can sustain liquid water that may harbour living organisms. “The major message from our simulations is that there’s a decent chance that the planet would be habitable,” Anthony Del Genio, a planetary scientist at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies said when the study was first published in 2018. The study concluded that Earth-sized planet is potentially the closest “highly habitable” planet to our Solar System, located 4.2 light-years away from the Sun. “Practically next door,” Mr Musk wrote in a tweet on Sunday, sharing the study. Proxima Centauri b has been the subject of several studies since it was first discovered in 2016, with astronomers attempting to assess whether it is capable of sustaining life. Similar to the Earth’s moon, the planet is “locked” due to gravitational forces, meaning that the same side of Proxima Centauri b always faces its parent star. Computational models suggest that the exoplanet’s circulating oceans and atmosphere act as an effective transfer of heat, so that its dark side is not permanently frozen. Despite its relatively close distance compared to other potentially habitable planets, travelling 4.2 light-years – or 40 trillion kilometres (25 trillion miles) – requires technology that is still in the conceptual stages of development. Nasa’s interstellar space probe Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977, would take 80,000 years to travel to Proxima Centauri, however the US space agency’s DEEP-IN programme aims to make the journey possible within a single lifetime. Scientists working on DEEP-IN claim that small crafts propelled by light could travel at speeds of up to 161 million kilometres per hour, and could reach the neighbouring star and exoplanet in 20 years. Mr Musk has frequently voiced his concerns about humanity’s long-term survival, claiming that setting up self-sustaining colonies on other planets is vital to ensure the continuation of our species. SpaceX has so far been at the forefront of these endeavours, developing its reusable Starship rocket with the intention of transporting people and cargo across the solar system. Read More Elon Musk refuses to pay Twitter’s Google bill Elon Musk claims AI will overtake humans 'in less than five years'

Demand for oil and natural gas will stay resilient for decades, driven by population growth and industrialization in

Scientists have seen one of the mysterious “dark spots” on Neptune from Earth for the first ever time. Researchers spotted the feature using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, or VLT. Using that telescope, astronomers were able to examine a large dark spot – which was joined by a smaller, bright spot, they said, of a kind that has never seen before. Scientists still do not know why those spots form on Neptune’s blue atmosphere. But they hope that the new observations could help answer questions about their origin. “Since the first discovery of a dark spot, I’ve always wondered what these short-lived and elusive dark features are,” said Patrick Irwin, professor at the University of Oxford and lead investigator of the study. It has already helped rule out one possibility: that the dark spots are caused when the clouds on the planet clear. The observations instead suggest that the spot is formed when air particles make a layer below the main one go darker, caused by ice and haze mixing in the atmosphere. Understanding the spots has been difficult because they leave the planet’s surface as mysteriously as they arise. They have also been difficult for researchers to actually examine, given the difficulty of spotting them through telescopes. Previously, scientists were forced to send spacecraft to see the spots, and the first was observed in 1989, when Nasa’s Voyager 2 flew past. It disappeared a few years later. In recent years, scientists have been able to examine them with the Hubble Space Telescope, which has seen more spots on the atmosphere. When it did so, astronomers were able to point ground-based telescopes towards them, allowing for more detailed research. “This is an astounding increase in humanity’s ability to observe the cosmos,” said Michael Wong, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and a co-author on the paper. “At first, we could only detect these spots by sending a spacecraft there, like Voyager. “Then we gained the ability to make them out remotely with Hubble. Finally, technology has advanced to enable this from the ground.” The new observations allowed scientists to examine the spot using the VLT’s Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, which let them split the light from Neptune and the spot into its component colours. That in turn means that astronomers can understand the height at which the spot sits, and how the atmosphere is composed. As well as helping examine the dark spots, scientists also saw a surprise result: another, entirely new kind of bright spot. “In the process we discovered a rare deep bright cloud type that had never been identified before, even from space,” said Wong. The work is described in a new paper, ‘Cloud structure of dark spots and storms in Neptune’s atmosphere’, published in Nature Astronomy. Read More Mysterious dark spot on Neptune detected from Earth for the first time We just received the first ever pictures taken near the Moon’s uncharted south pole Chandrayaan-3 mission rover exits Moon lander to explore lunar south pole Mysterious dark spot on Neptune detected from Earth for the first time We just received the first ever pictures taken near the Moon’s uncharted south pole Chandrayaan-3 mission rover exits Moon lander to explore lunar south pole