It’s well known that all humans alive today can be traced back to a common ancestor but a study may have found where that ancestor originates. Researchers at the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute mapped the entirety of genetic relationships among humans to create the largest human family tree ever. By combining modern and ancient human genomes data from eight different databases, the researchers were able to create a massive family tree. This allowed them to see how a person’s genetic sequence relates to another using the points of the genome. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “Essentially, we are reconstructing the genomes of our ancestors and using them to form a vast network of relationships,” Lead author Dr Anthony Wilder Wohns said. “We can then estimate when and where these ancestors lived.” Where they lived? Sudan, Africa. Dr Wohns told Reuters, "The very earliest ancestors we identify trace back in time to a geographic location that is in modern Sudan. “These ancestors lived up to and over 1 million years ago—which is much older than current estimates for the age of Homo sapiens—250,000 to 300,000 years ago. So bits of our genome have been inherited from individuals who we wouldn’t recognize as modern humans," Dr Wohns said. Researchers used 3,609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations and samples that ranged from 1,000s to over 100,000 years. By using a new method to compile the data, algorithms were able to predict where common ancestors were in evolutionary trees to explain some patterns of genetic variation. The results were a network of almost 27 million ancestors. “The power of our approach is that it makes very few assumptions about the underlying data and can also include both modern and ancient DNA samples,” Dr Wohns says. Not only does the data help us understand human geology better but the new method could help in other research, like medicine. “The underlying method could have widespread applications in medical research, for instance identifying genetic predictors of disease risk," Dr Wohns added. 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.

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Trisha Paytas says she feels “super disrespected” after it was revealed that Colleen Ballinger sent unsolicited nudes of Paytas to her fans. Paytas is the latest person to speak up amidst the ongoing allegations against the YouTuber also known as Miranda Sings. Ballinger has been embroiled in a wave of allegations in the past few weeks after previous fans have spoken up about their inappropriate relationship with Ballinger whilst they were minors. It was claimed that Ballinger made fun of YouTuber Trisha Paytas’ body to her fans and also sent minors nude photos of Paytas. On Monday Paytas uploaded a 21-minute YouTube video titled ‘colleen’ discussing her relationship with the fellow YouTuber. The pair had recently started a podcast together as two mums with young children titled Oversharing. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Paytas starts the video by saying: “These most recent things that are coming out, everyone knows that I have a very very very firm stance on talking to anyone underage, platonic or not, I’ve always been very very firm with this that I think it’s appropriate.” “When all this came out I was shocked, you know the group chats and stuff I was kind of shocked, and it’s such a difficult thing because Colleen is someone that I quickly, literally in the past month that we did this podcast, like I really really cared about and really related to.” Paytas, who has long been a controversial figure and often embroiled in scandals herself shared that prior to Ballinger’s now infamous apology video “we were staying in touch because again I know what it feels like to have the whole internet come down on you. Even if the whole internet is right.” “I don’t want anyone, guilty or not, to ever feel like they don’t have someone to talk to.” Speaking of the allegations made in regards to Ballinger sending Paytas’ nudes to her fans, some who were minors, Paytas said she was “waiting to see what would come out” because of the “serious” and “illegal” aspects of the allegations. “It’s a topic I don’t take lightly and I can’t take lightly,” she adds. colleen youtu.be Paytas is widely known as a sex worker as well as for her YouTube videos. Talking about the sharing of her nudes she said: “I do not condone, at all, sending unsolicited nudes to anyone of anybody, sex worker or not. I think using someone’s nudes as a way to hurt them, make fun of them, make light of them, be mean, is the lowest form of human, the lowest form of intelligence. I think that’s so inhumane, so disgusting for anyone.” Prior to Paytas’ video, Johnny Silvestri, a previous fan of Ballinger who had messaged and met Ballinger on multiple occasions, shared censored photos of Paytas that had been sent to him by Ballinger. “Last night the text messages were shown and it’s very clearly from Colleen to a fan, it has over half a million views on Twitter. I’m not embarrassed by [them], I’m embarrassed for her.” “And these weren’t a long time ago, this is someone well into their 30s who just gave birth sending nudes, and I, a month prior, I was in her house meeting her child, meeting her newborn, and doing a mukbang with her,” says Paytas, clearly hurt. “In these texts there’s also friends of hers, they showed the viewing parties that were talked about, to make fun of me, they did viewing parties of my adult content to make fun of me.” Paytas also revealed that before the text messages were posted online, she had privately asked Colleen if the accusations were true and that Ballinger “assured me that she had never sent photos of me, that this one fan who was underage at the time would send photos to her.” “She said everything is taken out of context, these are lies.” Paytas concludes the video by saying “I just had to make this video to say I don’t stand behind Colleen whatsoever. Her video was not an apology and it took away from the severity of her actions of talking to minors, bringing minors on stage at her show, these peoples are speaking up and they’re uncomfortable for a reason. Acknowledge it, change it, do better.” 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.

Warning: This article does contain images some readers might find disturbing. Investigators have been left puzzled after finding a man’s body in a stage of “complete mummification” just 16 days after he was last seen alive. The man was found alongside a railway line in Bulgaria on 3 September. Identity checks later found he was 34 when he died, with a history of alcoholism, and was last seen alive on 16 August. However, his insides had been reduced to “structureless masses”, and case workers have been unable to explain how the body reached such an advanced state of mummification so quickly. A report published in Cureus journal shows a full set of pictures of the corpse – linked at the foot of this article. Trigger warning, they’re pretty gruesome. It has got scientists fascinated though. The report’s authors reveal that the “skin surface showed coloration ranging from light to dark brown, and it was hard and leathery.” “The internal examination of the body showed that the internal organs in the cranial, thoracic, and abdominal cavities had decayed into dried, brownish-black masses,” they write. Researchers stressed that natural mummification “usually takes several weeks to 6-12 months”, and that such a fast transformation would only normally happen in extreme heat. The temperature in Sofia has ranged from 16 to 33 degrees Celsius in the time period, which scientists said is not hot enough. The authors speculated that passing trains could have created a windy environment that could have contributed to drying out the body and causing bodily fluids to evaporate. They said it almost certainly wasn’t the weather in Sofia that caused the bizarrely fast mummification process. As of yet, it remains a mystery. Here’s the journal article. 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.

TOKYO (Reuters) -Sony on Wednesday reported a 30.6% fall in first-quarter operating profit, in line with analyst estimates. Profit for

The European Parliament voted today to move forward with the first comprehensive artificial intelligence legislation,

Twitter has been plunged into chaos in recent days, amid new “rate limits” and rules that actually stop people from using the site. The changes have been dramatic enough that they have led to speculation that they could be the thing to finally doom Elon Musk’s takeover of the social network. What are the ‘rate limits’? It is a somewhat technical term for a complex process that has a simple effect: users are rationed on how many tweets they can see. If people and the apps they use make too many requests too often – in this case for tweets – then the service will stop providing them. On Twitter, the new rate limits are different depending on what kind of user is on: someone who pays for the premium “Twitter Blue” service will get more than a normal user, for instance. They are also changing all the time, with the limit being increased recently. Twitter has long had rate limits, which ensure that malicious actors cannot send huge number of requests to the site and bring it down, for instance. But they would previously only have been hit by people using specific tools, since they were much higher. What happens when you hit the limit? Users will see a warning telling them they have received the rate limit. The site will then stop working properly, because it will refuse to load any more tweets. Why has it happened? The official explanation is that Elon Musk is concerned about how many artificial intelligence companies are scraping posts from Twitter in order to feed to their systems and teach them more about how to use language. In an attempt to stop that, Mr Musk placed the limits to make it harder for that scraping to happen. But there is no proof that is actually the case. The problems at Twitter may well be infrastructural issues caused by the site’s engineering, and its lack of staff, that have made it incapable of serving normal requests. Or it might be a mix of the two. There is no doubt that the site is being scraped, but rate limits of this kind are an unusual way of responding to it, and other sites that are being scraped have not needed to do the same thing. Are there other changes? The other major change instituted recently by Elon Musk is to ban people who are not signed into the site from seeing posts. This is ostensibly for the same reason, since it means that scrapers cannot just gather up posts from the site from the outside. It already means that some things about Twitter are not working as they used to. If someone sends a tweet within a messaging app, for instance, then the posts’ preview won’t show, since the app cannot access the tweet. Will this change how people use Twitter? Almost certainly. Much of Twitter’s value lies in its high-profile and high-commitment users: the celebrities, organisations and big brands who use it to post, and the engaged users who follow them. That is much of what sustains its place in culture, even as it gets fewer users than much bigger social networks such as Facebook. The recent changes have directly antagonised those users. Big organisations cannot rely on tweets as a way for anyone to see what they’re posting, since users have to be logged in; engaged users cannot rely on being able to use the platform, since they are set to be rate limited. What’s more, the recent changes could cause problems for advertisers, given how important it is for users to stay engaged and see their posts. Companies are already using Twitter less for advertising, as a result of other controversies, and that may just continue. Is this the end? Some people have been predicting an end to Twitter since long before Elon Musk took it over; when he did, those predictions got louder and more regular, but they have still been largely wrong. It appears that no matter what Mr Musk does, people keep logging on and using the site. That might well be largely due to network effects: the idea that the value really comes from the number of people using the platform, which also makes it very difficult to create a new one. People might be unhappy on Twitter, but the network effect means they might feel lonely or that they are missing out if they move elsewhere. But all of that doesn’t mean that this time around won’t be the end. Certainly the latest problems have the most obviously problematic effect, of forcing Twitter’s most engaged users to not use the app, which might finally encourage them to go elsewhere. In the end, the discussion is often based on the idea that there will be some big moment that causes everyone to leave Twitter, or for the app to die. In fact, social networks have tended to decline slowly before they are finally shut down; something that might already be happening on Twitter. What are the alternatives to Twitter? Again, people have been trying to replace Twitter for years, for reasons including everything from protests against its content management rules to opposition to its centralised nature. Attempts to create a new Twitter have only increased since Elon Musk took over the original one. But they have almost always failed to take off. Network effects and the relative maturity of Twitter as a platform mean that they have always faced a challenge, and never really met it. As such there are a number of alternatives to Twitter. Notable among them are Mastodon, which is decentralised and has become perhaps the most discussed new alternative, and Bluesky, an effort to build a new kind of Twitter that originally began with the company. But the most promising alternative might be about to launch. Meta is launching Threads this week, an app linked to Instagram that aims to allow people to post text updates that might have the might to actually take over from Twitter. What is happening to TweetDeck? TweetDeck also went down along with Twitter over the weekend. It’s unclear how the two are connected, though they happened at the same time. Now Twitter has announced that TweetDeck is coming back. But it comes with some changes, and the most notable of them is that people will have to pay for Twitter Blue to get access to it. Read More Twitter to stop TweetDeck access for unverified users Meta’s Twitter alternative Threads to be launched this week How Elon Musk finally broke Twitter – and why it might just be the start Twitter rival Bluesky halts sign-ups after huge surge in demand Twitter is breaking more and more Twitter rival sees huge increase in users as Elon Musk ‘destroys his site’

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