Three minority advocacy groups are suing Harvard University's governing body, accusing the school of discrimination by giving preferential treatment to children of wealthy donors and alumni, and are citing the recent US Supreme Court ruling that gutted affirmative action to bolster their lawsuit.

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating OpenAI for possible violations of consumer protection law, seeking extensive records from the maker of ChatGPT about its handling of personal data, its potential to give users inaccurate information and its "risks of harm to consumers, including reputational harm."

The Final Fantasy franchise has been an RPG paragon for more than 30 years. Although

They may not be as stylish as a DeLorean or as sturdy as a blue police box, but wormholes in space could hold the key to real-life time travel – and a team of experts think they’ve figured out how. The trio of scientists delved deep into the laws of physics and discovered that it might be possible for humans to one day zip across galaxies in a matter of seconds, or journey through time itself. Now, this is all to do with the general theory of relativity and quantum physics, so don’t expect to get your head around it too easily. However, in their paper, Valeri P. Frolov and Andrei Zelnikov of Canada’s University of Alberta, and Pavel Krtouš of Prague’s Charles University proposed that a specific kind of wormhole would “inevitably” be “transformed into a time machine” if it was subject to particular conditions. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter For the uninitiated, wormholes can be described as spacetimes in which a “kind of tunnel exists connecting distant parts in the universe”. The main problem with them is… they don’t actually exist. At least not in any tangible way. As Drs Eric Christian and Louis Barbier put it in an explainer for NASA: “Wormholes are allowed to exist in the math of ‘General Relativity’, which is our best description of the Universe. “Assuming that general relativity is correct, there may be wormholes. But no one has any idea how they would be created, and there is no evidence for anything like a wormhole in the observed Universe.” Still, numerous experts in the field of gravitation and general relativity have spent years or even decades working on them, including Stephen Hawking in his time. For their paper, Frolov, Krtouš, and Zelnikov explored what is known as a ring wormhole, which was first described in 2016 by theoretical physicist Gary Gibbons, of Cambridge University, and Mikhail Volkov of the University of Tours. Unlike the spherical contortions of spacetime we might attribute to black holes, the ring wormhole proposed by Gibbons and Volkov connects sections of the universe (or, indeed, different universes) which are generally described as “flat”, as ScienceAlert notes. Ring-shaped masses could potentially create some pretty remarkable distortions in what would otherwise be flat spacetime if you consider how their electrical and magnetic fields might interact. And so Frolov, Krtouš, and Zelnikov decided to consider two types of such wormholes: “a wormhole connecting to flat spaces; and a wormhole connecting two distant domains in the same space”. For the latter, they concluded that if a “massive thin shell” surrounded one of the mouths of the ring wormhole, a “closed timelike curve” would form. This, as the name suggests, would mean that any travelling object (or ray of light) would come back to the exact same point whence it began. In other words, you could travel in space and time and return to your point of departure. The most exciting aspect of ring wormholes, as the authors point out is that: “For the ring wormhole an observer passing through it moves in a flat (or practically flat spacetime), while in the case of ‘standard’ (spherical) wormholes he/she should pass a domain filled with the matter violating the null energy condition.” Even without knowing what the “null energy condition” is, you can appreciate that the first option sounds a lot simpler. Now, before you start calling yourself Marty McFly or making a list of all the past mistakes you’d like to correct, we should stress that we’re a long way off seeing the creation of a bonafide, buckle-your-seatbelt time machine. But at least, thanks to the efforts of experts like Frolov, Krtouš, and Zelnikov, we’re at least one step closer to going back in the future. 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.

When IShowSpeed revealed on a stream that Adin Ross didn't text him back, his fans started speculating that their friendship might have ended

A contractor at a US national lab and a radioactive waste storage site managed by the Department of

This content originally appeared on Mashable for a US audience and has been adapted for

Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., the biggest electric car battery producer, will supply energy storage systems to Western

Studios have already been utilizing this technology for several years, including major productions from Warner Bros. Discovery, Marvel Studios, and Netflix

Germany, through its KfW development bank, will as soon as Friday sign an agreement to lend South Africa

From Twitter being rebranded as X, to Meta who have rivalled this with their new Threads platform, there's been quite a few changes to social media this year. One of those recent changes also includes Instagram’s new-like animation which applies to those who updated the app. It means that when you like something on Instagram, the large heart will then appear in the area where you double-tapped on the photo and then the heart flies upwards off the screen. Of course, when it comes to social media updates, no one is a fan of change and Instagram users made this clear on X, formerly known as Twitter. Here is a compilation of reactions who all shared they weren't happy with the new like update, as one declared the feature "sucks," though this update did result in some amusing memes too: Unfortunately for those who updated the app, there is no way to change the like option back to the original but those who haven't updated Instagram can avoid the new feature if they opt out of auto-updates on Instagram. 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.

US antitrust agencies stepped up the Biden administration’s crackdown on mergers and acquisitions with a sweeping overhaul of