Harvard embraces generative AI in the classroom, adopting it as an official learning tool for

A handful of gamers have erupted across social media due to the option to select pronouns for characters in the game Starfield. The role-playing game (RPG) allows players to customise their characters, including deciding which pronouns they have. The feature was discovered after the game went live on Friday 1 September for those who had pre-ordered. Bethesda, who have previously made games such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 4, allowed Starfield players to select they/them pronouns for non-binary characters if they so pleased. But a small number of notable gaming streamers seemed extremely upset over the decision. They accused video game publishes of going “woke”. Streamer Herschel ‘Guy’ Beahm IV, known by his online alias Dr Disrespect, was outraged both at the pronoun option and the head of publishing at Bethesda, Pete Hines, having his pronouns in his Twitter/X bio, saying “it all makes sense now. Beahm also shared with his viewers that he had tried to work with Bethesda prior to the release of Starfield, but was told no due to “past controversies.” Another streamer known online as 'Heel vs Babyface', revealed his sheer lack of imagination when he screamed at his camera for two-and-a-half minutes claiming the choice of pronouns meant he was being “dragged out” of the immersive experience of the game. “Do you want to get immersed in our world? Yeah well guess what, f**king pronouns,” he screamed. “F**king gender ambiguity. F**king current-day California s**t, because that’s all we f**king know.” As expected, many mocked those who were upset over a two-second feature in a video game. One user called Heel vs Babyface “pathetic”: Others told him to “grow up”: Outside of streamers who are unable to comprehend an experience outside of their own, Starfield has received less than favourable reviews from critics for valid reasons such as poor performance and calling the title “disjointed”. 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.

MIAMI LAKES, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 22, 2023--

Streaming giant Netflix Inc on Tuesday began its planned crackdown on password sharing in the United States, alerting

If the thought of jetting off to Mars to live doesn’t scare you enough, imagine what it would be like going with people whose personalities you cannot stand. To avoid that happening, scientists have come up with a simulation that can determine the right and, importantly, wrong, personality types to send up to colonize Mars. 28 different simulations of colonies on Mars were run as part of the study to establish which type of people stood the best chance of settlement and survival. While the study was published on pre-print server arXiv, it had not yet been peer-reviewed. The study worked on the assumption that there would already be some kind of infrastructure in place, including power, food, air and water being locally produced and available. As part of the model, there would also be regular supply deliveries from Earth. Those behind the simulation gave each agent their own attributes, skills and personalities and let the simulation run as they interacted, socialised and problem-solved together. In the paper, the researchers explained: “Each agent is granted skills associated with their civilian and military occupational specialities consistent with NASA’s Human Factors and Behavioral Performance Element research.” Different personality types included: “Agreeables” – they score low on levels of competitiveness and aggression. “Neurotics” – these people are highly aggressive, competitive, and are much less able to handle routine change or boredom. “Reactives” – they tend to have a “competitive interpersonal orientation”. “Socials” – people who are extroverted and require a lot of social interaction. As for the groups themselves, the numbers within each simulation differed with the lowest amount being 22 individuals. The study found that the presence of neurotics made the team have a worse chance of survival and that these people in particular “suffered during life on the colony”. The researchers: “Martians with the neurotic psychology and a high coping capacity benefit the least from interaction with other Martians, and are penalized the most if they have a low coping capacity. “Our results suggest that this effect is a driver of the Martian population decline, and once minimized or removed, can produce a stable settlement.” A lot to process there if you identify as neurotic. 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.

Rescue and clean-up crews are now pouring into the historic Hawaiian town of Lahaina, which has been leveled

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As Silicon Valley and beyond is gripped by the fervor of artificial intelligence, Melinda French Gates is raising the alarm that more women must be involved in developing these tech tools.

TL;DR: The Fire TV Cube is an all-in-one streaming entertainment system, giving you access to

Beats has launched a new version of its Studio Pro over-ear headphones, with a host of updates. The Studio headphones were Beats’ first product, launched 15 years ago. Since then, the company has been acquired by Apple and undergone a host of changes – and now released a new version of the Studio Pro. They include a new look as well as changes on the inside. The new headphones include better sound, adaptive noise cancellation and transparency modes, personalised spatial audio, better battery life, lossless audio and better performance on calls, Apple said. “When Beats approached me to bring a new design language to the Studio Pro, my goal was to retain the integrity of the design while creating a more sophisticated look and feel that compliments all of the technological advancements,” said Samuel Ross, Beats Principal Design Consultant. “The result is the perfect blend of design culture, creative culture, and engineering coming together.” Beats has also added new leather cushions to the ears, which it calls “UltraPlush”. Those should make the headphones more comfortable through the day, it said. The sound has also ben improved, with new components that reduce distortion at high volumes by up to 80 per cent. As with many Beats products, the headphones bring a range of features best known from Apple. They include spatial audio, for instance, which can be boosted by using an iPhone to examine your ears to customise the sound. But it also offers extra Android compatibility, too. They include fast pairing on Android and Chrome devices and the ability to switch between them, as well as compatibility with Google’s Find My Device app. Beats Studio Pro will go on sale from 10 August, for £349.99 – £200 cheaper than the now almost three year old AirPods Max made by Apple. The new Beats are available in four colours and available from Apple. Read More Rare ‘Holy Grail’ iPhone sells for almost $200,000 Apple’s next iPhone may include new battery technology, report suggests Apple launches huge new payment upgrade for iPhone

The universe went in “extreme slow motion” at its beginning, and has dramatically sped up since, scientists have found. The discovery, predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, was finally confirmed after scientists observed the universe soon after the Big Bang. Einstein’s theory suggests that we should be able to see the distant universe, when it was much older than it is today, running much more slowly. But scientists have not been able to actually look that far and confirm the theory. Now scientists have used bright quasars as a sort of space clock, allowing them to measure time when the universe was much older than it is today. “Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower,” said Geraint Lewis from the University of Sydney, lead author on the new research. “If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second – but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag.” Professor Lewis and other researchers gathered data from 200 quasars for the research. Quasars are very active supermassive black holes that sit in the middle of early galaxies, and hence provide a reliable way to look back at a much younger universe. Previous researchers have done the same using supernovae, or massive exploding stars. Those are useful but they are also difficult to see at the very very long distances of the early universe, meaning that the confirmation was limited only to about half the age of the cosmos. Now by using quasars scientists were able to look much further back, to just a tenth of the age of the universe, when it was only a billion years old. “Thanks to Einstein, we know that time and space are intertwined and, since the dawn of time in the singularity of the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding,” Professor Lewis said. “This expansion of space means that our observations of the early universe should appear to be much slower than time flows today. “In this paper, we have established that back to about a billion years after the Big Bang.” The work is described in a new paper, ‘Detection of the cosmological time dilation of high-redshift quasars’, published in Nature Astronomy. Read More Astronomers discover ‘shooting stars’ on the Sun Tonight’s ’supermoon’ will be biggest full moon of 2023 so far – here’s how to see it Euclid: UK-backed space mission takes off to uncover mysteries of dark universe Astronomers discover ‘shooting stars’ on the Sun Tonight’s ’supermoon’ will be biggest full moon of 2023 so far – here’s how to see it Euclid: UK-backed space mission takes off to uncover mysteries of dark universe