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A dangerous strain of mpox that is killing children and causing miscarriages in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the most transmissible yet and could spread internationally, scientists have warned.

Hundreds of people with the disease, formerly known as monkeypox, have attended hospital in the mining town of Kamituga, South Kivu province, in what is likely to be the “tip of the iceberg” of a larger outbreak, doctors say.

Clade I has historically been found in people who eat infected bushmeat, with transmission largely confined to the affected household.

At a briefing for journalists, Trudie Lang, professor of global health research at Oxford University, said that when the DRC outbreak was detected last September scientists had assumed it would be clade II, because of the sexual transmission, until genetic testing revealed it belonged to the more virulent strain.

South Kivu is on the border with Burundi and Rwanda and close to Uganda, and there is frequent cross-border travel by local people.

Lang said it was unclear how many asymptomatic or mild cases there were, with the long incubation time of the virus increasing the risk of transmission before people realised they were sick.

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A newly identified tipping point for the loss of ice sheets in Antarctica and elsewhere could mean future sea level rise is significantly higher than current projections.

Sea level rise is the greatest long-term impact of the climate crisis and is set to redraw the world map in coming centuries.

There is also real-world evidence that seawater intrusion is causing melting today, including satellite data that shows drops in the height of ice sheets near grounding zones.

Bradley said: “Now we want to put [seawater intrusion] into ice sheet models and see whether that two-times sea level rise plays out when you analyse the whole of Antarctica.”

Research in 2023 found that accelerated ice melting in west Antarctica was inevitable for the rest of the century, no matter how much carbon emissions are cut, with “dire” implications for sea levels.

Dr Tiago Segabinazzi Dotto, of the UK’s National Oceanography Centre, welcomed the new analysis of the ocean-ice feedback loop under ice sheets.

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Ryan Gosling will produce the feature with Jessie Henderson, his partner at General Admission, the production banner the duo launched earlier this year.

Twins Adam and Daniel Cooper wrote the unpublished 42-page short story and will write the script adapting their own work.

Story details are being kept hidden, but it is described as being set in a “post-post-apocalyptic” world where former zombies struggle to reintegrate.

The Oscar-nominated actor is coming off Universal’s The Fall Guy and is due to next shoot Project Hail Mary for Amazon MGM.

The Cooper Twins, as the duo are known, have written and directed several short films that have made the festival rounds.

They have made a name for themselves directing marketing content and editing trailers for studios such as Disney, Warner Brothers, Netflix and Apple — work that has earned them Clios and Golden Trailers awards.

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With the recently released KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop environment, those still relying on old Intel integrated graphics should have a much more pleasant experience thanks to improvements made to the KWin compositor.

For very old Intel integrated graphics, it can effectively be a night and day difference upgrading to the new Plasma 6.1 desktop.

The biggest improvement to bettering the KDE Plasma desktop graphics performance is thanks to dynamic triple buffering support.

It’s not just old or slow processors that benefit though, I also tested this on a laptop with an integrated Intel and a dedicated NVidia GPU.

Triple buffering can’t do magic, but KWin now at least reaches around 100-120fps on that setup, which is likely the best that can be done until the driver issue is resolved and feels a lot smoother already."

Those wanting to learn more about this improvement to KDE Plasma on old graphics hardware can visit Xaver’s blog for all the details.

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The joint venture will be co-owned by Rivian and VW Group, which oversees brands like Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini, and its flagship Volkswagen.

The new venture was announced in a post from Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, who noted the investment will help the company bring its next generation R2 electric vehicle to market starting in 2026.

VW Group CEO Oliver Blume said all of the company’s brands could benefit from the partnership with Rivian, including potential competitor Scout Motors, which is planning to launch a new lineup of electric trucks in the US.

The plan was to use Rivian’s battery pack and electric motor setup in a Ford or Lincoln branded SUV.

Asked whether the deal would make Rivian the exclusive partner to VW and its brands, Scaringe declined to answer directly.

“In the context of the joint venture, we have certainly talked about the ability to work on other products or private programs outside of the Rivian or Volkswagen Group portfolio,” he said.

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Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia have developed special “energy-smart bricks” that can be made by mixing clay with glass waste and coal ash.

It mostly contains fine pieces of glass (92 percent) left over from the recycling process, along with ceramic materials, plastic, paper, and ash.

Based on bricks produced in their lab, they estimated that “each firing cycle led to a potential value of up to $158,460 through a reduction of 417 tonnes of CO2, resulting from a 9.5 percent reduction in firing temperature.” So basically, if a manufacturer switches from regular clay bricks to energy-smart bricks, it will end up saving thousands of dollars on its power bill, and its kilns will release less CO2 into Earth’s atmosphere.

“Bricks characterized by low thermal conductivity contribute to efficient heat storage and absorption, creating a cooler environment during summer and a warmer comfort during winter.

This advantage translates into energy savings for air conditioning, benefiting the occupants of the house or building,” the study authors explained.

Tests conducted by the researchers suggest that the residents of a single-story house built using energy-smart bricks will save up to 5 percent on their energy bills compared to those living in a house made with regular clay bricks.

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For starters, SteamIDFinder is using the current sale price of every game in your unplayed library, as confirmed by looking at a half-dozen “Pile of Shame” profiles.

Steam and I disagree on whether I’ve launched and played Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition (I definitely did and was definitely overwhelmed), Mountain, and SteamWorld Dig.

Even if they’re not dedicated tools, Steam libraries sometimes end up with little bits of game that you didn’t ask for and might never play, like Half-Life Deathmatch: Source.

So nobody I could easily poll had fewer than 25 percent of their games unplayed, and those with higher numbers tended to have bought into bundles, sales, add-ons, and other entry generators.

If you’ve looked up your own stats and feel surprised, you can keep your unplayed games as a dedicated collection in Steam, and it might inspire you to check out the most intriguing left-behinds.

Play what interests you when you have the time, and if your unplayed count helps you stave off your worst sale impulse buys or rediscover lost gems, so be it.

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In a landmark ruling that threatens to unravel Israel’s government, the country’s Supreme Court has ordered the military to begin drafting ultra-Orthodox men, who’ve long been exempt from service.

Tuesday’s decision was unanimous, and comes amid intensified public opposition to the policy following the Hamas-led attack on Israel last year, and the months-long war in Gaza that has strained the military’s resources.

Before Tuesday’s ruling, the Israeli government had repeatedly extended the waiver, but it has been unable to pass a law that would make it permanent, or allow for a more limited draft of ultra-Orthodox men.

With conscription of the ultra-Orthodox now set to start, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now faces the prospect of eroding support within what was already a fragile coalition keeping him in power.

The ultra-Orthodox military exemption goes back to Israel’s 1948 founding in the wake of the Holocaust, when protecting the remnant of religious scholars was considered key for a Jewish state.

But in Israel, where military service is otherwise mandatory, Haredi families have on average six or seven children, a birth rate that makes them the fastest growing segment of the country’s population.

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George Latimer, a pro-Israel centrist, defeated U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman on Tuesday in a Democratic primary in suburban New York that highlighted the party’s deep divisions over the war in Gaza.

Most current members of Congress have been able to repel challenges from within their party, though GOP Rep. Bob Good is in a tight contest with a rival backed by Donald Trump in a race that is too close to call.

In the final stretch of the race, he rallied with liberals Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders, while Latimer pulled in the endorsement of former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Also on Tuesday, Democratic voters on Long Island picked former CNN anchor John Avlon as the candidate who will challenge incumbent Republican Rep. Nick LaLota in a district that’s been controlled by the GOP for a decade.

The Long Island congressional district has become a priority for Democrats as the party tries to flip suburban seats in New York as part of a strategy to win a House majority.

In central New York, two other Democrats are vying to become the party’s nominee to take on U.S. Rep. Brandon Williams, a Republican who represents a recently reconfigured congressional district where President Joe Biden beat Trump by 11 points in the 2020 election.

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Progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., lost his primary Tuesday to a moderate challenger who was backed by pro-Israel groups, NBC News projected, following a bitter and expensive race that exposed the party’s divisions.

Nearly $15 million of that spending came from the United Democracy Project, a super PAC linked to the powerful pro-Israel lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which backed Latimer.

A former Bronx middle school principal, Bowman stormed Washington after unseating 16-term Rep. Eliot Engel, then the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and one of the most powerful Jewish lawmakers in Congress, in 2020.

As the Democratic nominee, Latimer will almost certainly be the next congressman from New York’s 16th district, a diverse area north of Manhattan that includes parts of the Bronx and south Westchester County.

Former CNN anchor John Avlon won the Democratic primary to take on GOP Rep. Nick LaLota, NBC News projects.

And Rep Tom Suozzi, who won a special election to take back his old Long Island-based seat, will face former state Assemblyman Mike LiPetri.

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So far, legal attacks on organizations pointing out X’s abundance of extremist content have been rebuffed: a judge tossed X’s suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate in March on First Amendment grounds, ruling that Musk’s lawyers were trying to muzzle free speech with intimidation tactics.

Currently, Media Matters for America, an anti-misinformation nonprofit, faces a similar suit — considered “bogus” by legal experts — over an article detailing how the site served pro-Nazi posts next to ads while Musk himself endorsed antisemitic conspiracy theories.

O’Connor is the notoriously partisan George W. Bush appointee who in 2018 declared the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional in an attempt to repeal it entirely (the Supreme Court struck down that widely mocked decision), and has a long record of other rulings that align with right-wing ideology.

In March, the judge had to recuse himself from hearing a suit by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and banking trade groups seeking to block a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that caps most credit card late fees at $8.

Even without O’Connor on the case, Media Matters will have to contend with some other judge in the largely conservative Northern District of Texas, an arena bound to be more receptive to X’s efforts to censor progressive institutions that criticize it.

Media Matters did score an important win back in April, when D.C. District Court Judge Amit Mehta blocked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton from launching an investigation into the nonprofit on the heels of X’s lawsuit.

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For starters, SteamIDFinder is using the current sale price of every game in your unplayed library, as confirmed by looking at a half-dozen “Pile of Shame” profiles.

Steam and I disagree on whether I’ve launched and played Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition (I definitely did and was definitely overwhelmed), Mountain, and SteamWorld Dig.

Even if they’re not dedicated tools, Steam libraries sometimes end up with little bits of game that you didn’t ask for and might never play, like Half-Life Deathmatch: Source.

So nobody I could easily poll had fewer than 25 percent of their games unplayed, and those with higher numbers tended to have bought into bundles, sales, add-ons, and other entry generators.

If you’ve looked up your own stats and feel surprised, you can keep your unplayed games as a dedicated collection in Steam, and it might inspire you to check out the most intriguing left-behinds.

Play what interests you when you have the time, and if your unplayed count helps you stave off your worst sale impulse buys or rediscover lost gems, so be it.

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The latest feature headed to the Google graveyard is continuous scrolling on search results, according to a report from Search Engine Land.

The user experience, which mirrored the endless scrolling behavior of social media feeds, was originally introduced for search results on mobile devices in October of 2021 and then brought over to desktop search results in late 2022.

A Google spokesperson reportedly told Search Engine Land that continuous scroll is being removed today from desktop search results, while the feature will be removed from mobile results “in the coming months.”

In its place on desktop will be Google’s classic pagination bar, allowing users to jump to a specific page of search results or simply click “Next” to see the next page.

On mobile, a “More results” button will be shown at the bottom of a search to load the next page.

Google told Search Engine Land that “this change is to allow the search company to serve the search results faster on more searches, instead of automatically loading results that users haven’t explicitly requested.”

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As of this past week the change is now in place for Ubuntu 24.10 daily users that will find Wayland-by-default when using the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.

The proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver has been the hold-out on Ubuntu in sticking to the GNOME X.Org session out-of-the-box rather than Wayland as has been the default for the past several releases when using other GPUs/drivers.

But for Ubuntu 24.10, the plan is to cross that threshold for NVIDIA now that their official driver has much better Wayland support and has matured into great shape.

Particularly with the upcoming NVIDIA R555 driver reaching stable very soon, the Wayland support is in great shape with features like explicit sync ready to use.

Canonical’s Daniel van Vugt of the Ubuntu desktop team made the change last week for the GDM session manager to drop their NVIDIA-prefers-X11 patches so that NVIDIA Linux users will find Wayland being used by default.

Updated Revert-data-Disable-GDM-on-hybrid-graphics-laptops-with-v.patch to ensure Nvidia 5xx drivers always get Wayland as the default unless there’s a stronger reason why it won’t work (like modeset has been disabled on the kernel command line).

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Researchers claim to have developed a new way to run AI language models more efficiently by eliminating matrix multiplication from the process.

The technique has not yet been peer-reviewed, but the researchers—Rui-Jie Zhu, Yu Zhang, Ethan Sifferman, Tyler Sheaves, Yiqiao Wang, Dustin Richmond, Peng Zhou, and Jason Eshraghian—claim that their work challenges the prevailing paradigm that matrix multiplication operations are indispensable for building high-performing language models.

They argue that their approach could make large language models more accessible, efficient, and sustainable, particularly for deployment on resource-constrained hardware like smartphones.

In the paper, the researchers mention BitNet (the so-called “1-bit” transformer technique that made the rounds as a preprint in October) as an important precursor to their work.

According to the authors, BitNet demonstrated the viability of using binary and ternary weights in language models, successfully scaling up to 3 billion parameters while maintaining competitive performance.

Limitations of BitNet served as a motivation for the current study, pushing them to develop a completely “MatMul-free” architecture that could maintain performance while eliminating matrix multiplications even in the attention mechanism.

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But a 2022 report by the regulator on oil and gas emissions shows flaring volumes in Alberta have been increasing since 2016 and nudged close to the regulatory limit in 2022.

But companies have also been turning increasingly to flaring in order to reduce venting, a term that refers to the direct release of unburned methane into the atmosphere from an oil or gas facility.

It also produces black soot which negatively impacts air quality and may pose a risk to human health, said Amanda Bryant, a senior oil and gas analyst with clean energy think-tank The Pembina Institute.

She said these alternatives include the installation of a vapour recovery unit, which can be used to capture flare gases and redirect them back into production for use as fuel.

The U.S. Department of Energy says both practices represent “significant challenges” for operators and regulators, who must work together to bring down oil and gas emissions.

But Julia Yuan, a PhD student with the University of Calgary’s department of chemical and petroleum engineering, said if increased flaring is a byproduct of less venting and overall methane emissions from oil and gas production, then it may be something society needs to accept for now.

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Threads will now let people like and see replies to their Threads posts that appear on other federated social media platforms, the company announced on Tuesday.

Previously, if you made a post on Threads that was syndicated to another platform like Mastodon, you wouldn’t be able to see responses to that post while still inside Threads.

That meant you’d have to bounce back and forth between the platforms to stay up-to-date on replies.

Thanks to this upgrade, you’ll probably do less of that, but in a screenshot, Meta notes that you can’t reply to replies “yet,” so it sounds like that feature will arrive in the future.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also revealed that Threads’ fediverse integration will be available starting today in more than 100 countries, a significant expansion from its initial availability in the US, Canada, and Japan.

Meta has been vocal about its plans to integrate with the decentralized social networking protocol ActivityPub since launching Threads nearly a year ago, with first testing starting in December.

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“A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.

By 2100, only six countries are expected to be having enough children to keep their populations stable: Africa’s Chad, Niger and Somalia, the Pacific islands of Samoa and Tonga, and Tajikistan, according to research published by the Lancet, a medical journal.

The long-term solution to declining fertility rates, said Stefano Scarpetta, director for employment, labour and social affairs at the OECD, is to promote more gender equality and fairer sharing of work and childrearing.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang has warned against a “vicious cycle” of economic decoupling from the West, as Beijing struggles to contain rising global pushback over soaring electric vehicle (EV) exports, report my CNN colleagues Juliana Liu and Joyce Jiang.

Speaking to international executives at the “Summer Davos” forum in the northeastern city of Dalian on Tuesday, Li also defended his country against accusations that Chinese overcapacity in key green industries has led to dumping of products such as EVs and solar panels on global markets.

The Justice Department and Boeing had reached an agreement in January of 2021 to settle charges that alleged the company defrauded the Federal Aviation Administration during the certification process of the 737 Max before it could carry its first passengers.

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On Monday, State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said that, according to Israel, the Red Crescent and the United Nations had rebuffed Israeli efforts to investigate the incident that had made headlines around the world.

On January 29, Hind and her 15-year-old cousin made a desperate call to the Red Crescent, asking for help while stuck in a car with family members they said were killed by Israeli fire.

The Washington Post previously confirmed there were armed military vehicles in the vicinity, as did Al Jazeera’s analysis of satellite imagery.

She also noted that Tel al-Hawa, where the attack happened, was under evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military due to ongoing operations at the time.

In the nearly five months since the killings, The Intercept repeatedly asked the State Department about the incident, the status of investigations, and how the U.S. could continue sending Israel aid if it could not get straightforward answers on the case.

After nearly 150 days, the State Department finally came back with answers: ones that relied wholly on Israeli claims — assertions the U.S. admitted it did not attempt to verify, that deflated upon the slightest provocation.

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LONDON (AP) — Microsoft violated European Union antitrust rules with “possibly abusive” practices by tying its Teams messaging and videoconferencing app to its widely used business software, the bloc said.

The commission took aim at Microsoft a day after accusing Apple of breaching the bloc’s new digital competition rulebook, in a flurry of regulatory action underlining Brussels’ leading role as a watchdog for Big Tech companies.

“Having unbundled Teams and taken initial interoperability steps, we appreciate the additional clarity provided today and will work to find solutions to address the Commission‘s remaining concerns.” Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a prepared statement.

The commission opened its investigation in July 2023 after rival Slack Technologies, which makes popular workplace messaging software, filed a complaint with Brussels.

Slack, owned by business software maker Salesforce, had alleged that Microsoft abused its market dominance to eliminate competition — in violation of EU laws.

“The Statement of Objections issued today by the European Commission is a win for customer choice and an affirmation that Microsoft’s practices with Teams have harmed competition,” Salesforce President Sabastian Niles said.

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