By Valerie Volcovici and David Stanway BEIJING (Reuters) -This week's visit by U.S. climate envoy John Kerry to China after

By David Shepardson WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Two U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to address questions about

We use letters every day of our lives, but apparently, there's one lowercase letter that we do not recognise. Psychologists at Johns Hopkins University have discovered that most people aren't aware that there are two types of the lowercase letter g. One of them is the open tail 'g' which most of us would have written out by hand with its image comparable to "a loop with a fishhook hanging from it. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Then, there is the loop tail 'g' which appears in print form e.g. books and newspapers as well as in Serif fonts such as Times New Roman and Calibri - we've all seen this type of letter millions of times, but it seems remembering it is an entirely different challenge altogether. There were 38 volunteers in the study published by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance and they were asked to list letters that they thought had two variations in print. In the first experiment, "most participants failed to recall the existence of looptail g" while only two people could write looptail g accurately. "They don't entirely know what this letter looks like, even though they can read it," co-author Gali Ellenblum said. Next participants were asked to look for examples of the looptail g in the text and were asked to reproduce this letter style after this and in the end, only one person could do this while half the group wrote an open tail g. Finally, those taking part in the study were asked to identify the letter g in a multiple-choice test with four options of the letter where seven out of 25 managed to do this correctly. So how can we know a letter but not recognised it? It could be to do with the fact we are not taught to write this kind of 'g," according to Michael McCloskey, senior author of the paper. "What we think may be happening here is that we learn the shapes of most letters in part because we have to write them in school. 'Looptail g' is something we're never taught to write, so we may not learn its shape as well," he said. "More generally, our findings raise questions about the conditions under which massive exposure does, and does not, yield detailed, accurate, accessible knowledge." In a play-along video on John Hopkin's YouTube channel, four different g's labelled from one to four appear on the screen where it asked viewers to guess which is the correct looptail 'g'. (*Spoiler ahead*) The correct answer is number 3. Meanwhile, this study has also led research to question the impact that writing less and using more devices has on our reading abilities. "What about children who are just learning to read? Do they have a little bit more trouble with this form of g because they haven't been forced to pay attention to it and write it?" McCloskey said. "That's something we don't really know. Our findings give us an intriguing way of looking at questions about the importance of writing for reading..." 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.

Are you so ducking excited for iOS 17? Apple this week showed off all the

Fire might seem like one of the most elemental things in the natural world, but it’s never been found anywhere other than Earth. It’s because the creation of fire relies on very specific circumstances. In fact, if fire was ever found on another planet, it would be a good indicator of the possible existence of life. Oxygen is key to fire, and while it’s particularly prevalent in the universe, Earth’s atmosphere features an abundance of the element in the right molecular form for it to form. Even then, the way the Earth’s atmosphere has changed over its lifespan is also crucial to conditions being fostered where fire can form [via IFLScience]. For millions of years, in fact, there wasn’t enough oxygen in the atmosphere to create fire. Before the Middle Ordovician period, when there was far less oxygen, there’s no evidence of fire whatsoever. Most of the fuel that fire needs is also directly related to life existing on the planet – think wood, oil and coal. Without life, there isn’t an awful lot of fuel going around, which just shows why the existence of fire on another planet would be a very promising sign when it comes to exploring the universe for life. Despite fire being much rarer in the universe than most might think, it was previously confirmed that humans in Europe may have mastered fire long before we previously thought. According to a study published in Scientific Reports, humans made the discovery around 245,000 years ago, up to 50,000 years earlier than scientists believed, Researchers studied samples from the Valdocarros II, a huge archaeological site found east of Madrid, Spain. Using chemical analysis, they found certain compounds that show things were burnt by fire in "organised" social events, rather than through accidents or wildfires. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel 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

Putting solar panels on water to generate power sounded like a dangerous gimmick to Benedikt Ortmann when he

The NBA 2K24 update 1.3 patch notes are here with changes to MyCAREER mode, dunking, defense, and more, set to hit the game in October.

King Felipe VI of Spain and King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands attended the ceremony.

Apple Inc. is asking suppliers to produce about 85 million units of the iPhone 15 this year, roughly

A federal judge will not block Microsoft from closing its $69 billion deal to acquire video game giant Activision Blizzard, a defeat for US regulators who had asked for a temporary injunction while legal challenges to the merger unfold.

A crocodile has made herself pregnant in what is believed by scientists to be a world first. The crocodile at the Costa Rica zoo created a foetus that was 99.9 per cent genetically identical to itself, often known as a "virgin birth." This process typically does not occur with crocodiles but with other species such as birds, lizards, snakes, fish and sharks. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Scientists believe this kind of solo reproduction could be traced back to the dinosaurs, as they suggest the species may have also been capable of this rare method. The latest study was published on Wednesday (June 7) in the Royal Society journal, Biology Letters. Back in January 2018, an egg was laid by an 18-year-old female American crocodile in Parque Reptilania, the BBC reported. The fully formed foetus did not hatch however and was stillborn. Researchers from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, say this is the "first documentation" of this kind of reproduction in this species. Dr Warren Booth who has studied virgin births (parthenogenesis) for 11 years theorised that this reproduction method has not been seen in crocodiles because weren't looking out for this happening. ''There was a big increase in reports of parthenogenesis when people started keeping pet snakes. But your average reptile keeper doesn't keep a crocodile," he noted to the BBC. "This new evidence offers tantalizing insights into the possible reproductive capabilities of extinct archosaurian relatives of crocodilians, notably the Pterosauria and Dinosauria," experts said in the study. 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.

Thea Booysen expressed her opinions on Twitter, replying to Twitch's tweet revoking their new Branded Content Guidelines