List of All Articles with Tag 'ci'

The MLB playoffs feature some pretty big what-ifs that some teams are kicking themselves over. One team, though, can enjoy the show and know they're positioned well for the future.

Today's MLS rumors include Wayne Rooney continue to be linked with Birmingham City. Luis Suarez is set to leave Gremio at the end of the year and could be on his way to Inter Miami.

Why Mateo Kovacic wasn't sent off in Manchester City's 1-0 defeat at Arsenal on Sunday?

The Sun has been punching holes in the Earth’s magnetic field lately – but that’s not as alarming as it sounds. Instead, they have been sparking magnificent light shows across Europe and North America, made up mainly of crimson auroras and sustained periods of red sky. The displays have been caused by disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field, which happened after a massive ejection of plasma from the Sun came hurtling our way. The event, known as a coronal mass ejection, made a hole in the planet’s magnetic field, allowing highly charged particles to make their way in and cause a geomagnetic storm. Normally, the Northern Lights are made up of mainly green, with the occasional flash of other colours including red. However, longer periods of red light shows are very rare. The highly charged particles then get channelled towards the north and south poles, where they interact with gas molecules in the atmosphere. They, in turn, release photons, causing the aurora borealis in the north and aurora australis in the south. Normally, the Northern Lights are made up of mainly green, with the occasional flash of other colours including red. However, longer periods of red light shows are very rare. But what makes this geomagnetic storm different is that the particles coming from the Sun collided with oxygen atoms higher in the Earth’s atmosphere than normal. The altitude at which this interaction happens dictates the colour of the aurora. This time, the charged particles were between 300 and 400 kilometres in the sky. There, the oxygen is less concentrated and doesn’t need as much energy to cause it to react. It all adds up to a flash of crimson red light in the sky. Somewhat excitingly for aurora-watchers, this sort of event is likely to get more common over the next two years, as the Sun’s activity becomes heightened until its peak in roughly July 2025. Looks like there will be more of these incredible ruby light shows soon enough. 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.

In 2020, philosopher Toby Ord published The Precipice, a book on the risk of human extinction. The chances of "existential catastrophe" for humanity in the next century according to Ord? One in six. It was a shocking number that alarmed many. After years of being flooded with warnings over climate change, rogue AI, nuclear weapons and pandemics, it's hard to disagree that humans face worrying chances. In his book, Ord discusses a number of potential extinction events, some of which can be examined through history. His research involved looking at the number of space rocks that have hit the moon over its history to figure out the likelihood than an extinction-sized asteroid hitting Earth. This was, in fact, looked at in 2022 by French scientists Jean-Marc Salotti, he calculated the odds of an extinction-level hit in the next century to be roughly one in 300 million. By contrast, Ord estimated the risk to be one in a million, although he does point out a considerable degree of uncertainty. Probabilities can be hard to understand in this context. Traditional probability, for example, relies on observations and a collection of repeated events, but human extinction would be a one-off. But there is another way to think if, called Bayesianism, after the English statistician Thomas Bayes. It sees probabilities as a ranking system of sorts. Specific number predictions shouldn't be taken so literally, but rather compared to other probabilities to understand the likelihood of each outcome. Ord's book contains a table of potential causes of extinctions, accompanied by his personal estimates of their probability. From a Bayesian perspective, we can view these as relative ranks. Ord thinks extinction from an asteroid strike (one in a million) is much less likely than extinction from climate change (one in a thousand). However, even using Bayesianism traditionally requires the incorporation of observational evidence. So, what do we make of Ord's "one in six"? Well it's better to take it less literally but to think of it as a warning, to jump start action on issues such as climate change to hopefully reduce the risk of human extinction in the next century. 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.

Mars is often called the Red Planet, but a recent image captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover from the surface would go some way to contradicting that. Earlier this year, Perseverance snapped a sunset from Mars in which the Sun looks blue, a sight which would never be seen from our own planet. The photograph was taken on the rover’s 842nd day on the planet, and shows a Martian horizon with the sun setting behind causing an eerily cool glow. Because of Mars’ distance from the Sun, it gets less sunlight than we do on Earth. Even at its sunniest, it gets less than half our quota of light from the star. And the planet’s atmosphere, which is weaker than Earth’s, is mainly made up of carbon dioxide, with a small amount of nitrogen and a trace of oxygen. This gaseous mix and weak atmosphere causes the light to scatter in a blue haze across the sky. It’s the same process which gives us our blue sky during the daytime, when the light has less atmosphere to penetrate before it reaches our eyes. On Earth, this changes when the sun dips below the horizon, and the light has more atmosphere to penetrate, filtering our blue and violet wavelengths, leaving only reds and oranges. Meanwhile on Mars, the sunlight interacts with the dust hanging in the atmosphere, scattering red light during the day. At twilight, that red light is filtered away, leaving blues. Atmospheric scientist Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University told Science Alert: "The colours come from the fact that the very fine dust is the right size so that blue light penetrates the atmosphere slightly more efficiently. “When the blue light scatters off the dust, it stays closer to the direction of the Sun than light of other colours does. “The rest of the sky is yellow to orange, as yellow and red light scatter all over the sky instead of being absorbed or staying close to the Sun.” 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.

Quite a thing to say on television.

With the increasing number of self-service checkout machines popping up in stores for convenience, there is one simple feature that is used to put off potential shoplifters - mirrors. There's a good chance that you've looked at your reflection in the screens fitted to these machines, and the purpose of it is for potential shoplifters to catch themselves in the mirror in the hopes of making them feel guilty. This pang of a guilty conscience is hoped to prevent them from committing any crime (it's not just there for vanity purposes like most of us use it for). Research also backs up the theory that people who see themselves in a mirror are less likely to do something bad. A 1976 study from Letters of Evolutionary Behavioural Science found that when people are around mirrors, they "behave in accordance with social desirability". "Mirrors influence impulsivity, a feature that is closely related to decision-making in both social and non-social situations." When participants in the experiment were looking at mirrors, their "private self-awareness was activated" by them and as a result influenced "decision-making as a non-social cues". Similarly, Psychology Today notes how a mirror allows "people to literally watch over themselves" and this "dramatically boosts our self-awareness". Meanwhile, the issue of self-service checkouts and shoplifting was highlighted in a report by Mashed last year which it appeared to confirm that Walmart's attempt at combatting this problem was a psychological method with the addition of mirrors (though Walmart, alongside other supermarkets, has never confirmed the purpose of their mirrors at their self-service checkout services). 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 pair of shoes thought to be the oldest ever found in Europe are now estimated to be even older than scientists had previously thought. About 20 pairs of sandals found in southern Spain are at least 6,200 years old, while other woven objects found in the cave date back 9,500 years, according to a new study. The scientists used carbon-dating on 76 objects found in the Cueva de los Murciélagos, Albuñol, near Granada, which were originally discovered by miners in the 19th century. The objects are particularly valuable to science because they represent the first direct evidence of certain hunter-gatherer skills, such as weaving, in southern Europe. They are made of wood, reed and esparto grass. The shoes measured about eight inches in length. The study was published in the journal Science Advances by a team from the Universidad de Alcalá (UAH) and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Francisco Martínez Sevilla, a researcher at the Prehistory Department of UAH, said: “These are the earliest and widest-ranging assemblage of prehistoric footwear, both in the Iberian Peninsula and in Europe, unparalleled at other latitudes. “The new dating of the esparto baskets from the Cueva de los Murciélagos of Albuñol opens a window of opportunity to understanding the last hunter-gatherer societies of the early Holocene. “The quality and technological complexity of the basketry makes us question the simplistic assumptions we have about human communities prior to the arrival of agriculture in Southern Europe.” He said the project placed the cave as “a unique site in Europe to study the organic materials of prehistoric populations”. Cueva de los Murciélagos, or “Cave of the Bats,” is located on the coast of Granada, to the south of the Sierra Nevada. The finds are thought to have been so well-preserved because of low humidity levels in the area. Study co-author María Herrero Otal added: “The esparto grass objects from Cueva de los Murciélagos are the oldest and best-preserved set of plant fibre materials in Southern Europe so far known. “The technological diversity and the treatment of the raw material documented demonstrates the ability of prehistoric communities to master this type of craftsmanship, at least since 9,500 years ago, in the Mesolithic period. “Only one type of technique related to hunter-gatherers has been identified, while the typological, technological and treatment range of esparto grass was extended during the Neolithic from 7,200 to 6,200 years before the present.” 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.

Man City and Man Utd are among the teams who have been impressed by Benfica's Joao Neves in recent months. PSG, Borussia Dortmund and Juventus have also been watching the 19-year-old midfielder.

Jaime Gilinski Bacal, a Colombian banking and real estate entrepreneur, has taken control of Metro Bank as part of a bigger rescue deal to fill a hole in the UK lender's finances.

Archaeologists have found a rare cold bath below the 18th-century Bath Assembly Rooms. The rooms, completed in 1771, were fashionable places of entertainment, conversation, dancing and gambling and cold baths were seen as good for people's health. The cold bath is in the centre of a suite of three rooms beneath one end of the ballroom. It has dressing rooms on either side. The excavation involved removing a later floor that had been installed over the cold bath and removing tonnes of rubble to reveal steps down into it. Bruce Eaton, of Wessex Archaeology, which oversaw the excavation, told the Guardian: “Although historical records indicated that there was a cold bath buried beneath the Bath Assembly Rooms, we had no idea what preservation of the bath would be like. “The building suffered damage at the hands of the Luftwaffe and the rooms were remodelled in the late 20th century but, after carefully excavating tonnes of concrete and rubble, we saw the original structure emerge in its entirety. “It’s tremendous to be able to piece together this rare archaeological evidence of an 18th-century cold bath with social historical accounts from the time.” Tatjana LeBoff, a project curator at the National Trust, said: “The cold bath at the assembly rooms is highly unusual. It is a rare, if not unique, surviving example, and possibly it was the only one ever built in an assembly room.” The trust was researching records, letters, diaries and other documents to discover more about the cold bath, she 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.