About 2,000 people mobbed Union Square in anticipation of a PlayStation 5 offer by influencer Kai Cenat.

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You probably know who Bryan Johnson is by now. If the name doesn't ring a bell, perhaps his mission to reverse his biological age does. Spending a staggering $2 million a year on his experiment to reverse his age, the 46-year-old has tried various methods from a strict diet to using his son's blood. During an interview with Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO podcast, Johnson revealed his latest method to indicate his health. This time? Measuring his nighttime erections. Johnson told Bartlett that nighttime erections "are actually a meaningful health indicator" because they "represent psychological health, cardiological health." He found that during the night he was typically erect for "two hours and 12 minutes" – but has since undergone shockwave therapy to "rebuild" his penis in an attempt to reach "three hours and 30 minutes of nighttime erections" in order to get to the level of an 18-year-old. Johnson explains that he sits in a chair and gets his penis "shocked". "So there's this technology, you have a wand and you sit in a chair and then the technician uses the wand and basically shocks your penis, through the acoustic technology. "And it does the same things as workouts [...] where you're creating micro injuries so that it rebuilds." The technology is more commonly used for other body parts, namely dodgy knees, joints, or shoulders, however it can also be used for erectile dysfunction. Although Johnson made it clear that he does not suffer from erectile dysfunction saying he "score[s] perfect[ly] in every category" - Johnson was curious to see the technology's effects on his penis, seeing if would "rejuvenate" it and "increase nighttime erections." The results? "I'm now two months in, in my subjective experience, it's as if my penis has gotten like 15 years younger," Johnson told Bartlett." So we're still in the early stages, we still need to measure, we need data before we're going to believe anything subjectively." Although, the results come with a cost it seems. "It's painful. You need to be focused. You need to do pain management," he says. "It's like maybe a seven out of 10, but once you get to the tip, it's like a nine out of 10 because the tip you have improve sensitivity. "In addition to what we're trying to do with the nighttime erections, it also improves erection strength and orgasm pleasurability. So it has all kinds of benefits I'm trying to figure out." 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. How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel

Google can now use public data to help train and create AI products, according to

A natural phenomenon consisting of polka-dot-style formations has been cropping up around the world, and scientists are baffled as to why. The circular-shaped patches of ground have been seen in deserts in Australia and Namibia but now experts believe they are more widespread than originally thought. Known as “fairy circles”, there are now 263 known sites across the globe where they can be found, according to new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). They have been documented in 15 countries, across three continents, including the Sahel region of Africa, Madagascar, and in Middle-West Asia. And yet, despite the spread of these anomalies, scientists are still none the wiser about how they actually form. A team led by environmental scientist Emilio Guirado, of the University of Alicante in Spain, explained in their paper on the "intriguing" phenomenon: “We conducted a global and systematic assessment of fairy circle-like vegetation patterns and discovered hundreds of [fairy-circle]-like locations on three continents. “Our study provides insights into the ecology and biogeography of these fascinating vegetation patterns and the first atlas of their global distribution.” The mysterious circles appear in desert regions and can be as wide as 12 metres (39 feet) in diameter. They are almost always spaced out and rarely connect or overlap with one another. Several theories have been put forward as to what causes them, including, tiny insects, termites, and plant toxins. But, none have been accompanied by any significant evidence and some have been debunked completely. One significant factor limiting their study is they are often found in places that are difficult to access and are inhospitable. Locating the 263 different sites of “fairy circles” involved analysing high-resolution satellite imagery. Guirado and his team wrote in their paper: “[The sites] include those already identified in Namibia and Western Australia, as well as areas never described before, including the Sahel, Western Sahara, Horn of Africa, Madagascar, Southwest Asia, or Central and Southwest Australia. “By doing so, our study provides a global atlas of areas showing FC-like vegetation patterns and expands the known existence of this vegetation type to new countries and continents.” The team hopes that locating new sites will enable them to find common traits that may point towards their cause. 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.

TL;DR: The 2023 All-In-One Raspberry Pi and Arduino Developer Bundle is on sale for £55.47,

The iPhone is a lot of things. It's a social networking portal, it's a games console – sometimes it's even a phone. For Apple's Jon McCormack, Apple's vice president for camera software engineering, it's "primarily a camera that you can text from". It wasn't always this way. When Steve jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he famously described it is an iPod, a phone and an internet communications device; the first iPhone had a camera, new iPhones are cameras. The pictures that first iPhone turned out were more useful than beautiful. Today, however, the iPhone's pictures have grown up, and it is now the most popular camera in the world. Now the question is how sharp the pictures should be, and there has even been some criticism that the pictures it turns out are too sharp, if anything. The iPhone's camera is no longer just a useful addition but is used in professional contexts, and is often given as the main reason to upgrade to new models. The new iPhone 15s, in particular the premium Pro and Pro Max, continue Apple's mission to turn its smartphones into cameras like nothing in the history of photography. They have new image formats, the addition of extra focal lengths, and the iPhone 15 Pro Max even includes a 5x lens that makes use of a "tetraprism" lens that bounces light around inside the phone to add dramatically more zoom without making the phone any bigger. All of that additional hardware works in collaboration with improved software: users no longer have to click into portrait mode, for instance, because the camera automatically captures depth information when taking a picture of people, so that background blur can be added and edited even after the photo has been taken. Apple has also added a host of features that many people are unlikely ever to even look at, let alone use, but are important to professionals. They include the addition of Log encoding and the Academy Color Encoding System – both key to those who need them. Apple also says that the new iPhone has "the equivalent of seven pro lenses", despite really only having three; what they mean is that you can choose different crops, which is in part an attempt to appeal to those professional photographers who stubbornly say that they will only ever work with a 50mm lens, for instance. (Those new lens choices are not only a cropped version of the existing lenses, says McCormack, since the phone also has custom neural networks specifically designed to optimise images at that focal length.) Those complex new features are a reminder that the iPhone is many things to many users: some may simply want to remember important events, or snap pictures of their pets. Others might be truly professional photographers, needing to rely on their iPhone to capture valuable and fleeting events. Some people are, no doubt, both – and Apple is aware that the iPhone has to be both, too. "For us, what we feel is really important – especially since computational photography started to blur the line between hardware and software, and really enable anybody to take stunning shots with minimal effort – is making sure that that tool that we have in your pocket is adapting to your needs," says Maxime Veron, Apple's senior director for iPhone product marketing. "So if you're just trying to take a quick photo of your kids can get out of the way and just allow you to do that. And if you want to create a professionally created Hollywood style video, it can also give you the customisation and the power to do that." McCormack says that Apple builds the camera from "the core belief that everybody has got a story that is worth telling". For some people that story might be their child taking their first steps, captured in a video that will be shared with only a few people. Or it might be a photojournalist taking images that are going to be shared with millions. "Our belief is that your level of technical understanding shouldn't get in the way of you being able to tell that story," he says. High-end cameras have often required their users to think about a whole host of questions before they even get to actually pressing the button to take a picture: "the temperature of light, the amount of light, the direction of light, how fast is the subject moving? What are the skin tones?" notes McCormack. "Every second that you spend thinking about that, and playing with your settings and things like that, are seconds that you are drawn out of the moment," he says. "And what we want to create is this very deep connection between the photographer, the videographer and the moment." He points to the action button on this year's Pro models, which can be programmed to launch the camera with a push. "It's all about being able to say all of this crazy complexity of photography, or videography – Apple's taken that, and understood that, and hidden that from you," he says. "You as a photographer, you get to concentrate on the thing that you want to say, and finding that decisive moment, finding that beautiful framing, that says the thing that you want to say. "But the motivation for all of this and using all of this crazy, great computational photography, computational videography, is that we don't want to distract you from telling the story that you want to tell." That has meant building the iPhone's camera in a way that the features "unfold", he says. "Out of the box, we are going to give you an amazing thing that is going to cover most of your moments, with lots of dynamic range, lots of resolution, zero shutter lag, so you can capture the moment. "But of course, there are folks who are going to look at this and say, you know, I've got a very specific and very prescriptive vision," he says. He points to a variety of new tools that are built into the phone, such as the ProRAW format, which makes huge files and is not especially useful to most – but can be key to someone who really wants to ensure they are able to process every detail of a photograph after it is taken. Those are hidden within settings, there for the people who need them but not troubling those who don't. Veron also notes that many of those extra features are enabled by "an amazing ecosystem of third party partners" who make apps that allow people to get features they are looking for. It is a reminder of just how much is going on as soon as someone takes a picture with the iPhone. First, light travels through one of Apple's three lenses and hits a 48 megapixel sensor – but that's just the beginning of a long process of computational photography that analyses and optimises that image. The picture that is taken is not just the one image, for example: it is actually made up of multiple exposures, with more or less light, that can then be merged into a picture with the full dynamic range. "This year for the first time, we merge them in a larger resolution," says McCormack. It takes one image in 12 megapixels, to give a fast shutter speed and plenty of light, by combining pixels together; then it grabs a 24-megapixel frame, which collects the detail. "Then we register those together and use a custom machine learning model to go and transfer the detail from the 48 over into what has now become a 24." That creates something like the negative in old camera terms, which the iPhone’s processor can then get to work on, using parts of its chip focused on machine learning. "We use the neural engine to go decompose that photograph, bit by bit." It will notice if people have different skin tones, and develop those parts of the image accordingly; hair, eyes, a moving background and more are all taken to pieces and optimised on their own. (The intensity of that process has occasionally led to questions over whether the phone is working too hard to make its images look good.) Then there's yet more work for the camera system. The iPhone uses tonemapping to ensure that images pop on the bright screens of modern iPhones, but also that they still look bright on a compressed image that might be sent around the internet; one of the many changes that smartphones have brought to photography is that, for the first time, the photos are mostly looked at on the same device they were taken with, but that they can also be sent and seen just about anywhere. If the image is taken using night mode, then there's even more work, with new tools that ensure that colours are more accurate. And that isn't even mentioning portrait mode, which when it registers that there is a person (or a pet) in the frame will gather the relevant depth information to ensure that the background can be manipulated later. That whole process – those five paragraphs, and thousands of calculations by the phone – happen within the tiniest moment after pressing the button to take the photo. The phone may look as if it is serenely offering up an image to its users, but it has been busily working away in the background to ensure the picture is as accurate and vibrant as possible. All that work done by the camera and the rest of the device depends on a variety of choices made not only by the iPhone but by Apple, which accounts for the look of the modern iPhone picture – Veron says that its aim in making those decisions is to make "beautiful, true-to-life memories in just one click". McCormack is clearly keenly aware of the responsibility of that task; his vision decides what the world's memories look like. "This is your device that you carry with you all time the time, and we want to be really, really thoughtful of that," he says. That responsibility carries into the design of the camera within the phone: rumours had suggested that this year's model would include a "periscope" design for the long zoom, bouncing the light through the length of the iPhone, but McCormack says that Apple went for the five-way prism to ensure that it could "both retain the industrial design that we want, to just make iPhone feel so good in your hand, but also be able to get that extra focal length". "It is just of one of those crazy things – only Apple is going to do something like that. And I'm really glad that that's the way we think about product." Read More Tim Cook says Vision Pro release is on track: ‘I watched Ted Lasso Season 3 on it’ Apple Store goes offline as Apple opens pre-orders for iPhone 15 Apple to update iPhone 12 after fears over radiation iPhone 12 is not emitting dangerous radiation, Apple says, amid fears of Europe ban France’s iPhone 12 ban could spread across Europe, regulators say Everything Apple killed off at iPhone 15 event

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A startup in China is set to begin production of ultra-efficient solar panels that are made from the so-called “miracle material” perovskite. The next-generation solar cells will be manufactured at half the cost of traditional silicon cells, with 50 per cent greater efficiency, according to researchers from Nanjing University who made the design breakthrough that made mass production possible. “The raw materials for making perovskite cells are cheap and abundant, making the production costs of these cells just one 20th of traditional solar cells,” Professor Tan Hairen from Nanjing University, told state media. “Moreover, they are easier to produce and can be made in a single factory. Even with other items added, the overall cost of production is only half of that of traditional silicon cells.” Professor Tan has created a startup called Renshine Solar to move forward with commercialisation of the technology, and has already signed a government deal to build a production line in Jiangsu province this summer. The factory is expected to achieve a capacity of 150 megawatts by September, according to the South China Morning Post, with the perovskite solar panels built for use on roofs, walls, or placed on electric cars to improve their range. The perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are capable of retaining over 90 per cent of their initial performance after 600 hours of continuous operation, the team noted, making them suitable for commercial use. The researchers said the next-generation solar cells could also be used in applications ranging from building-integrated panels to space-based electricity generation. “With their lower fabrication cost, low-temperature solution processability, roll-to-roll manufacturing, and wide-bandgap tunability, PSCs have the potential to become the candidate of choice for high-efficiency tandem solar cells,” they wrote in a study detailing the new design that will enter production. “Considering the rapid progress in photovoltaic performance, PSCs have been considered to be ideal candidates for integrating with other systems to realise new innovative technologies.” The study, titled ‘Next-generation applications for integrated perovskite solar cells’, was published in the scientific journal Nature. Its publication comes just one month after a South Korean firm announced that it was aiming to commercialise tandem perovskite solar cells following a $100 million investment to fund a pilot production line next year. Read More Scientists break world record for solar power window material Electric cars could save more than 100,000 lives, study claims Solar trees offer unique solution to charging electric cars College students who cut social media use have less anxiety