By Greg Bensinger Amazon.com Inc on Wednesday unveiled a slate of new and refreshed devices and updated its

TL;DR: Get a £40 aloSIM Mobile Data Traveller Lifetime eSIM credit for only £20 —

Microsoft Corp. is talking to partners to help launch a mobile gaming store that will take on Apple

A new effort to promote internet and media literacy by Microsoft has shown promising results in the fight against online misinformation

The centuries-old card game of bridge is being played at the Asian Games

Germany imposed an emergency spending freeze in response to last week’s ruling by the country’s top court, deepening

A lesbian couple have become the first in Europe and only the second in the world to have a baby they both carried. Little Derek Eloy came into the world weighing just over 7 lb 4 oz. Couple Estefanía, 30, and Azahara, 27, went to a fertility clinic in March to begin the process. A capsule of eggs and sperm was first placed into Estefania’s vagina. It was left for five days so the sperm could naturally fertilise the eggs in vivo. After the device was removed, the embryos were examined and selected before being transferred into Azahara’s uterus for further development. Azahara then carried Derek for nine months before giving birth to the healthy boy on 30 October. Derek’s birth in Palma, Majorca, was made possible thanks to an innovative fertility treatment called INVOcell. In total, the couple paid more than £4,400 (€5,000) for the treatment and the medication they had to take. A doctor from the team that made Derek’s birth possible explained: “The novelty in this process is that both could carry the embryo and share it for as long as needed.” Estefanía told local media: “It was a way for both of us to be able to carry him. “The idea that I could participate in this way and carry him in my womb was much more exciting.” Derek is the first European baby born via INVOcell. The technology has only been used once before - in 2018 by Texan couple Bliss and Ashleigh Coulter to allow them to carry their son, Stetson. Estefanía said: “Now, I look at him, my partner and I look at each other, and we feel that it’s something that has been within both of us, something we’ve done together.” Sign up to our new 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.

Fortnite x Jujutsu Kaisen requires players to earn Cursed Energy by completing Break the Curse Quests to unlock rewards, including Yuji Itadori.

It might be time to upgrade your iCloud storage, as the decade-old My Photo Stream

Facebook users have reported that the social media platform is down in the US. Thousands of users reported an outage with Mark Zuckerberg’s platform at around 11.45am PST, according to DownDetector, which monitors tech outages. Users in Indiana, Washington state, Florida, Nebraska and New York all stated on DownDetector that their service had been impacted. Thousands of users also complained about an issue with Facebook Messenger, while Twitter users posted that they were experiencing issues with WhatsApp and Instagram, which are both also owned by Meta. The Independent has reached out to Facebook for comment. Read More Meta scrambles to fix Instagram algorithm connecting ‘vast paedophile network’ Google revenue from anti-abortion campaigns and ‘fake’ clinics ‘topped $10m’ Police warn about dangerous emergency setting on Android phones

A brightly flashing “X” sign has been removed from the San Francisco headquarters of the company formerly known as Twitter, days after it was installed. The San Francisco Department of Building Inspection said Monday it received 24 complaints about the unpermitted structure over the weekend. It was first erected on Friday 28 July. “As you can see, they took down the X,” social media user @darren_stallcup wrote, sharing a video of the building which no longer features the sign. Elon Musk’s company also removed the Twitter wording and iconic blue bird logo from the building last week. Read More Luminous X sign glows on roof of Twitter building in San Francisco Twitter to X: Why Elon Musk rebranded the social networking platform Elon Musk provides first glimpse of new Twitter logo in X rebrand

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