World

Indian-origin scholar Soumitra Shukla came under anti-Indian racist attacks on social media. American economist and social scientist Steven Durlauf stood up for Indian-origin scholar Soumita Shukla against anti-India hatred on social media. Soumitra Shukla, a research fellow at Harvard Business School’s Artificial Intelligence Institute, made an observation on the increasing hatred targeting Indians on X…

The fictional misanthrope Dr House would often joke that if one could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people. Of course, the savant made those observations before Donald Trump became president, an event so catastrophic that it has forced the most openly religious person in the world to act as a voice…

Pope Leo XIV has invoked one of the Bible’s most famous stories, the Tower of Babel, while warning about the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. In recent remarks about AI ethics and global technological power, the pontiff compared the modern AI race to the ancient biblical tale of humanity attempting to build a tower reaching…

Quote of the day by Nelson Mandela Some quotes feel important because they sound grand. Others stay alive because they feel personal. Nelson Mandela’s words seem to belong to the second category. At first glance, the quote appears to be speaking only about language. Someone reads it and may think it is a simple observation…

The mother of a British teenager who allegedly died after attempting a dangerous online challenge has criticised the UK government for moving too slowly on plans to restrict children’s access to social media, saying ministers are “kicking it down the road”.Ellen Roome, whose 14-year-old son Jools Sweeney died in 2022, is among a group of…

PC: University of Washington A small stretch of ground beside a chain-link fence on the University of Washington campus has turned out to hold a far older story than anyone working there on an ordinary day might have expected. It began almost casually, with soil being turned over near a greenhouse and a piece of…

A 13-year-old boy has died after getting into difficulty while swimming at a reservoir in West Yorkshire during the Bank Holiday heatwave, police confirmed on Tuesday.Emergency services rushed to Leadbeater Dam on Lumb Lane in Halifax at around 3.20pm on Monday after reports that the teenager was struggling in the water. The boy was later…

The sky this week does something it only occasionally manages without fussing about it too much. A second full moon arrives inside the same calendar month, the sort of timing quirk that sounds more dramatic than it really is when you first hear it, but becomes oddly satisfying once you notice how neatly the lunar…

A quiet field can look completely ordinary until you notice the pattern. Many cows and deer seem to rest or graze with their bodies lined up roughly north-south. That odd detail first drew serious scientific attention in 2008, when Sabine Begall, Hynek Burda and colleagues reported that cattle and deer across many locations often followed…

The music was loud, the streets were crowded and a troupe of glamorous dancers swayed through the festival in sparkling outfits and heavy makeup. To most people in the crowd, they looked like part of the entertainment. But hidden beneath the wigs, dresses and bright lipstick were undercover Thai police officers waiting for the right…