Malaysia and Indonesia have signed agreements to end longstanding sea border disputes and vowed to bolster cooperation to fight “highly detrimental discriminatory” measures against palm oil

Global inflation over the past year has hiked prices for Islam's Hajj pilgrimage dramatically

In the first match week of June in the NWSL the league saw massive table shifts as the leader heading into the week dropped to fourth.Once again, the NWSL displays why it is one of the best women's soccer leagues in the world. The two clubs that were in the bottom two of the league heading ...

American chess grandmaster Hans Niemann has been cleared of claims that he cheated in a match last year using vibrating anal beads. The dispute had scandalised the world of chess after world champion Magnus Carlsen implied that Niemann had cheated in a match in late 2022 when he beat Carlsen in the prestigious Sinquefield Cup. Carlsen, who is considered one of the best players in history, quit the tournament immediately. A week later, he also refused to play Niemann in a live broadcast online game, instead choosing to immediately resign the match before making a move. A rising star in the chess world, Niemann found himself a pariah. He filed a $100m lawsuit against Carlsen, as well as the website chess.com and another top grandmaster, American Hikaru Nakamura, who all appeared to support the allegations that he had cheated. Niemann has admitted to cheating online when he was 12 and 16 – a serious offence when you become a top grandmaster – but insists he has never done so in a game over the board. He even promised to play naked to prove his innocence after unfounded claims he may have used vibrating anal beads were amplified by Elon Musk. Chess.com, the world’s most popular chess playing website with millions of users, published a 72-page report in October, claiming that Niemann had “likely cheated” between 2015 and 2020. Niemann denied the allegations. Now, after a US judge dismissed Niemann’s suit in June, he appears ready to move on. On Monday, Chess.com said the parties had agreed to move forward without the threat of legal action. “We are pleased to report that we have reached an agreement with Hans Niemann to put our differences behind us and move forward together without further litigation,” the website said in a statement. “At this time, Hans has been fully reinstated to Chess.com, and we look forward to his participation in our events. We would also like to reaffirm that we stand by the findings in our October 2022 public report regarding Hans, including that we found no determinative evidence that he has cheated in any in-person games. We all love chess and appreciate all of the passionate fans and community members who allow us to do what we do.” Carlsen said: “I acknowledge and understand Chess.com’s report, including its statement that there is no determinative evidence that Niemann cheated in his game against me at the Sinquefield Cup. I am willing to play Niemann in future events, should we be paired together.” Niemann added: “I am pleased that my lawsuit against Magnus Carlsen and Chess.com has been resolved in a mutually acceptable manner, and that I am returning to Chess.com. I look forward to competing against Magnus in chess rather than in court,” he said. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

A federal appeals court says a government agency cannot enforce anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination employment rules against a Texas company owned by a conservative Christian

Today's MLS rumors include Lionel Messi not planning to go out on loan from Inter Miami. Alphonso Davies continues to be linked with Real Madrid and Wayne Rooney has a poor start to his time as Birmingham City manager.

By Steve Scherer and David Ljunggren OTTAWA The Bank of Canada on Wednesday is expected to keep rates

“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now in this very room." So says Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus in sci-fi classic ‘The Matrix’ as he offers Keanu Reeves’s Neo the choice to find out just how “deep the rabbit hole goes”. Now, just as Neo discovered that the "life" he'd been living was little more than an algorithmic construct, scientists and philosophers are arguing that we could be stuck inside a simulation ourselves. In a paper published earlier this month, physicist Melvin Vopson, of the University of Portsmouth, offered scientific evidence for a philosophical theory known as the simulation hypothesis. This, in a nutshell, posits that the entire universe and our objective reality are just super-advanced virtual reality illusions. Elon Musk is among the well-known fans of the theory, which – as Dr Vopson notes in his paper – has been “gaining traction in scientific circles as well as in the entertainment industry”. The university lecturer also pointed out that recent developments in a branch of science known as information physics “appear to support this possibility”. Information physics suggests that physical reality is fundamentally made up of bits of information. However, Dr Vopson has gone further and is working to prove that information has a physical mass and is a fundamental building block of the universe. He even claims that information could be the mysterious dark matter that makes up almost a third of the universe. In previous research, the physicist proposed that all elementary particles (the smallest known building blocks in the universe), store information about themselves, much like DNA in humans. Then, in 2022, he discovered a new law of physics, christened the second law of infodynamics, which states that entropy – the degree of randomness or disorder – within an isolated information system either remains constant or decreases over time. In other words, the system becomes less and less chaotic, implying that there is some kind of mechanism governing it rather than random chance. “I knew then that this revelation had far-reaching implications across various scientific disciplines,” Dr Vopson said in a statement released by the University of Portsmouth. “What I wanted to do next is put the law to the test and see if it could further support the simulation hypothesis by moving it on from the philosophical realm to mainstream science.” Is the Universe a Simulation? | Melvin Vopson www.youtube.com Dr Vopson employed the law in a range of different fields, including genetics, cosmology and even symmetry. Here, he found that the abundance of symmetry in the Universe (think snowflakes and facial structures) could be explained by the second law of infodynamics. "Symmetry principles play an important role with respect to the laws of nature, but until now there has been little explanation as to why that could be,” he said. “My findings demonstrate that high symmetry corresponds to the lowest information entropy state, potentially explaining nature's inclination towards it." Again, put simply, nature prefers things to be as well-ordered as possible. He continued: “This approach, where excess information is removed, resembles the process of a computer deleting or compressing waste code to save storage space and optimise power consumption.” As a result, this “supports the idea that we’re living in a simulation.” Dr Vopson is serious about this idea and, last year, even launched a crowdfunding campaign to test it. At the time, he announced that he had designed an experiment to determine whether we are all just characters in an advanced virtual world. “There is a growing community out there looking seriously at the possibility that information is more fundamental to everything than we think,” he said in a statement released back in December. “If information is a key component of everything in the universe, it would make sense that a vast computer somewhere is in control. “Assuming the universe is indeed a simulation, then it must contain a lot of information bits hidden everywhere around us. I’ve devised an experiment that proposes a way of extracting this information to prove it’s there.” His proposed experiment is based on his conclusion that information is physical and that elementary particles have a DNA of information about themselves. He posited that the information in an elementary particle could be detected and measured by using particle-antiparticle collision. “We can measure the information content of a particle by erasing it. If we delete the information from the particles, we can then look at what’s left,” he said in the December statement. “This experiment is highly achievable with our existing tools, and I’m hoping the crowdfunding site will help us achieve it.” And whilst the crowdfunder closed well before reaching its proposed £185,000 target, Dr Vopson still hopes to carry out the ambitious test. Following his most recent paper, he suggested the experiment had the power to confirm the “fifth state of matter in the universe” and “change physics as we know it.” Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter 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.

Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson will miss Sunday’s game against Baltimore with a right shoulder injury, pushing rookie Dorian Thompson-Robinson into his first NFL start against the Ravens

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