Scotland has become the first country in the world to offer free period supplies . Nearly two years after parliament approved the Period Products Act in 2020, Scots now have free access to period products as part of a global effort to end “period poverty”. In addition to Scotland, similar measures are being considered in […]

High temperatures are frequent all over the world. The United Kingdom experienced the first high temperature of over 40ºC on record. India and Pakistan experienced heat waves earlier this March. Hundreds of cities in China were hit by heat waves last week, with temperatures exceeding 40ºC in some cities. Why is this year so hot

The Cyberspace Administration of China released a list of domestic internet information service algorithms (docx) last week, and major Chinese internet companies disclosed details of the algorithms they use to the cyberspace administration. The list contains 30 filing algorithms, including the push algorithm and information search algorithm of NetEase News, the content recommendation algorithm of

OpenAI announced last month that its natural language image generation system, DALL·E 2, is now available for beta testing. DALL·E generates photorealistic images based on natural language text descriptions, and additional usage requires payment. Now startup Stability AI has announced DALL·E’s open-source competitor, Stable Diffusion, with the source code on GitHub. Stable Diffusion can run

At the Def Con security conference in Las Vegas, security researcher Sick Codes demonstrated running the Doom game on a tractor display made by John Deere. Sick Codes said the whole process took several months, including jailbreaking the Linux system used by the John Deere 4240 tractor . Doom running on a tractor is of

The United States banned the export of 3-nanometer chip production technology on national security grounds. The newly announced export bans include two ultra-wide-gap semiconductor materials, certain ECAD computer-aided design techniques, and pressure ignition techniques. ECAD can be used to design circuits that support gate-around field-effect transistors (GAAFETs), which can be used to produce chips 3

The Xe integrated graphics and Arc Alchemist discrete graphics on Intel’s 12th generation CPUs drop the hardware’s native support for DX9 and will instead support DX9 in an emulated form via DirectX 12 . The simulation will run on Microsoft’s D3D9On12 open source translation layer. It works by sending 3D DirectX 9 graphics commands to

Mozilla announced the appointment of Steve Teixeira as Chief Product Officer, who will lead its product team. Teixeira previously worked at Twitter as VP of Product for Machine Learning and Data Platforms; led product management, design and research for Facebook’s infrastructure division; and spent 14 years at Microsoft. He said Mozilla’s products such as Firefox

According to Reuters , citing people familiar with the matter (paywall or privacy model), Tencent plans to sell all or most of its $24 billion stake in Meituan. The move is aimed at quelling regulators’ concerns. After the news broke, Meituan’s Hong Kong-listed share price plummeted 10%, and Tencent responded by saying it declined to