By Krystal Hu Venture capital funding globally almost halved in the first six months of 2023, data from

In today's connected world, you must leverage social media tools, such as Facebook and Twitter,

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 22, 2023--

Meowko, a well-known Twitch streamer, has been banned from the platform for what she claims is a very bizzare reason

Federal safety regulators are urging consumers to stop using baby pillows that have been linked to 10 infant deaths but are still being sold on Facebook Marketplace, despite being recalled two years ago

Apple has released an emergency patch to protect older iPhones and Macs from last week’s

If the AMD X670E chipset has a sweet spot, MSI's X670E Tomahawk motherboard is dead

Anna Sitar, who rose to fame with her 'I Don't Want It' and 'Another Day, Another Starbies' series, makes up to $4,000 per sponsored post

Elon Musk pleaded with X users on Sunday to try and stick to the facts, as the site and its billionaire owner come under heavy criticism for the spread of false information regarding the Israel-Hamas war. “As always, please try stay as close to the truth as possible, even for stuff you don’t like,” Mr Musk wrote on X. “This platform aspires to maximize signal/noise of the human collective.” Critics have been hammering Mr Musk for the proliferation of fake news on the site, arguing his attempts to loosen the reins on its content moderation have allowed bad actors and dubious sources to flourish. “This site is a cesspool of disinformation,” former Obama administration official and podcaster Tommy Vietor wrote on X in response to Mr Musk’s plea. “You have made it exponentially worse, and just this morning you recommended an account known to spread lies and antisemitism. Other than that, great job.” “This site is worse than useless during a breaking news story,” Aaron Kleinman, of the States Project political advocacy group, wrote recently in response to a thread collecting false information about the war in Israel and Gaza. “Actively harmful. Don’t log in if you want to be informed.” Dubious news stories have spread far and wide on the site formerly known as Twitter since the outbreak of war in Israel yesterday. A widely seen video, purporting to show a Hamas militant shooting down an Israeli helicopter, was really a clip from a video game, BBC Verify’s Shayan Sardarizadeh reports. A Taliban spokesperson had to set the record straight after a false claim spread on social media that the group was seeking to join in the conflict, Pakistan bureau chief for WIONews Anas Mallick reports. And a widely shared clip of Israel reportedly bombing a Gazan office tower really was from fighting that occured in 2021. Critics of X allege that policy changes under Mr Musk have allowed such false information to spread more easily. Since taking over, Mr Musk has disbanded Twitter’s trust and safety team, reinstated (and at times vocally endorsed the content of) known extremists and far-right commentators, removed labels noting accounts associated with foreign governments, and allowed paid access to the verification feature, a designation on Twitter previously reserved for heads of states, celebrities, journalists, and other high-profile individuals who could see their credibility abused by imitators. The Independent has contacted X for comment. Read More Israel-Palestine conflict live: Fierce gun battles rage with Hamas militants as ‘over 700 Israelis killed’ Israel suffers bloodiest day in decades as fierce gunfights rage in streets against Hamas militants US regulators seek to compel Elon Musk to testify in their investigation of his Twitter acquisition

An algorithm has spotted a nearly 600-foot, potentially hazardous asteroid near Earth. The tool is intended to find dangerous objects in Earth’s vicinity, to allow scientists to better track them and understand any threat they might pose. The new discovery is the system’s first detection of a “potentially hazardous” asteroid, a term that is used for those rocks that are near enough and possibly threatening enough to cause a danger to Earth. An asteroid gets the designation if it is within about 5 million miles of Earth’s orbit. The asteroid, known as 2022 SF289, does not pose any threat to Earth for the foreseeable future. Its closest approach brings it 140,000 miles from Earth – closer to us than the Moon, but still far enough away to be safe. But the creators of the algorithm said that it showed that the system could be used to detect others in the future – some of which may pose a threat to life on Earth. “By demonstrating the real-world effectiveness of the software that Rubin will use to look for thousands of yet-unknown potentially hazardous asteroids, the discovery of 2022 SF289 makes us all safer,” said scientist Ari Heinze, the principal developer of the algorithm, known as HelioLinc3D. Astronomers are looking forward to switching on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, in Chile, in 2025. It will allow for a much more detailed view of the night sky. They hope that it can be used to spot more potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs. But the extra detail will also make more work for those poring through the data to find them, and so algorithms will be important to helping that work. HelioLinc3D is one such algorithm, and was built specifically to find asteroids within the Rubin observatory’s dataset. Though the equipment is not yet switched on, its creators looked to test whether it would successfully be able to find asteroids when it is looking through that data. The discovery of 2022 SF289 suggests that it will be. It was found in data from the ATLAS survey, based in Hawaii. ATLAS had actually seen the object three times on four separate nights, but an asteroid has to be seen four times on one night to be identified as a near-Earth object. “Any survey will have difficulty discovering objects like 2022 SF289 that are near its sensitivity limit, but HelioLinc3D shows that it is possible to recover these faint objects as long as they are visible over several nights,” said Denneau. “This in effect gives us a ‘bigger, better’ telescope.” Until now it had also been missed because it was passing in front of the busy and bright stars of the Milky Way. But scientists were able to confirm the existence of the object by looking back through data when they knew where to look. Scientists are aware of 2,350 PHAs already, but expect there are 3,000 out there waiting to be found. “This is just a small taste of what to expect with the Rubin Observatory in less than two years, when HelioLinc3D will be discovering an object like this every night,” said Rubin scientist Mario Jurić, director of the DiRAC Institute, professor of astronomy at the University of Washington and leader of the team behind HelioLinc3D. “But more broadly, it’s a preview of the coming era of data-intensive astronomy. From HelioLinc3D to AI-assisted codes, the next decade of discovery will be a story of advancement in algorithms as much as in new, large, telescopes.” Read More Reddit closes Place after obscene protests Kenya suspends eyeball-scanning crypto worldcoin Google warns Gmail users they could be about to lose their account Reddit closes Place after obscene protests Kenya suspends eyeball-scanning crypto worldcoin Google warns Gmail users they could be about to lose their account

It's almost that time of year again, when we see how many hours we've shamelessly spent listening to mortifying music and just playing Taylor Swift on loop. Yes, Spotify Wrapped is almost here again and soon you social media feeds will be full of people either showing you how cool by how much Senegalese lounge Jazz they listen to or embarrassed that they still haven't moved on from The Libertines or The Strokes. Each and every year, even for the most dedicated of music lovers, Spotify Wrapped throws up countless surprises in your top artists and songs leading many to question just how it tallies what you listen to. With the big day somewhere on the horizon (it arrived on November 30 in 2022 and December 1 in 2021) music nerds are curious to know what their Wrapped will look like for 2023. Spotify have never officially said how they compile their data for Wrapped but a Reddit user in 2021 revealed how they believed it works. In the post Hudsonlovestech pointed out six key takeaways that they discovered after downloading their data from the music platform. They were: This year the data was logged from January 1st 00:00 to November 15th 23:59. You have to listen to a song for more than 30 seconds for it to count in your song rankings. Your top songs are calculated by play count rather than total time listened. In your top 100 playlist only the first 10 songs are sorted by play count, the rest are close but sorted by artist. Your total time listening includes podcasts. Your top artists are calculated by total play counts rather than total time listening. If you apply this date to your own listening history then there is a chance you might discover what your Wrapped will look like this year although there is no guarantee. Meanwhile, many users on X/Twitter are posting memes, imagining what their Wrapped will look like this year. To be honest, we're just dreading seeing how much we listened to Ryan Gosling sing 'I'm Just Ken' from the Barbie soundtrack. 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.

An artificial intelligence system has achieved a key milestone by winning multiple races against three world-class drone-racing champions, marking the first time AI has beat humans at a physical sport. The AI system called Swift, developed by researchers from the University of Zurich in Germany and Intel, could prove its mettle in first-person view (FPV) drone racing – a sport in which pilots fly quadcopters at speeds exceeding 100kmph. Until now AI systems have achieved a number of remarkable victories over humans in a range of strategy-based games, including IBM’s Deep Blue winning at chess against Gary Kasparov in 1996 and Google’s AlphaGo defeating top Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016. However, physical sports are more challenging for AI as they are less predictable than board or video games. “We don’t have a perfect knowledge of the drone and environment models, so the AI needs to learn them by interacting with the physical world,” Davide Scaramuzza, one of the authors of the study from the University of Zurich, explained. AI-driven autonomous drones have until now taken twice as long as those piloted by humans to fly through racetracks unless an external position-tracking system was used to precisely control their trajectories. But the new Swift AI drone, described in a new study in the journal Nature, has demonstrated that it can react in real-time to the data collected by an onboard camera, just like the one used by human racers in the sport. Sensors on the drone measure acceleration and speed while the AI system uses data from the camera to locate the drone in space and detect the gates along the racetrack. A control unit in the drone, also based on AI, a control unit, then chooses the best action to finish the race circuit as fast as possible. Researchers say the Swift drone trained itself to fly in a simulated environment by trial and error. Using simulations, scientists could avoid destroying multiple drones in the early stages of learning when the system often crashes. “To make sure that the consequences of actions in the simulator were as close as possible to the ones in the real world, we designed a method to optimise the simulator with real data,” study first author Elia Kaufmann said. During the testing phase, the drone flew autonomously using very precise positions provided by an external position-tracking system, while also recording data from its camera. By comparing the two data sets, Swift could learn to autocorrect errors it made in interpreting information from the onboard sensors, scientists say. The AI was soon ready to challenge some of the world’s top human drone pilots – the 2019 Drone Racing League champion Alex Vanover, the 2019 MultiGP Drone Racing champion Thomas Bitmatta, and three-time Swiss champion Marvin Schaepper. In races that took place between 5 and 13 June 2022, on a special track designed in a hangar of the Dübendorf Airport near Zurich, Swift achieved the fastest lap, with a half-second lead over the best lap by a human pilot. The special track – about 25 by 25 meters in dimension – was built with seven square gates that had to be passed in the right order to complete a lap. Drones had to execute challenging maneuvers to successfully finish the track, including an acrobatic “Split-S” feature that involves half-rolling the drone and executing a descending half-loop at full speed. While Swift could record the fastest lap, humans are more adaptable than the AI drone, which failed when the conditions were different from what it was trained for, scientists say. However, they add that the new breakthrough in AI flight is an important way beyond drone racing. “Drones have a limited battery capacity; they need most of their energy just to stay airborne. Thus, by flying faster we increase their utility,” Dr Scaramuzza said. The new research, according to scientists, may lead to better drones for forest monitoring or space exploration, and in cases where flying fast is important to cover large spaces in a limited time. They say fast AI drones could also be used for shooting action scenes in movies and may also “make a huge difference” for rescue drones sent inside a burning building. Read More Ukraine launches ‘massive’ drone strikes on six regions of Russia – destroying war planes Ukraine-Russia war live: Kyiv’s huge drone attack as Putin floods frontline with ‘poorly trained troops’ To stop wildfires, residents in some Greek suburbs put their own money toward early warning drones Google launches AI to go to meetings for you Behind the AI boom, the armies of overseas workers in ‘digital sweatshops’ Nvidia sales hit record high as AI chip demand soars