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A wave of exceptionally hot weather has blasted the region over the past week, sending the mercury as high as 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) and forcing thousands of schools to tell students to stay home.

The Philippines announced on Sunday the suspension of in-person classes at all public schools for two days after a record-shattering day of heat in the capital Manila.

In Thailand, where at least 30 people have died of heatstroke so far this year, the meteorological department warned of "severe conditions" after temperatures in a northern province exceeded 44.1C (111.4F) on Saturday.

And in Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh, forecasters warned that temperatures could exceed 40C in the coming days as people endured searing heat and stifling humidity.

"I dare not go out in the daytime. I am worried we would get heatstroke," said a 39-year-old cashier in Myanmar’s Yangon who gave her name as San Yin.

The decipherment of an ancient scroll has revealed where the Greek philosopher Plato is buried, Italian researchers suggest.

Graziano Ranocchia, a philosopher at the University of Pisa, and colleagues used artificial intelligence (AI) to decipher text preserved on charred pieces of papyrus recovered in Herculaneum, an ancient Roman town located near Pompeii, according to a translated statement from Italy's National Research Council.

Like Pompeii, Herculaneum was destroyed in A.D. 79 when Mount Vesuvius erupted, cloaking the region in ash and pyroclastic flows.

One of the scrolls carbonized by the eruption includes the writings of Philodemus of Gadara (lived circa 110 to 30 B.C.), an Epicurean philosopher who studied in Athens and later lived in Italy. This text, known as the "History of the Academy," details the academy that Plato founded in the fourth century B.C. and gives details about Plato's life, including his burial place.

Historians already knew that Plato, the famous student of Socrates who wrote down his teacher's philosophies as well as his own, was buried at the Academy, which the Roman general Sulla destroyed in 86 B.C. But researchers weren't sure exactly where on the school's grounds that Plato, who died in Athens in 348 or 347 B.C., had been laid to rest.

Physicists have proposed modifications to the infamous Schrödinger's cat paradox that could help explain why quantum particles can exist in more than one state simultaneously, while large objects (like the universe) seemingly cannot.

Theoretical physicists have proposed a new solution to the Schrödinger's cat paradox, which may allow the theories of quantum mechanics and Einstein's relativity to live in better harmony.

The bizarre laws of quantum physics postulate that physical objects can exist in a combination of multiple states, like being in two places at once or possessing various velocities simultaneously. According to this theory, a system remains in such a "superposition" until it interacts with a measuring device, only acquiring definite values as a result of the measurement. Such an abrupt change in the state of the system is called a collapse.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger summarized this theory in 1935 with his famous feline paradox — using the metaphor of a cat in a sealed box being simultaneously dead and alive until the box is opened, thus collapsing the cat's state and revealing its fate.

However, applying these rules to real-world scenarios faces challenges — and that's where the true paradox arises. While quantum laws hold true for the realm of elementary particles, larger objects behave in accordance with classical physics as predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, and are never observed in a superposition of states. Describing the entire universe using quantum principles poses even greater hurdles, as the cosmos appears entirely classical and lacks any external observer to serve as a measuring device for its state.

With the ability to use tools, solve complex puzzles, and even play tricks on humans just for funsies, octopuses are fiercely smart.

But their intelligence is quite weirdly built, since the eight-armed cephalopods have evolved differently from pretty much every other type of organism on Earth.

Rather than a centralised nervous system such as vertebrates have, two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are spread throughout its body, distributed between its arms. And now scientists have determined that those neurons can make decisions without input from the brain.

“One of the big picture questions we have is just how a distributed nervous system would work, especially when it’s trying to do something complicated, like move through fluid and find food on a complex ocean floor,” said neuroscientist David Gire of the University of Washington.

“There are a lot of open questions about how these nodes in the nervous system are connected to each other.”

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Super interesting article!

Cards and dice and all things nice.

Greetings, fans of Baldur's Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2. What if I was to tell you that Larian has launched a new massive RPG that you can play right now? Sure, it may be a bit pricier than you expect, and involve more little bits of card…

Divinity: Original Sin The Board Game adapts the videogame series into a tabletop experience, complete with cards, tokens, miniatures, dice, and pretty much anything else you can imagine being scattered across a dining room table. You and your friends build your own heroes and then journey together through a branching narrative—exploring different locations, fighting monsters, levelling up, and otherwise going on a grand old fantasy adventure.

Though the story is based on Divinity: Original Sin 2, it's far from a simple retread. Beyond the changes that come with an entirely different format, it also features new characters, enemies, quests, interactions, abilities, and more, making it feel more like a reimagining or a remix of the videogame than a direct adaptation.

You may be wondering, however, why this board game is only coming out now, given Divinity: Original Sin 2 is approaching seven years old? Well… it's been a long road to get here.

TikTok was one of India's most popular apps – until it was banned in 2020. It's a lesson for what might unfold if a US ban goes ahead.

Four years ago, India was TikTok's biggest market. The app boasted a growing base of 200 million users, thriving subcultures and sometimes life-changing opportunities for creators and influencers. TikTok seemed unstoppable – until simmering tensions on the border between India and China erupted into deadly violence.

After the border skirmish, the Indian government banned the app on 29 June 2020. Almost overnight, TikTok was gone. But the accounts and videos of Indian TikTok are still online, frozen in time when the app had just emerged as a cultural giant.

In some ways, it could offer a preview of what might lie on the horizon in the United States. On 24 April, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that could ultimately ban TikTok from the US, marking a new chapter after years of threats and failed legislation. The law requires the company that owns TikTok, Bytedance, to sell its stake in the app within the next nine months, with a further three-month grace period, or face a potential ban in the country. Bytedance says it has no intention of selling the social media platform and has vowed to challenge the legislation in court.

Banning a massive social media app would be an unprecedented moment in American tech history, though the looming court battle currently leaves TikTok's fate uncertain. But the Indian experience shows what can happen when a major country wipes TikTok from its citizen's smartphones. India is not the only country to have taken the step either – in November 2023, Nepal also announced a decision to ban TikTok and Pakistan has implemented a number of temporary bans since 2020. As the app's 150 million US users swipe through videos in limbo, the story of India’s TikTok ban shows that users are quick to adapt, but also that when TikTok dies, much of its culture dies with it.

A YouTuber has taken a boring office product and injected an RPG you can play while pretending to look at spreadsheets.

If you thought that Excel spreadsheets were just for mind-numbing office work, think again. A gaming hobbyist has created an Excel-based RPG game that he based on the popular post-apocalyptic game Fallout. It’s the end of the world, all over again.

How do you turn spreadsheet software into a video game? Don’t ask me because I have less than zero idea. That said, the game’s creator, YouTuber “Dynamic Pear,” has offered a quick tutorial on how to use his weird, makeshift game that was developed via everybody’s least favorite office software.

On his website, “Pear” gives a brief description of the game’s story like so:

It is the 145th year of the second age. Life in Mercer is unrecognisable to that which came earlier – The bombs saw to that. Humanity may never fully recover…Adventure beckons once more, and you are ready to answer its call!

Click to expand...

The YouTuber explains that his game has two components: “Mapping and Questing” and “Battling.” You can move through the various areas of the bombed-out RPG environment...

A 38-year-old man repeatedly tries to force his wife to have sex in the middle of the night but has no memory of his actions when he wakes up.

A married woman in her mid-20s often tears off her clothing and masturbates but remembers nothing when her partner rouses her.

For a dozen years, a 31-year-old man masturbates while asleep, at times injuring his groin. Embarrassed due to his unconscious behavior, he avoids relationships for eight years.

These are all clinically documented cases of sleep sex, or sexsomnia, part of a family of sleep disorders called parasomnias that include sleepwalking, sleep talking, sleep eating and sleep terrors.

Electric cars have hit the brakes across the U.S., with brands like Tesla sinking in sales figures. However, this situation has ceased to be a mystery since we learned about the new water engine, the first of its kind in history. You know what makes it special? Not only its 400 hp, but also that it is a more efficient option than hydrogen in any environment.

New water engine: EVs and conventional hydrogen will be soon replaced

AVL, an Austrian automotive engineering company, has developed an innovative hydrogen combustion engine that could revolutionize motorsports and transportation. Their 400 horsepower prototype engine can run on hydrogen fuel with zero CO2 emissions, providing performance comparable to tradicional ICE.

Unlike other hydrogen engines that run on fuel cells, AVL’s technology utilizes direct hydrogen injection into the combustion chamber. This allows the engine to operate much like a conventional petrol or diesel engine, but fueled by hydrogen. The technology builds upon AVL’s decades of experience in high-performance powertrain.

Early testing shows tremendous promise for racing applications. Motorsports provide an ideal testing ground for developing hydrogen engine technology that could eventually make its way to road cars. AVL’s hydrogen engine offers drivers the sound, emotion and excitement of combustion engines.

This breakthrough demonstrates that high-performance vehicles do not need to sacrifice driving experience in the transition to cleaner energy. AVL’s hydrogen engine technology could pave the way for the motorsport and automotive industries to reduce their carbon footprint dramatically.

NASA’s planet-hunting telescope Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered its first free-floating, or rogue, planet. It is a terrestrial object, likely bigger than Earth but not by too much. This candidate object was discovered within the analysis of 1.3 million light curves collected by the space observatories over its years in orbit.

Rogue planets have one of the coolest names in astronomy. Beyond that, they are cool because they are expected to outnumber regular star-bound planets – but where are they all? Only a relatively small number of candidates have been found. The reason for that is because they are extremely difficult to find.

These worlds are cold and small, and for that reason, they disappear in the background. Given they are very difficult to see directly, the best approach is to use a technique called microlensing. Astronomers wait for a planet to pass in front of a background star. The gravity of the planet will warp space-time a bit like a lens, so the light of the star will be slightly magnified. And that’s what happened in this case, documented in a pre-print paper that has not yet undergone peer review.

The star in question is called TIC-107150013. It is much bigger than the Sun, having a radius almost 13 times that of our star. It is located over 10,400 light-years away. They saw a microlensing event that lasted 107 minutes. If the free-floating planet is within 8,500 light-years from Earth, they estimate that the planet is smaller than 10 times the mass of the Earth. If it’s within 3,200 light-years then the object is about the same mass as our planet.

The work was led by Michelle Kunimoto and William DeRocco, respectively from MIT and the University of California, Santa Cruz. They argue that TESS has the ability to probe a mass range of free-floating planets that can’t be seen by other instruments – not even by the Nancy G. Roman telescope, which is expected to find hundreds of free-floating planets.

TOKYO/NEW YORK -- Japan's currency fell past 158 yen to the dollar on Friday in a quickening sell-off after the Bank of Japan left interest rates unchanged, even as the outlook for an early U.S. rate cut fades.

Hitting the 158 level marks a new 34-year low for the yen, which had been hovering in the mid-155 yen range before the BOJ decision.

Although the yen's slide has prompted speculation that Japanese authorities are poised to intervene with support, the U.S. interest rate outlook suggests there is little Tokyo can do to change the overall direction of exchange rates.

The central bank did not make any changes to its statement on bond purchases. Going into the meeting, some analysts predicted the BOJ might reduce Japanese government bond purchases to stop the yen's depreciation.

Meanwhile, data out Friday showed that U.S. personal consumption expenditures -- the Federal Reserve's preferred measure of inflation -- rose more than expected in March, tamping down investors' expectations of an early Fed interest rate cut.

"The market was probably disappointed by the lack of detail regarding the BOJ's stance in relation to bond purchases," said Joey Chew, head of Asia FX research at HSBC, although he thinks the central bank's latest outlook report was more hawkish than the previous one in January.

A federal appeals court today reversed a ruling that prevented New York from enforcing a law requiring Internet service providers to sell $15 broadband plans to low-income consumers. The ruling is a loss for six trade groups that represent ISPs, although it isn't clear right now whether the law will be enforced.

New York's Affordable Broadband Act (ABA) was blocked in June 2021 by a US District Court judge who ruled that the state law is rate regulation and preempted by federal law. Today, the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit reversed the ruling and vacated the permanent injunction that barred enforcement of the state law.

For consumers who qualify for means-tested government benefits, the state law requires ISPs to offer "broadband at no more than $15 per month for service of 25Mbps, or $20 per month for high-speed service of 200Mbps," the ruling noted. The law allows for price increases every few years and makes exemptions available to ISPs with fewer than 20,000 customers.

"First, the ABA is not field-preempted by the Communications Act of 1934 (as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996), because the Act does not establish a framework of rate regulation that is sufficiently comprehensive to imply that Congress intended to exclude the states from entering the field," a panel of appeals court judges stated in a 2-1 opinion.

At least three women contracted HIV after receiving a trendy skincare treatment in New Mexico, according to a detailed report of the outbreak investigation.

In a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the agency shared details of how several people were likely infected with HIV after being given “vampire facials” at the now-shuttered VIP Spa in Albuquerque.

The first case of HIV linked to the salon was discovered in 2018, prompting the New Mexico Department of Health (NMDOH) to offer free testing to clients of the facility. The middle-aged woman had no history of recent blood transfusions, injectable drug use or sexual contact with an HIV-positive individual, but she did report receiving a vampire facial.

The other reports came from women who had also had vampire facials in 2018. One was diagnosed with early-stage HIV in 2019, and the other last year when she wound up in hospital with severe symptoms.

The “Texas Miracle” loses some of its magic as Oracle announces it’s moving its new HQ out of Austin and Tesla lays off nearly 2,700 workers.

Back in the halcyon days of 2020, a year we all remember fondly, a new flash point opened in the enduring war between Texas and California. Technologists started picking up sticks in Taxifornia and moving to the Lone Star State in greater numbers. The enemy’s chief newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, worried that Silicon Valley’s “monopoly” was over and wondered if Austin was “the future.” Governor Greg Abbott declared Texas was “truly the land of business, jobs, and opportunity.”

In the wave of stories about Austin’s ascension in 2020, there were always two pieces of evidence given top billing. That year the tech goliath Oracle relocated its HQ to Austin, where it had already built a massive campus on the south shore of Town Lake, and Elon Musk began building a gargantuan Cybertruck factory just outside the city. Austin-area authorities helped Oracle secure valuable lakefront real estate and offered Tesla some $60 million in tax abatements, including $50 million from the historically struggling school district in Del Valle. The new facilities were greeted by state officials as evidence that the “Texas Miracle” was alive and well. Abbott proudly proclaimed last year that Austin was “THE destination for the world’s leading tech companies.”

This week saw a major plot twist in that narrative: Oracle declared it was moving its headquarters to Nashville, and Tesla—the largest private employer in the capital city—announced it would be laying off almost 2,700 workers from its Austin plant after a disappointing earnings report. Texas wasn’t really at fault here. Oracle, which makes business software, cited Nashville’s strength as a center of the American health-care industry, though it surely also helps that the company is getting nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in tax breaks and incentives from the city and the state of Tennessee. Tesla, meanwhile, laid off workers across the country after the Cybertruck suffered significant quality issues that put the future of its Austin production facility in doubt. The city’s debut in auto manufacturing is a vehicle that apparently rusts in the rain. The factory complex, which Musk once promised would become an “ecological paradise,” recently took advantage of a new state law to exempt itself from Austin’s environmental regulations.

The search for an accused boat thief came to an odd conclusion in Florida when deputies noticed a blonde in a blue sundress bore a striking resemblance to the guy they were hunting.

Turns out it wasn’t a woman but a he in disguise, and he was wanted in multiple counties, the Glades County Sheriff’s Office said in an April 25 news release.

The discovery, which has become a hot topic on social media, was made around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, April 24, near Lakeport, about a 125-mile drive northwest from Miami.

“Deputies were investigating a recovered stolen boat located at the Old Caloosa Lodge area,” the sheriff’s office said.

The number of homeless people in Japan fell 8.0% as of January from a year earlier to 2,820, the lowest level since data began in 2003, the health ministry said in a survey report Friday.
The improvement was due to the success of related support measures, the ministry said.

Men accounted for 2,575 of the total, while the number of women was 172. The gender was unknown for 73 individuals.

By prefecture, the figure for Osaka was highest, at 856, followed by Tokyo, with 624, and Kanagawa, at 420.

Of the national total, the 23 wards of Tokyo and 20 ordinance-designated large cities accounted for some 80%.

Google has spent the past year dealing with two of the biggest threats in its 25-year history: the rise of generative AI and the growing drumbeat of regulation. AI, in particular, has shaken the company to its core: it’s made big search changes, realigned the Search, Android, and hardware teams around AI, and launched its own Gemini AI model to capitalize on the opportunity.

Google execs cut projects and laid off employees to refocus, and yesterday, it announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion share buyback alongside its Q1 2024 earnings.

Investors, at least, are eating it up: Google parent company Alphabet has finally officially hit and maintained a $2 trillion market cap for a whole day of trading after briefly touching $2 trillion in November 2021. Google is the fourth most valuable public company in the world, behind Nvidia ($2.2 trillion), Apple ($2.6 trillion), and Microsoft ($3.0 trillion). Amazon is currently at $1.8 trillion, and Meta is at $1.1 trillion.

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A normal if windy work day went south for one Japanese bureaucrat when documents containing residents' personal information were blown away in a real-life slapstick mishap.

The official in central Japan's Aichi region was using a trolley to transport a cardboard box filled with documents from one building to another when, to their horror, it toppled over.

Despite frantic efforts by the official to collect reams of paper strewn across the road by the wind, three sheets were lost, Aichi Prefecture said in an apology statement this week.

"More than 10 other officials joined the search" for the missing documents until sunset, prefectural official Akira Kato told AFP on Friday.


Original news:

A Maryland high school athletic director is facing criminal charges after police say he used artificial intelligence to duplicate the voice of Pikesville High School Principal Eric Eiswert, leading the community to believe Eiswert said racist and antisemitic things about teachers and students.

"We now have conclusive evidence that the recording was not authentic," Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough told reporters during a news conference Thursday. "It's been determined the recording was generated through the use of artificial intelligence technology."

Dazhon Darien, 31, was arrested Thursday on charges of stalking, theft, disruption of school operations and retaliation against a witness after a monthslong investigation from the Baltimore County Police Department.

Attempts to contact Darien or Eiswert for comment were not successful.