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After more than three billion doses, the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine is being withdrawn.

AstraZeneca said it was "incredibly proud" of the vaccine, but it had made a commercial decision.

It said the rise of new coronavirus variants meant demand had shifted to the newer updated vaccines.

Its vaccine was estimated to have saved millions of lives during the pandemic, but also caused rare, and sometimes fatal, blood clots.

In the race to lift the world out of pandemic lockdowns, the Covid vaccine was developed by scientists at the University of Oxford in record time. A process that normally takes 10 years was accelerated down to about 10 months.

The “world’s largest” plant designed to suck planet-heating pollution out of the atmosphere like a giant vacuum began operating in Iceland on Wednesday.

“Mammoth” is the second commercial direct air capture plant opened by Swiss company Climeworks in the country, and is 10 times bigger than its predecessor, Orca, which started running in 2021.

Direct air capture, or DAC, is a technology designed to suck in air and strip out the carbon using chemicals. The carbon can then be injected deep beneath the ground, reused or transformed into solid products.

Climeworks plans to transport the carbon underground where it will be naturally transformed into stone, locking up the carbon permanently. It is partnering with Icelandic company Carbfix for this so-called sequestration process.

Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink on Wednesday said part of its brain implant malfunctioned after it put the system in a human patient for the first time.

Neuralink has built a brain-computer interface, or a BCI, that could eventually help patients with paralysis control external technology using only their minds. The company’s system, called the Link, records neural signals using 1,024 electrodes across 64 “threads” that are thinner than a human hair, according to its website.

In January, Neuralink implanted the device in a 29-year-old patient named Noland Arbaugh as part of a study to test its safety. The company streamed a live video with Arbaugh as he used the BCI in March, and Neuralink said in an April blog post that the surgery went “extremely well.”

But in the weeks afterward, a number of threads have retracted from Arbaugh’s brain, Neuralink said in a blog post Wednesday. This meant there were fewer effective electrodes, which inhibited the company’s ability to measure the Link’s speed and accuracy.

A high-tech method for producing cold brew coffee that uses ultrasonic waves to extract flavour could cut the time required from 24 hours to just a few minutes.

Cold brew coffee, which is made by steeping coffee grounds in cold water, is gaining popularity because it results in a less bitter drink than traditional methods using hot water. But the technique is also a headache for coffee shops as they need refrigerator space and must allow up to 24 hours to make a brew.

Now Francisco Trujillo at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and his colleagues have found a unique way to quickly extract a cold shot of coffee – by bombarding the grounds with ultrasonic waves. The resulting drink can be ready in less than 3 minutes.

Trujillo says the initial idea for using ultrasound, which smashes up the grounds in a process called acoustic cavitation, was that it might allow the extraction of more antioxidants. This turned out not to be the case, but their initial set up, requiring around £15,000 of ultrasonic equipment, produced a surprisingly good coffee.

“There’s nothing like it,” says Trujillo. “The flavour is nice, the aroma is nice and the mouth feel is more viscous and there’s less bitterness than a regular espresso shot. And it has a level of acidity that people seem to like. It’s now my favourite way to drink coffee.”

Stack Overflow, a legendary internet forum for programmers and developers, is coming under heavy fire from its users after it announced it was partnering with OpenAI to scrub the site's forum posts to train ChatGPT. Many users are removing or editing their questions and answers to prevent them from being used to train AI — decisions which have been punished with bans from the site's moderators.

Stack Overflow user Ben posted on Mastodon about his experience editing his most successful answers to try to avoid having his work stolen by OpenAI.

Ben continues in his thread, "[The moderator crackdown is] just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. It's just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you."

Harsh words, but words that ring true with fellow Stack Overflow users who are joining the post protest. Users are also asking why ChatGPT could not simply share the source of the answers it will dispense in this new partnership, both citing its sources and adding credibility to the tool. Of course, this would reveal how the sausage of LLMs is made, and would not look like the shiny, super-smart generative AI assistant of the future promised to users and investors.

Amid a series of layoffs, tech companies are finding it increasingly difficult to sponsor foreign workers for employment-based green cards due to stringent labor rules designed to protect U.S. workers. The process, governed by the Program Electronic Review Management system, mandates job advertising to ensure U.S. workers are not adversely affected.

However, President Joe Biden's administration is considering a green card rule change that could significantly alter this landscape. The proposed exemption could be applied to a broad range of tech occupations including, notably, software engineering -- which represents about 1.8 million U.S. positions, according to U.S. labor statistics data -- and would allow companies to bypass some labor market tests if there's a demonstrated shortage of U.S. workers in an occupation.

Specifically, the Biden administration is looking to update the Department of Labor's Schedule A Shortage Occupation List to include STEM occupations. This list, which hasn't been updated in decades and is focused primarily on healthcare, exempts listed occupations from Program Electronic Review Management (PERM) requirements such as advertising job openings in newspapers, on the employer's website, at jobs fairs and other steps. Tech companies have latched on to the Schedule A list as a means to cut green card processing time and government regulation.

Microsoft, one of the tech leaders in Washington seeking tech-related immigration reforms, is lobbying for the inclusion of tech roles on this list. Citing its own research from LinkedIn, a business it owns, Microsoft anticipates significant labor shortages in fields such as software engineering, cybersecurity and data science.

There’s really no gentle way to ease you into this situation so I’ll just be blunt: Yoda got removed from Fortnite because an emote inspired by Zoidberg from Futurama was turning the little Jedi master into a nasty monster that crashed people’s games. What a world we live in?

In case you missed it, last week Fortnite launched its massive Star Wars Day event. It added new Star Wars character skins, accessories, and even the catchy Cantina band song to the game’s Fortnite Festival mode. One of these new Star Wars-themed cosmetic items was a Yoda backpack that players could buy and wear as any character as they ran around Fortnite killing Goku and Ariana Grande. But, as documented online and confirmed by Epic Games, if you tried to do a specific emote while he was on your back, you’d trigger a game-breaking bug.

On May 7, iFireMonkey, a popular Fortnite news and leaks account, reported that players with the Yoda backpack were encountering a strange bug that turned the Jedi Master into a noodle-y monster before crashing the game. You can see the game-breaking glitch in action in the video below.

Samsung has launched a new television aimed squarely at those for whom money is no object. Measuring 114 inches and packing Micro LED technology, the "ultra-premium" set costs the equivalent of around $132,630. It's so expensive that Samsung is giving away an 8K TV worth $8,000 as an incentive to buyers.

Samsung has a history of producing massive, and massively expensive, Micro LED TVs, going back to CES 2018 when it first unveiled The Wall, a 146-inch modular TV.

The Korean giant made a more living room-friendly 75-inch Micro LED TV a year later, followed by a 110-inch version in 2020. There have also been 89-inch and 110-inch models.

In addition to the massive size, the reason for the 114-inch version's KRW 180 million ($132,630) price tag is the set's use of Micro LED.

A 34-year-old Idaho man has been imprisoned for at least 30 years after "purposely" trying to spread HIV through sexual contact with both men and teenage boys, prosecutors say.

This investigation began in August 2023 as a child enticement case, according to the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office in Idaho, when Alexander Louie initially began an online sexual conversation with who he believed was a 15-year-old boy but was actually an undercover Ada County Sheriff’s Detective.

“Mr. Louie organized to meet up with the person he believed was the boy for sex, and was arrested,” prosecutors said following the announcement of Louie’s sentence. “As the investigation continued, law enforcement uncovered that Mr. Louie, who is HIV positive, was not taking his medication, and purposely having sexual contact with both men and teenage boys in hopes to transfer HIV to them. He lied to these victims about his HIV status. Through the defendant’s own admissions, he had sexual intercourse with 30-50 different men and boys, including a 16-year-old.”

On Friday, Ada County District Judge Derrick O’Neill sentenced Louie to a 30-year prison sentence, 16 of which must be served before being eligible for parole.

Alexandra 'Nicole' Ligon Lambert was arrested after a student at Morgan County Middle School in Georgia, US, allegedly drank vodka from a Mountain Dew bottle she had in her possession

The incident happened when a male student from Morgan County Middle School in Georgia, US, pinched a Mountain Dew from the staff member's stash. It was later identified as belonging to 39-year-old Alexandra "Nicole" Ligon Lambert.

After taking a gulp, he quickly realised that the green label bottle contained something other than his expected soft drink. The student then threw out the drink and went to alert another teacher.

That teacher then brought the matter to the principle's office on Thursday afternoon. Lambert was then confronted about the hidden spirit and eventually confessed to unintentionally bringing the alcohol to the school.

Police were called to the school at around 1.15pm. A subsequent breathalyser test confirmed Lambert to be three times over the state's drink-drive limit at 0.08 hitting a hefty 0.259. Due to her intoxicated state, she was barred from driving home and the police were called to investigate the matter further.

French company Seabike has developed a swimming device that uses your own leg power to accelerate you through the water at superhuman speeds. This crank-driven pusher prop looks a bit like an underwater unicycle... We'd love to take one for a spin!

I can't say I've seen anything like this "underwater mobility device" before. The idea is simple enough; you extend the Seabike's pole to the appropriate length, then strap it to your waist with a belt. Then you find the pedals with your feet, and start turning the crank, with the waist strap to push against.

This drives what looks like about a 15-inch (38-cm) propeller. At this point, you start gliding through the water with the splendid, gracious ease of a cruising dugong with an outboard up its bum. You can swim with your arms as well, which creates a surreal visual effect somewhat akin to watching somebody walking along an airport travelator:

Or you can laze along, arms held out Superman-style. Or indeed, you can angle your nose down, go fully underwater and make like a pedal-powered fish. It's fully compatible with a SCUBA setup if you want to really go nuts down there, although you wouldn't want to take it down too deep and overexert yourself.

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Awesome!

TOKYO -- The Japanese government warned day care centers, kindergartens and other facilities across the country on May 7 not to publish naked children's photos on their websites as many have been reposted on porn sites.

The Children and Families Agency and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology issued the notice in response to some cases in which images of unclothed children have been misused by third parties. They asked facilities to remove such photos immediately if there are any on their websites.

The Mainichi Shimbun had earlier reported that at least 135 facilities such as day care centers and kindergartens had posted images of their children in the nude on their blogs and elsewhere. Of these, photos from 12 facilities were reposted on overseas porn sites among others, while whole web pages containing images from 80 facilities were duplicated and stored on external sites. In addition, pictures from at least six facilities were incorporated into data used for artificial intelligence training.

/u/kynthrus said:

For those wondering, Japan schools have sleep overs and school trips from a very young age and everyone bathes together, boys and girls separate in elementary. So the pictures taken are of everyone having fun in the bath area specifically for parents. There usually isn't any fully nude kids in pictures either, but it's a cultural thing and most places probably don't even consider that some perverts will be trying to look at kids.

Click to expand...

/u/Slggyqo said:

Infant/young child nudity or partial nudity isn’t as big of a deal in most Asian cultures as it is in America either. My wife (American) thought it was weird but there’s a bunch of naked pictures of me in my baby photo albums.

Posting the pictures on a publicly available website is definitely an oversight though.

Click to expand...

A tokamak in France set a new record in fusion plasma by encasing its reaction in tungsten, a heat-resistant metal that allows physicists to sustain hot plasmas for longer, and at higher energies and densities than carbon tokamaks.

A tokamak is a torus- (doughnut-) shaped fusion device that confines plasma using magnetic fields, allowing scientists to fiddle with the superheated material and induce fusion reactions. The recent achievement was made in WEST (tungsten (W) Environment in Steady-state Tokamak), a tokamak operated by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA).

WEST was injected with 1.15 gigajoules of power and sustained a plasma of about 50 million degrees Celsius for six minutes. It achieved this record after scientists encased the tokamak’s interior in tungsten, a metal with an extraordinarily high melting point. Researchers from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory used an X-ray detector inside the tokamak to measure aspects of the plasma and the conditions that made it possible.

“These are beautiful results,” said Xavier Litaudon, a scientist with CEA and chair of the Coordination on International Challenges on Long duration OPeration (CICLOP), in a PPPL release. “We have reached a stationary regime despite being in a challenging environment due to this tungsten wall.”

Venezuela has lost its last remaining glacier after it shrunk so much that scientists reclassified it as an ice field.

It is thought Venezuela is the first country to have lost all its glaciers in modern times.

The country had been home to six glaciers in the Sierra Nevada de Mérida mountain range, which lies at about 5,000m above sea level. Five of the glaciers had disappeared by 2011, leaving just the Humboldt glacier, also known as La Corona, close to the country’s second highest mountain, Pico Humboldt.

The Humboldt glacier was projected to last at least another decade, but scientists had been unable to monitor the site for a few years due to political turmoil in the country.

Now assessments have found the glacier melted much faster than expected, and had shrunk to an area of less than 2 hectares. As a result, its classification was downgraded from glacier to ice field.

IRVING, Texas (AP) — The Boy Scouts of America announced after 114 years that it will change its name and will become Scouting America in an effort to emphasize inclusion as it works to move past the turmoil of bankruptcy and a flood of sexual abuse claims.

The rebrand is another seismic shift for an organization steeped in tradition that did not allow gay youths or girls to begin joining its ranks until relatively recently. Seeking to boost flagging membership numbers, the Irving, Texas-based organization announced the name change Tuesday at its annual meeting in Florida.

“In the next 100 years we want any youth in America to feel very, very welcome to come into our programs,” Roger Krone, who took over last fall as president and chief executive officer, told The Associated Press in an interview before the announcement.

The change will officially take effect on Feb. 8, 2025, timed to the organization’s 115th birthday.

Holly LeGresley, 37, whose username was ‘The Immolator’, uploaded images and videos to online group

A British woman has pleaded guilty to being part of a global monkey torture network.

Holly LeGresley, 37, from Kidderminster in Worcestershire, admitted uploading 22 images and 132 videos of monkeys being tortured to an online chat group.

She was charged after an investigation by the BBC into the torture of monkeys overseas. The investigation exposed a global network involving a private online group paying people in Indonesia to kill and torture baby monkeys on video.

The BBC said LeGresley used the username “The Immolator” and ran a poll for members of the group on which method of torture should be inflicted upon an infant monkey.

The maker of the Swiss Army Knife is working on a new version of the classic multi-tool, which won’t have a blade.

“We are in the early stages of developing pocket tools without blades,” a spokesperson for Swiss firm Victorinox told CNN in a statement Tuesday, adding that they will compliment the existing range of multi-tools rather than replacing them.

“With innovation at the core of our brand, we are constantly listening to our consumers and their needs; and acknowledge that there is an appetite for the functionality, versatility, and craftsmanship the Swiss Army Knife is known for in more specialized fields and situations,” said the spokesperson.

CNN contacted Victorinox after company CEO Carl Elsener Jr. told Swiss media outlet Blick that he is concerned about increasingly stringent regulations on knives in many markets.

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Such a dumb move. They have totally lost there way.

Microsoft has closed a number of Bethesda studios, including Redfall maker Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush and The Evil Within developer Tango Gameworks, and more in devastating cuts at Bethesda, IGN can confirm.

Alpha Dog Games, maker of mobile game Mighty Doom, will also close. Roundhouse Studios will be absorbed by The Elder Scrolls Online developer ZeniMax Online Studios. Microsoft, currently valued at over $3 trillion, did not say how many staff will lose their jobs, but significant layoffs are inevitable. IGN has asked Bethesda for comment. Microsoft declined to expand further when contacted by IGN.

On Redfall, the disastrous vampire co-op game will now not receive promised updates, including an offline mode and new character DLC, as Microsoft has ended all development on the game. Microsoft said Redfall will remain online to play, and it will provide a "make-good" offer for those who bought the Hero DLC.


Arkane Lyon, which is working on Marvel's Blade, survives the cull, as does Bethesda Game Studios (Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Starfield), and Machine Games (Indiana Jones and The Great Circle). Doom developer id Software is also unaffected.

Alzheimer’s disease may be inherited more often than previously known, according to a new study that paints a clearer picture of a gene long known to be linked to the common form of dementia.

The authors of the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, say that this might even be considered a distinct, inherited form of the disease and that different approaches to testing and treatment may be needed.

Among people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, researchers recognize familial forms of the disease and sporadic cases. Most cases are thought to be sporadic, which develop later in life. Familial forms, caused by mutations in any of three genes, tend to strike earlier and are known to be rare, accounting for about 2% of all Alzheimer’s diagnoses, or about 1 in 50 cases.

Under the new paradigm, 1 in 6 cases of Alzheimer’s would be considered to be inherited, or familial.

An investor at famed Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz is the latest VC to get involved in the debate around "fake work" in the tech industry.

In an interview published Monday with Emily Sundberg for her Substack newsletter "Feed Me," Andreessen Horowitz general partner David Ulevitch called Google "an amazing example" of a corporation employing people in "BS jobs."

"As we (society / our economy) prioritize conglomerates and megacorps, irrelevant jobs proliferate," he said. "Anyone who works in a 10,000+ person or larger white-collar job company knows that a bunch of the people can probably be let go tomorrow and the company wouldn't really feel the difference, maybe it'd even improve with less people inserting themselves into things."

Ulevitch was previously the CEO of web security startup OpenDNS, which he sold to Cisco for $635 million in 2015.