By Jane Lanhee Lee OAKLAND, California Lightmatter, a Boston-based startup using light for AI computing, said on Wednesday

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 13, 2023--

Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, slowed down access to rivals and news organisations, according to a new report. The company seemingly added a delay of as long as five seconds when people clicked on links to go elsewhere on the web, according to a Washington Post report. The delay was applied to a host of rival websites, including Facebook, Instagram and Bluesky. It was also used on the websites of news organisations that have been critical of Mr Musk, such as Reuters and the New York Times. Clicking a link on X to one of the affected websites resulted in a delay of about five seconds before the webpage loaded, the Washington Post reported, citing tests it conducted on Tuesday. Reuters also saw a similar delay in tests it ran. By late Tuesday afternoon, X appeared to have eliminated the delay. When contacted for comment, X confirmed the delay was removed but did not elaborate. Billionaire ElonMusk, who bought Twitter in October, has previously lashed out at news organizations and journalists who have reported critically on his companies, which include Tesla and SpaceX. Twitter has previously prevented users from posting links to competing social media platforms. Reuters could not establish the precise time when X began delaying links to some websites. A user on Hacker News, a tech forum, posted about the delay earlier on Tuesday and wrote that X began delaying links to the New York Times on Aug. 4. On that day, Musk criticized the publication’s coverage of South Africa and accused it of supporting calls for genocide. Reuters has no evidence that the two events are related. A spokesperson for the New York Times said it has not received an explanation from X about the link delay. “While we don’t know the rationale behind the application of this time delay, we would be concerned by targeted pressure applied to any news organization for unclear reasons,” the spokesperson said on Tuesday. A Reuters spokesperson said: “We are aware of the report in the Washington Post of a delay in opening links to Reuters stories on X. We are looking into the matter.” Bluesky, an X rival that has Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on its board, did not reply to a request for comment. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Additional reporting by Reuters Read More Twitter turning Tweetdeck into paid service after slowing down access to rivals The last parts of Twitter are being removed Musk pledges to fund legal bills of X users ‘unfairly treated’ by employers for posts Musk’s Twitter takeover sparks mass exodus of climate experts Snapchat experiences ‘temporary outage’ as My AI chatbot posts own Story WhatsApp rolls out AI tool for creating custom art

Scientists have worked out how close a neutron star collision would have to be to threaten all life on Earth, in a not-remotely-terrifying new study. The event, known as a kilonova, is among the most powerful and explosive in the known universe. It’s not quite as bright as a supernova – but we should still keep our distance. Haille Perkins, team leader and a scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Space.com: “We found that if a neutron star merger were to occur within around 36 light-years of Earth, the resulting radiation could cause an extinction-level event.” That’s about 212 trillion miles – which seems like quite a large danger zone. But we need not worry, apparently. Kilonovae are extremely rare and difficult to spot, because they happen so quickly. Scientists, including those from the University of Warwick, recently managed to observe one by using the James Webb telescope. The explosion first produces a blast of gamma rays which lasts for just seconds. If we got caught in one of those, it would fry us all rather quickly. That’s pretty unlikely because they go in two thin lines out from the centre of the blast. They also cause an afterglow of X-ray emissions in the surrounding dust and particles. If we’re within 16.3 light years of those, we’d be in trouble. But the worst bit is the cosmic rays (of course!) – energetic charged particles spreading out from the explosion in a bubble. If these hit Earth, they would strip the ozone layer and leave us vulnerable to ultraviolet rays for several thousand years. That would be a bummer because, again, we’d all die. Fortunately, kilonovae are so rare that we’re more likely to get hit by an asteroid, added Perkins. She said: “There are several other more common events like solar flares, asteroid impacts, and supernova explosions that have a better chance of being harmful.” That’s good then. New kilonova discoveries In the most recent kilonova, it was the gamma rays that alerted the astronomers to the fact something big was going down. Then, they got in touch with various telescopes and detectors to ask them to focus on the bit of the sky where the burst had come from, and bingo: kilonova. Here's what it looked like on the JWT's feed. One of the major discoveries from this one is that kilonovae produce an element called tellurium, a relatively rare element on Earth. They also worked out where the two neutron stars came from: a spiral galaxy about 120,000 light years away from the location of the final explosion. That’s about the diameter of the Milky Way, and just a little further away than the mere 36 light year danger zone, then. But it’s food for thought nonetheless, eh? How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel 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.

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IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 21, 2023--

Listen to The Big Take podcast on iHeart, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Terminal. The “Black Summer” bushfires devastated Australia