FRISCO, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 22, 2023--

A pan-African approach is needed to solve the continent’s food-security dilemma given the high cost of developing agricultural

Going into week 13, how do the NFL MVP Power Rankings stack up?

By Andrew Chung The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday lifted restrictions imposed by lower courts on the ability

Instagram is experiencing global outages with more than 50,000 users reporting issues from just before 11pm on Sunday night. Down Detector, a website that tracks outages, has had 56,628 reports at around 11pm. The Down Detector location map shows the outages are spread right across the UK with reports of the outages coming from the US and Australia as well. Instagram’s owners Meta have yet to publicly address the outage or say when the Instagram may come back online. According to Down Detector, 92% of the outages were on the app, 6% via the website and 2% on the login. Users cannot refresh their Instagram feed. Instagram had an outage on March 9 where thousands of users reported similar issues. Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live

The gunman who killed 23 people at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart faces a sentencing hearing in federal court this week, as prosecutors seek to have him serve dozens of consecutive life sentences for the August 2019 shooting.

By Jonathan Landay WASHINGTON Even when he was president, Donald Trump lacked the legal authority to declassify a

It is possible for human beings to hear silence, according to a team of philosophers and psychologists, in a huge win for 1960s crooners Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. In a study published on Monday by Johns Hopkins University researchers, the team decided that it’s not just sound that human hears pick up: silence is, indeed, something we can hear too. Rui Zhe Goh, a Johns Hopkins graduate student in philosophy and psychology who was the study’s lead author, wrote: "We typically think of our sense of hearing as being concerned with sounds. But silence, whatever it is, is not a sound — it's the absence of sound. Surprisingly, what our work suggests is that nothing is also something you can hear.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Per the study, published in the journal PNAS, researchers had participants listen to an array of audio illusions. They also periodically substituted the noise for pure nothingness, the measure whether people’s brains would react in the same way. “Philosophers have long debated whether silence is something we can literally perceive, but there hasn’t been a scientific study aimed directly at this question,” said study co-author Chaz Firestone, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences and the director of the Johns Hopkins Perception & Mind Laboratory. “Our approach was to ask whether our brains treat silences the way they treat sounds.” "If you can get the same illusions with silences as you get with sounds, then that may be evidence that we literally hear silence after all." The 1,000 participants’ responses were measured across seven different tests. Across all of them, their brains reacted the same way to silence as they did to noise. “We show that silences can 'substitute' for sounds in event-based auditory illusions,” said the study. “Seven experiments introduce three 'silence illusions,' adapted from perceptual illusions previously thought to arise only with sounds.” “In all cases, silences elicited temporal distortions perfectly analogous to their sound-based counterparts, suggesting that auditory processing treats moments of silence the way it treats sounds. Silence is truly perceived, not merely inferred,” it said. “The kinds of illusions and effects that look like they are unique to the auditory processing of a sound, we also get them with silences, suggesting we really do hear absences of sound too,” added study co-author Ian Phillips, a John Hopkins philosopher and psychologist. Hello darkness my old friend… Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Ghana’s central bank is poised to look past a recent quickening in inflation and keep interest rates on

By Divya Rajagopal TORONTO Canada's plan to bring down food prices by tightening regulation could backfire and fail,

Long before a wildfire blasted through the island of Maui last week, there was tension between Hawaii’s longtime residents and the visitors some islanders resent for turning their beaches, mountains and communities into playgrounds

A humorous mishap led to unexpected revelations as Cher and Jimmy Fallon accidentally got locked in 'The Tonight Show' freezer