List of All Articles with Tag 'tech'

Elon Musk will force companies on X to pay at least $1,000 (£770) per month in order to keep their verified status on the platform. From 7 August, any brand that does not pay the fee to the company formerly known as Twitter will lose the gold check mark that appears next to the account name. The latest strategy, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, comes amid declining ad revenues and fresh competition from text-based platforms launched by Meta and TikTok. Mr Musk responded to the report by stating that brands could also pay $1,000 per month for a verified organisation subscription. “This more than pays for itself in organic reach,” he posted on X. “The reason for the $1,000/ month is to set a moderately high bar to be a verified org, so that an org must be of non-trivial size to qualify and to make it expensive for scammers to create millions of accounts.” Earlier this month, the tech billionaire revealed that the company was suffering from negative cash flow issues after advertising revenue dropped by 50 per cent following his $44 billion takeover of the platform. Mr Musk has undertaken aggressive cost-cutting measures, which included firing more than 6,000 employees. He has also appointed former advertising executive Linda Yaccarino as the firm’s CEO in an effort to woo advertisers. The rebranding from Twitter to X could also open up new revenue streams, with Mr Musk planning to transform the social network into an “everything app” similar to China’s WeChat. X has already secured money-transmitting licences in three US states, which will allow payments to be integrated into the platform. Ms Yaccarino said on Monday that she believed X represented “the future state of unlimited interactivity”, integrating audio, video, messaging, and the ability to book and pay for goods and services. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” she posted on X. “For years, fans and critics alike have pushed Twitter to dream bigger, to innovate faster, and to fulfil our great potential. X will do that and more.” Read More What is Elon Musk’s ‘everything app’ X? Elon Musk takes control of @X account from user who had held it for 16 years Elon Musk’s ‘X’ is already trademarked by Mark Zuckerberg What is Elon Musk’s ‘everything app’ X?

DUBLIN Digital rights group NOYB on Thursday filed a complaint against Ryanair, alleging that the airline is violating

Slack, the popular workplace chat app, has broken in the middle of the day. The outage means that colleagues are unable to talk to each other. Attempting to send messages showed an error that indicated they had not been delivered – though users were still able to see old conversations. Many of the world’s biggest companies rely on Slack to connect colleagues both within and across companies. As many workplaces have gone at least partly remote, it is now a significant part of workplace communication. The outage began around 10am UK time on Thursday. Tracking website Down Detector showed a rapid spike in the number of reports of problems. The official Slack status page had not been updated at the time of publication. It had also not posted on its official Twitter accounts, which it sometimes uses to provide updates on outages. Read More Elon Musk’s Twitter rebrand ‘blocked in Indonesia’ Elon Musk takes control of @X account from user who had held it for 16 years Elon Musk’s ‘X’ is already trademarked by Mark Zuckerberg

Meta Platforms Inc. topped forecasts for second-quarter sales and gave a rosy outlook for the current period, signaling

ServiceNow Inc. raised its annual subscription sales forecast, signaling a strong pipeline for automation software and betting the

Meta's "year of efficiency" seems to be paying off. The Facebook-parent company on Wednesday reported revenue of some $32 billion for its quarter ending in June, marking a 11% increase compared to the same period last year and beating Wall Street's expectations.

By Luc Cohen NEW YORK Federal prosecutors in New York on Wednesday asked a judge to order Sam

The buzzing mattresses used to be a staple of seedy motels everywhere. Then they disappeared.

Scientists have claimed to make a breakthrough that would be “one of the holy grails of modern physics” – but experts have urged caution about the results. In recent days, many commentators have become excited by two papers that claim to document the production of a new superconductor that works at room temperature and ambient pressure. Scientists in Korea said they had synthesised a new material called LK-99 that would represent one of the biggest physics breakthroughs of recent decades. Superconductors are a special kind of material where electrical resistance vanishes, and which throw out magnetic fields. They are widely useful, including in the production of powerful magnets and in reducing the amount of energy lost as it moves through circuits. They are also often impractical, since they require low temperatures and high pressure. That means that they cannot be used in most traditional circuits, for instance. Since the beginning of the last century, scientists have been working not only to understand superconductivity but also develop new materials that would allow the phenomenon to be harvested at ambient temperatures and pressures. That has not been successful, and the discovery of such a material would mark a major breakthrough in physics. The new papers, published in recent days as a preprint on the website arXiv, claims to have overcome that problem. The researchers said they had not only found a way to synthesise such a superconducting material, but also that it could be done relatively easily – leading to huge excitement on social media. One Twitter thread from Alex Kaplan, a recent Princeton graduate who is now head of coffee product at startup Cometeer, helped propel the news into the mainstream. His thread had been viewed 8.5 million times, Twitter said, and has been retweeted more than 10,000 times. “Today might have seen the biggest physics discovery of my lifetime. I don’t think people fully grasp the implications of an ambient temperature / pressure superconductor,” he wrote in a long thread that went on to explain the possible applications of the material. Mr Kaplan pointed to the fact that vast amounts of energy are lost in the transmission of electricity across the world, that the the authors claimed material could be made in just 34 hours with simple equipment, and that such a superconductor would have revolutionary uses in everything from nuclear fusion reactors to batteries and quantum computers. Scientists away from the work agreed that such a breakthrough would be hugely significant. But they urged caution, pointing to the fact that the paper has not yet gone through the peer review process, the results have not been replicated, and that there could be other explanations for the apparently astonishing behaviour described in the work. “A real, working room-temperature superconductor which works at ambient pressure would be one of the holy grails of modern physics, unlocking major new developments in energy, transportation, healthcare, and communications,” said Mohammad Yazdani-Asrami of the University of Glasgow’s James Watt School of Engineering. “As it stands, however, the paper is not yet peer-reviewed and has not yet been tested in other labs to see if other researchers can reproduce its results. These are both key to determining for sure whether the world should be getting excited about the authors’ claims, which need much more scrutiny at this early stage. If the claims of findings are approved, perhaps, this is one of the most significant achievements of last few decades in physics and material engineering.” Others voiced specific concerns about the paper. Some of the results meant that other researchers working on superconductors were not convinced by the claims made in the paper. “The recent preprint by Lee, Kim and Kwon suggesting that they have observed room temperature superconductivity in the copper doped lead phosphate system, without the need for very high applied pressures, is interesting, but not yet wholly convincing,” said Susannah Speller, Professor of Materials Science at the University of Oxford, and Chris Grovenor, Professor of Materials at the University of Oxford. Professors Speller and Grovenor pointed to the fact that the data did not show the behaviour that would be expected to happen when the material became superconducting. Features that would be expected to be evident in the results were not, they said, and “and so it is too early to say that we have been presented with compelling evidence for superconductivity in these samples”. John Durrell, professor of superconductor engineering at Cambridge University, said that it could take considerable time to see the practical benefits of the breakthrough, even if the team’s results were confirmed. “There will be understandable scepticism about this result in the community as there have been numerous reports of room temperature superconductors over the years which have not held up,” he told The Independent. “I would, therefore, personally withhold judgement on this work until it becomes clear if the result is reproducible in other laboratories. “From my engineering point of view, a practical room temperature superconductor would be potentially transformative – allowing a host of exciting applications such as cheap MRI machines, more compact and efficient motors and low loss power transmission. “However, there can be significant challenges in turning a newly discovered superconducting material into a practical material. In previous cases, this has taken one or two decades and is not always possible.” Read More Europe to cover continent in fast EV chargers under new law Elon Musk takes control of @X account from user who had held it for 16 years iPhone users urged to check their photo library amid fears they could be deleted Europe to cover continent in fast EV chargers under new law Elon Musk takes control of @X account from user who had held it for 16 years iPhone users urged to check their photo library amid fears they could be deleted

Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit, determined to take on Microsoft and Google in the burgeoning market for generative artificial

The Loch Ness Monster has left people scratching their heads for years, with many claiming they spotted the beast itself. Now, it's got its own "eel hypothesis," a paper dedicated to the theory that such sightings could have been eels. Researchers looked at data from Loch Ness to understand the number of eels there and their average measurements, as per IFL Science. They discovered that the eels were on the smaller side, compared to the estimates of the Loch Ness Monster, said to be roughly 1-2 metres according to one sighting. Another suggested it could be 15-20 metres. "However, this is not quite the ‘monster postulated," the authors told the outlet."Indeed, the probability of finding a 6-meter [20-foot] eel in Loch Ness is essentially zero – too low for the software used to provide a reliable estimate." "Thus, while large eels may account for some eyewitness sightings of large, animate objects rising to the loch surface, they are unlikely to account for 'sightings' of extraordinarily large animals, which may instead be accounted for by wave phenomena, the occasional stray mammal, or other reasons." Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter It comes after several sightings last year were shot down by an academic who said they were simply whale penises. Michael Sweet, a professor in molecular ecology at the University of Derby, candidly, and informatively, added: "Whales often mate in groups so while one male is busy with the female the other male just pops his d*** out of the water while swimming around waiting his turn. "Everyone’s gotta have a bit of fun, right?" 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.

Amazon.com’s cloud division has drawn thousands of customers to try out its service vying with Microsoft and Google