Black Friday: why our brains love a bargain

Do you prefer Black Friday or Cyber Monday? The January sales or Amazon’s Prime Day? Or perhaps you like to hold out for a good old fashioned everything-must-go shop clearance. For whatever your shopping habits, there’s a good chance that you like the idea of bagging a bargain. The days and weeks before Black Friday […]

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SKAO Africa programme to broaden human capital development efforts – UKRI

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) coordinates the UK’s interests in the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), working with the academic and industrial community and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). The SKAO and STFC have now agreed to lay the foundation of the SKAO Africa programme. The programme is aimed at […]

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Riyadh Metro Opens: A New Era of Public Transportation in Saudi Arabia

On November 27, 2024, Riyadh’s long-awaited metro system officially opened to the public, marking a transformative milestone for Saudi Arabia’s capital. The Riyadh Metro project is a major infrastructure development aimed at revolutionizing urban transport, easing traffic congestion, reducing air pollution, and enhancing the overall quality of life for the city’s residents. The initial phase […]

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Naked singularities: how quantum black holes explain why we don’t see the end of space and time

Vadim Sadovski/Shutterstock Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity, is famously incomplete. As proven by physics Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, when matter collapses under its own gravitational pull, the result is a “singularity” – a point of infinite density or curvature. At a singularity, space, time and matter are crushed and stretched into nonexistence. The […]

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A blind beetle named Hitler? The case for changing offensive names of animals and plants, and how it can be done

German dictator Adolf Hitler, after whom a species of blind beetle is named. Roger Viollet via Getty Images Taxonomy is the science of describing, classifying and naming organisms. It organises the vast diversity of life on Earth. Species are grouped based on shared characteristics, providing a system that allows scientists to understand and communicate about […]

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Data Localization in the Universal Era: A Barrier to Global Digital Progress in a Borderless Cloud Ecosystem

Data localization laws are becoming an increasingly common feature of national regulations, with governments around the world mandating that certain types of data must be stored on servers within their national borders. These laws, often framed as efforts to bolster privacy, security, and national sovereignty, have a profound impact on the cloud services ecosystem and […]

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Their DNA survives in diverse populations across the world – but who were the Denisovans?

This finger bone discovered in Siberia in 2008 led to the original Denisovan discovery. Wikimedia, CC BY-SA It started with a finger bone found in a cave in the Altai mountains in Siberia in the late 2000s. Thanks to advances in DNA analysis, this was all that was required for scientists to be able to […]

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Tech Titans Compete to Build AI Superclusters with 100,000+ GPUs—But Is Bigger Really Better?

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve at breakneck speed, tech giants like Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Elon Musk’s xAI are engaged in a high-stakes race to build massive AI superclusters. These sprawling data centers, each housing 100,000 or more of Nvidia’s cutting-edge AI GPUs, are seen as the key to achieving unparalleled computational power […]

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Google Faces $9 Billion UK Class-Action Lawsuit Over Alleged Monopoly Practices Following US Court Ruling

In the wake of a historic ruling in the United States, Google is now facing a massive £7 billion ($8.8 billion) consumer lawsuit in the UK, challenging its dominant position in the search engine and digital advertising markets. This lawsuit comes as part of an intensifying global regulatory crackdown on the tech giant’s anti-competitive practices. […]

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High-Tech Heists: Thieves Steal Millions in Oculus and Microsoft Goods, Resell for Pennies on the Dollar

In a series of sophisticated truck heists across the U.S., thieves have stolen millions in tech hardware, including $1.5 million worth of Oculus VR headsets and $900,000 worth of Microsoft products, selling them at a fraction of their market value. The criminals’ methods mirror those seen in action-packed movies, with a strategic plan to target […]

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