UnitedHealth beat second-quarter expectations as an acquisition and more Medicare Advantage customers fueled revenue growth that balanced a jump in care use

Federal health advisers are debating a first-of-its-kind RSV vaccine to protect newborns by immunizing their moms late in pregnancy

Talks over forming Thailand’s next government are well into their second week and there’s still no sign that

The Philippine central bank left its benchmark interest rate unchanged for a third straight meeting as the economy

Kylie Jenner recently opened up about her plastic surgery regrets, and it weaseled its way into ‘The View’ as a part of the ‘Hot Topics’ segment

The Pentagon comments come three weeks after the mercenaries' failed mutiny in Russia.

Hamish Harding is one of the five crew members who could be trapped 12,000 feet underwater on OceanGate's Titan submersible

It might take all 162 games of the long Major League Baseball season to decide the playoff races in both the National League and American League

Success in Germany and Greece boosts hard-right parties; now they are eying Spanish elections.

Tesla titan and multi-billionaire Elon Musk has reportedly warned US senators at a private meeting that unregulated artificial intelligence technology poses a “civilisational risk” to society. Senate majority leader Chuch Schumer convened a meeting of the most prominent tech executives in the US to help pass a bipartisan legislation encouraging both the rapid development of AI technology and also mitigating its biggest risks. The closed-door meeting was attended by some of the tech industry’s biggest names, including Tesla and SpaceX boss Mr Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, former Microsoft chief Bill Gates, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, as well as OpenAI founder Sam Altman. As Mr Musk left the Capitol building following several hours of the meeting, he told reporters that “we have to be proactive rather than reactive” in regulating AI as its consequences of going wrong are “severe”. “The question is really one of civilizational risk. It’s not like … one group of humans versus another. It’s like, hey, this is something that’s potentially risky for all humans everywhere,” he said, according to NBC News. Mr Musk also reportedly called for a government AI agency, similar to the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Federal Aviation Administration to oversee developments in the sector and ensure safety. Leaders in the tech industry also called for a balanced approach towards regulating AI. In his prepared remarks, Mr Zuckerberg said the two defining issues for AI are “safety and access”, adding that the US Congress should “engage with AI to support innovation and safeguards”. “New technology often brings new challenges, and it’s on companies to make sure we build and deploy products responsibly,” the Meta chief said. “This is an emerging technology, there are important equities to balance here, and the government is ultimately responsible for that,” he added. The Facebook founder called for policymakers, academics, civil society and industry to work together to minimise the potential risks of AI, but also to maximise its potential benefits. Some of the measures he suggested for building safeguards into AI systems included “selecting the data to train with, extensively red-teaming internally and externally to identify and fix issues, fine-tuning the models for alignment, and partnering with safety-minded cloud providers to add additional filters to the systems we release”. As lawmakers at the US Capitol Hill interacted with tech giant chiefs about potential AI regulations, companies including Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon were also being probed on the conditions of the workers behind tools like ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard. Lawmakers are reportedly probing the working conditions of data labelers who are tasked by companies, often at outsourced firms, to label data used to train AI and for rating chatbot responses. “Despite the essential nature of this work, millions of data workers around the world perform these stressful tasks under constant surveillance, with low wages and no benefits,” lawmakers, including Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey, said in a letter to tech executives. “These conditions not only harm the workers, they also risk the quality of the AI systems –potentially undermining accuracy, introducing bias, and jeopardizing data protection,” they said. Read More Elon Musk was on brink of death after catching malaria on South African safari, book claims Fatherhood, rows with Amber Heard and ‘the woke mind virus’: 6 big revelations from Elon Musk’s biography Putin praises Musk as ‘outstanding person’ days after report Tesla boss stopped Ukrainian attack Long-form video content is here to stay, says YouTube UK boss Cybertruck sparked Tesla revolt that saw secret design plan, Musk biography reveals Everything Apple killed off at iPhone 15 event

Your brain doesn’t work the same when you speak to someone on Zoom, scientists have confirmed. Neural signalling is significantly less when chatting to someone through a video call rather than having a face-to-face conversation, the new study found. When researchers watched the brain of someone talking in real life, they found that there was a detailed and complex system of neurological activity. On Zoom, however, that was dramatically less. It suggests that there is still something fundamentally lacking about speaking with someone online. People’s faces are not able to light up people’s brains in the same way, the researchers suggest. That is something of a surprise: current models suggest that the brain should process people’s faces in the same way whether they are on Zoom or in real life, given the features of them are the same. But the new study suggests that there really is something fundamentally different between the two contexts. “In this study we find that the social systems of the human brain are more active during real live in-person encounters than on Zoom,” said Joy Hirsch, a Yale professor who was the lead author on the new study. “Zoom appears to be an impoverished social communication system relative to in-person conditions.” To find that, researchers studied people’s brains in real time as well as looking at other signals, such as where people’s eyes moved. As well as increased neural activity, the researchers found that people’s eyes hovered for longer on the real faces, for instance. The two people’s brains also seemed to be more co-ordinated. That suggests that there are more social cues being shared between the two people, they said. “Overall, the dynamic and natural social interactions that occur spontaneously during in-person interactions appear to be less apparent or absent during Zoom encounters,” Professor Hirsch said. “This is a really robust effect.” The study suggests that face-to-face encounters remain very important, even as technology companies and others come up with new ways for us to interact with people remotely, the authors said. “Online representations of faces, at least with current technology, do not have the same ‘privileged access’ to social neural circuitry in the brain that is typical of the real thing,” said Professor Hirsch. The findings are described in a new paper, ‘Separable Processes for Live “In-Person” and Live “Zoom-like” Faces’, published in Imaging Neuroscience. Read More Scientists reveal what talking on Zoom does to your brain – and it’s not good Infrared lights spotted on Uranus could be clue to alien life Elon Musk says X posts with misinformation are ‘ineligible for revenue share’

Jonny Evans said Northern Ireland’s 1-0 Euro 2024 qualifying defeat to Denmark was “hard to take” after he was adjudged to be offside when setting up Callum Marshall for what had appeared to be a stoppage-time equaliser. The 1,700 travelling fans inside the Parken Stadium erupted when teenage debutant Marshall neatly directed Evans’ header inside the post following Jordan Thompson’s free-kick. But when referee Daniel Stefanski signalled there would be a VAR check, a seemingly interminable five-minute wait followed as Tomasz Kwiatkowski took an age to review the footage before eventually ruling that Evans had been offside by the tightest of margins when Thompson struck the free-kick. “I kind of felt I was coming back from an offside position but it wasn’t until we were back in our own half that I even considered it might be a thing,” Evans said. “When they were checking for that long I thought they were going to something to try and disallow it. Those were the emotions going through my mind. “I’ve been involved before where decisions take a long time but that’s definitely the longest. The longer it was going on I kind of felt it was like a dream really. It was strange. The referee tried to explain afterwards that they checked every single possible scenario. “I don’t get many assists and I was gutted and I was obviously gutted for Callum. For him to be able to experience that feeling of scoring was great and I hope that stays with him and he can take motivation from it.” The trip to Copenhagen represented the toughest fixture on paper for Northern Ireland in Group H, and they acquitted themselves well, defending doggedly for long periods and soaking up pressure from the hosts. But a mistake from Ciaron Brown – about the only foot the Oxford defender put wrong – was punished by Jonas Wind at the start of the second half and that proved the difference in the match. “It is hard to take,” Evans said. “Denmark are obviously buzzing. Had it gone our way we would have been the same. You can run all that through. “In the last five or 10 minutes we tired but I thought we did well. We were brought on fresh legs to try and get something out of the game and we nearly did. When we got the free-kick I thought this is our chance… “I thought we did what we had to do. We came in at half-time pretty pleased. We knew the first 10 minutes of the second half would be important and it was disappointing to concede a goal. “I looked up at the clock and saw 47 minutes. We really needed to ride that out but they came out strong and quick and once they got their goal it wasn’t really until they changed their shape that we had a chance to get back in it.” Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live Connor Roberts eager to ‘create more memories’ as Wales aim to bounce back Kenny McLean savours special moment after scoring late Scotland winner in Norway Justin Thomas predicts shortest hole in modern US Open history could be ‘spicy’