NYC to Allow Outdoor Dining Only Part of the Year, Fewer Hours
The dining sheds that proliferated the streets of New York City during the pandemic will be allowed to
2023-05-20 02:55
Wildfire risk spurs Alberta park closures ahead of holiday weekend
By Ismail Shakil OTTAWA Authorities in Canada's main oil-producing province of Alberta have closed some parks and campgrounds,
2023-05-20 02:52
Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson expecting third child with wife, Carrie Johnson
Carrie Johnson, the wife of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, announced on Friday that she is "weeks away" from having their third baby.
2023-05-20 02:49
Clyburn says Biden pushed to move South Carolina up in primary calendar to avoid 'embarrassment'
President Joe Biden supported a decision to make South Carolina, not New Hampshire, the first Democratic presidential primary state in 2024 so as to avoid "embarrassment" in a state where the demographic makeup is less favorable to Democrats, Rep. Jim Clyburn told CNN's Chris Wallace.
2023-05-20 02:25
Air strikes hammer Khartoum as army chief drops RSF foe from Sudan council
KHARTOUM (Reuters) -Sudan's capital Khartoum and sister city Bahri came under renewed air attack on Friday as the war between
2023-05-20 02:17
US FDA approves Genmab-AbbVie's blood cancer therapy
(Reuters) -The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved AbbVie Inc and Danish drugmaker Genmab's blood cancer therapy for adult
2023-05-20 01:55
US debt ceiling: Republicans hit pause on negotiations for now
The lead Republican negotiator walks out of a closed-door meeting with White House representatives.
2023-05-20 01:50
NASA picks Bezos' Blue Origin to build lunar landers for moonwalkers
Jeff Bezos' rocket company has won a NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon, two years after losing out to SpaceX
2023-05-20 01:47
Republican Senator Tim Scott launches 2024 presidential bid
Senator Tim Scott, the only Black Republican member of the upper chamber, has officially declared himself a candidate for president in next year’s Republican primary election. According to a statement of candidacy filed on Friday with the Federal Election Commission, Mr Scott has designated his official campaign committee as “Tim Scott for America”, with a campaign address in the Palmetto State’s capital, Charleston. Mr Scott, who has served as South Carolina’s junior senator since 2013, was first appointed to his Senate seat by one of his presidential primary opponents, then-South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. He filled a vacancy left by the resignation of Jim DeMint, who left the Senate to lead the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. At the time of his appointment, Mr Scott was the first Black senator to represent a state that had been part of the Confederacy during the American Civil War and the first Black Republican since Massachusetts senator Edward Brooke left the body in 1979. The then-freshman GOP senator retained the seat he’d been appointed to in a 2014 special election and was reelected easily in 2016 and 2022 with at least 60 per cent of the vote in both elections. He has long been considered a rising star in the Republican Party, and was given the honour of delivering the party’s response to president Joe Biden’s inaugural address to Congress in 2021. Mr Scott, whose campaign website has teased a “special announcement” on 22 May, joins a GOP primary field that includes Ms Haley, former president Donald Trump, ex-Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. Florida governor Ron DeSantis and ex-New Jersey governor Chris Christie are also expected to officially enter the GOP presidential field in the coming days. Mr Trump, who has retained his preeminent position in the GOP despite being impeached twice by the House of Representatives, losing the 2020 election, inciting a deadly attack on the US Capitol in an effort to remain in power, facing criminal charges in his former home state of New York and his status as a potential defendant in at least two more criminal probes, currently holds a commanding advantage in most polls. Read More Parents of transgender kids seek to block DeSantis ban on gender-affirming care for minors How one North Carolina lawmaker's defection from the Democratic Party upended abortion protections Missouri governor to announce his pick as new St. Louis prosecutor after Kim Gardner resignation
2023-05-20 01:29
Scientists find that AI can read thoughts from monitoring your brain activity
Scientists have revealed they had found a way to combine the technology of brain scans and artificial intelligence to transcribe “the gist” of people’s thoughts. Alex Huth, an assistant professor of neuroscience and computing science at the University of Texas at Austin, and a co-author on the new study published in Nature Neuroscience, said that ‘this is a real leap forward.’ The study was led by Huth and Jerry Tang, a doctoral student in computer science. The main development from this study is that it’s non-invasive. This means that subjects do not require surgical implants. Instead, brain activity is measured using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter In the study, individuals listened to hours of podcasts in the scanner. Then, given the participant’s consent to have their thoughts decoded, they listened to a new story and the machine-generated corresponding texts from brain activity. It’s not a word-for-word transcript. For example, when an individual heard the phrase ‘I don’t have my driver’s licence yet’, the model decoded the individual’s thoughts to read as ‘she has not even started to learn to drive yet.’ Even when participants thought up their own stories, the machine was able to decode their thoughts still. Tang acknowledged that the advancements made in the study had the potential for negative aftermath. Tang said, ‘we take very seriously the concerns that it could be used for bad purposes and have worked to avoid that.’ They ran tests that highlighted that unless the machine had been trained on an individual’s particular brain activity, it could not decode its thoughts. An individual had to allow for the machine to train their brain activity over a long period of time inside a fMRI scanner for it to work. Researchers also found that it was easy to ‘sabotage’ the machine. Three participants were told to tell a different story in their mind, or count by seven, while listening to one of the podcasts. The study highlights even more development with artificial intelligence, after the popularity of OpenAI’s Chat GPT has sparked debate around the potential of AI. 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.
2023-05-20 00:27
Powell Signals a June Pause, Says Fed Can Afford to Watch Data
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell gave a clear signal he is inclined to pausing interest-rate increases next month
2023-05-20 00:21
Woman who called police on Black bird-watcher faces skeptical court in employment appeal
By Jonathan Stempel NEW YORK A U.S. appeals court on Friday appeared unlikely to reinstate a lawsuit by
2023-05-20 00:21