Google says it’s rolling out its AI-powered chatbot Bard across Europe and in Brazil, expanding its availability to hundreds of millions more users

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden's administration will cancel $39 billion in student debt for more than 804,000 borrowers, the

People can once again call 999 in an emergency after services were hit by a nationwide technical fault. BT said it had implemented a back-up platform after issues with 999 calls connecting were reported on Sunday morning. Emergency services across the country have confirmed they are able to receive 999 calls again, but some warned they were still experiencing residual difficulties. A spokesperson for BT said: “Early this morning we experienced a problem with the 999 service. “The situation is fast-moving as we fix the problem and our back up platform is now working – so people should call 999 as usual. “We will provide updates as the issue is resolved.” Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service warned of a 30-second delay to connect to 999, while Suffolk Police said its system may not be working to full capacity and urged people to use 999 only in a genuine emergency. The Metropolitan Police said the back-up system was “not as effective at telling us where you are calling from”. “Help us by having the address of the emergency ready,” the force said. “If you don’t know the address, look around for a street name or obvious landmark.” East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) said that if a 999 call was not successful, people should call 111 for urgent medical help instead. Richard Lyne, strategic commander at EMAS, said: “We urge people to seriously consider the alternative services available and if it’s possible to make your own way to a treatment centre. “For example, if a relative or friend can take you by car.” Problems with the service, which is managed by BT, were first reported at around 8.30am on Sunday and people were told to call 101 in an emergency for police and fire, or 111 in a medical emergency. Several police forces and fire and ambulance services said they were facing issues and said BT had reported a “system failure”.

Making your online content and social media profiles accessible to the majority of people stumbling

COPENHAGEN/OSLO A volcanic eruption in Iceland close to the capital Reykjavik is slowing and gas pollution is easing,

The human body is a marvel of science and researchers have discovered a strange reoccurring mathematical pattern within its cells. Our bodies are made up of a massive variety of individual cells with countless different functions, from neurons in our nervous system to the oxygen carriers that all work in harmony to keep us alive. Experts from scientific research institutions in Germany, Canada, Spain, and the US have worked together on a study to determine just how many cells of each type there are in the human body and the results are staggering. They found that most adult males possess around 36 trillion cells, while adult females have in the region of 28 trillion cells. For a 10-year-old child, they have around 17 trillion. Interestingly though, scientists discovered that, regardless of the total number of cells, if they are grouped according to their function, the proportions for each individual remain the same. The researchers explained in their findings: “These patterns are suggestive of a whole-organism trade-off between cell size and count and imply the existence of cell-size homeostasis across cell types.” Scientists believe there is a natural balancing act at play between different cell types with new cells being produced to maintain the balance. The body produces fewer larger cells (such as muscle fibres) and more smaller cells (like blood cells). It is hoped that future studies will be able to uncover exactly how this happens and how bodies seem to naturally regulate cells. They explained that all cells are perfectly sized for their roles and any deviation from their scale can indicate the presence of disease. Experts have made their data, analysis and results public in the hopes that future studies into biology will be able to utilise their research. 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.

Google is officially releasing its new SafeSearch setting to all users this month, a feature

VICTORIA, Seychelles--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 29, 2023--

Some of the world’s biggest investors are throwing their weight behind a plan to reform the mining industry

Threads says it has been forced to limit how many posts people can see, amid an increase in “spam attacks”. The announcement drew mockery from Elon Musk, who had been widely criticised for introducing such “rate limits” on his own site, Twitter. Adam Mosseri, who serves as the head of Instagram and therefore Threads at Meta, said in a post on the site that it was being hit by more spam attacks and that it would have to take a range of responses as a result. “Spam attacks have picked up so we’re going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits, which is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives),” he wrote. “If you get caught up [in] those protections let us know.” The change means that users who use Threads the most might run into limits on how many posts they can see and whether they can view the app. He did not give any indication of where the rate limit would be set or how many people mighttbe expected to run into problems. Threads users have complained about a significant increase in the amount of spam on the site, including in the replies to Mr Mosseri’s post. Mr Mosseri has made a number of announcements about the future of Threads on the site. The company – which appears to have been surprised by the success of its own app – has been looking both to add new and widely requested features as well as deal with any technical problems caused by the success of the app. The change drew mockery from Elon Musk, who announced days before the launch of Threads that Twitter would start rate limiting, in what he said was an attempt to stop AI companies scraping Twitter for data to train its models. That led to major problems for Twitter users, who were unable to see posts and more, and those technical issues have been pointed to as one of the reasons that so many users were eager to sign up to Threads in the first place. Mr Musk laughed and posted “copycat” in response to a screenshot of Mr Mosseri’s post. Mr Musk introduced his own rate limits earlier this month. But he announced the numbers of posts that users would be able to see – and did not invite feedback from those who might be swept up in the change. Read More DMs may come to Threads soon as app’s user base grows to one-fifth of Twitter’s Elon Musk posts series of explicit tweets about Mark Zuckerberg Twitter traffic ‘tanking’ after record-breaking Threads launch

The country is the latest front in a fight that analysts say has big stakes for news - and democracy.

Thousands of Twitter users reported problems with the social media platform this weekend, with many receiving a message saying “rate-limit exceeded” on their personal feed page meant for curated content. Many users complained of several issues over the weekend, such as disappearing timelines, an inability to retrieve or send out their own tweets or even send a direct message. Users could scroll only a limited number of times on their curated “For You” personal feed pages before hitting limits. Twitter owner and chief technology officer Elon Musk explained on Saturday that the platform was issuing temporary reading limits with verified accounts being restricted to reading 6,000 posts a day. Mr Musk said the new restriction was applied “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation”. The Tesla chief then later added that the “rate limits” were increasing to “8,000 for verified, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified”. He then followed it with another update, raising the limits to 10,000, 1,000 and 500 respectively. It remains unclear for how long the new restrictions will be in place as many users continue to face the “Rate limit exceeded. Please wait a few moments then try again” message. Mr Musk has been attempting to generate more revenue for Twitter by making changes to the platform’s policy regarding the use of its API – the system used to communicate with other services. The Tesla and SpaceX chief has previously expressed displeasure with third-party clients, including artificial intelligence firms, using Twitter’s data to train their AI models. The company has been cutting its free API support, which has effectively killed off third-party services that rely on it. Commenting on the outage, Adam Leon Smith of BCS, the UK’s professional IT body, said while data scraping may be “part of the reason”, there are likely to be “underlying technical problems” on the platform. “The alleged data scraping could well be caused by Twitter now charging exorbitant fees for API access, which may have led to a secondary market for tweet data,” he said. Mr Musk retweeted an Elon Musk parody account that said “we are all Twitter addicts and need to go outside”. “I’m doing a good deed for the world here. Also, that’s another view you just used,” the tweet read. Read More Jack Dorsey calls for ‘open internet’ as Musk imposes new reading limits on Twitter Twitter limits number of tweets people can read in a day, Elon Musk announces Is Twitter down? Thousands of users complain of issues with social media website and app What does Twitter’s rate-limiting restriction mean? ‘Rage-baiting’ leftist Twitter account is probably fake, expert says How to delete your Twitter account