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Texas officials are urging residents in some areas to use different modes of transportation other than their cars on Friday as ozone pollution in the state reach concerning levels.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) has declared an Ozone Action Day for the Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Galveston and Brazoria areas because of high levels of ozone, also known as smog. Officials suggested that to help reduce the pollution, people should minimize the use of their vehicles.

"Atmospheric conditions are expected to be favorable for producing high levels of ozone pollution in the Houston, Galveston, and surrounding areas on Friday," the alert posted by the National Weather Service (NWS) said. "You can help prevent ozone pollution by sharing a ride, walking, riding a bicycle, taking your lunch to work, avoiding drive through lanes, conserving energy and keeping your vehicle properly tuned."

The warning comes a day after California also experienced high levels of air pollution and warned people in Imperial County to delay visiting gas stations and using chemicals until ozone levels improve.

JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) — A large chunk of a twisting mountain pass road collapsed in Wyoming, authorities said Saturday, leaving a gaping chasm in the highway and severing a well-traveled commuter link between small towns in eastern Idaho and the tourist destination of Jackson.

Aerial photos and drone video of the collapse show the Teton Pass road riven with deep cracks, and a big section of the pavement disappeared altogether. Part of the guardrail dangled into the void, and orange traffic drums marked off the danger area. The road was closed at the time of the collapse.

The section that failed first drew attention Thursday when a crack and drop in the road contributed to the crash of a motorcycle.

Geologists and engineers who were sent to the area that day noticed “that crack and that drop started to move a lot,” said Stephanie Harsha, a spokesperson for District 3 of the Wyoming Department of Transportation. A paving crew temporarily patched the road, and traffic began moving again that night.

But that was short-lived as maintenance crews were sent to respond to a mudslide a couple of miles away in the pre-dawn hours of Friday, prompting the road to be closed once again.

Four hostages were rescued simultaneously from two separate nearby locations from Nuseirat in central Gaza in a high-risk joint operation by the IDF, Shin Bet, and Yamam and police in broad daylight, the IDF announced in a series of statements on Saturday.

Regarding the third such successful operation to rescue hostages since the war started on October 7, the IDF said that the rescued hostages were Noa Argamani (25,) Almog Meir (21,) Andrey Kozlov (27,) and Shlomi Ziv (40,) all of whom were kidnapped by Hamas to the Gaza Strip from the 'Nova' party.

An uncertain number of Palestinian terrorists and civilians were killed during the operation. The IDF implied that dozens of terrorists were killed but left open the possibility that potentially some dozens of Palestinian civilians might also have been killed.

According to the IDF, around 90 Palestinians were likely killed, but the complexity of the hostages being held in civilian areas and a certain amount of chaos at points of the operation left the breakdown of terrorists to civilians unclear, with Hamas claiming the number was closer to 210, but not providing any verifiable evidence.

/u/Goodmooood said:

This is an incredible win.
Noa Argamani was (one of) the face of this whole war, ever since the Oct 7 atrocities happened.
The whole nation is overcome with joy and emotions.

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A "serious" software glitch meant a plane taking off from Bristol Airport barely cleared the end of the runway.

The TUI Boeing 737-800 was departing for Gran Canaria on 4 March when issues with the auto-throttle emerged, and the incident is now being examined by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch.

The jet - carrying 163 passengers and six crew members, only managed to take to the sky with 260m (853ft) of runway remaining and cleared the end of the tarmac at a height of just 3m (10ft).

It then passed over the nearby A38 at a height of under 30m (100ft).

A Mississippi state trooper was fired after sending explicit images and videos to other cops and now she and the woman she had sex with on video are suing each other.

MHP Trooper Ivana Williams was let go from the agency after distributing the video. The unnamed woman in the video claims Williams said she would delete the tape, but instead shared it.

A Mississippi Department of Public investigation into her behavior found that Williams sent explicit images of herself to her superiors and visited porn websites on her state-issued phone.

The other woman in the tape has sued Williams for $11million, and now the former trooper has filed her own suit against the woman for $20million. Williams said the woman’s lawsuit has damaged her reputation and business relationship.

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The discovery of the potential for thousands of tons of lithium to be extracted annually from wastewater generated by fracking in the Marcellus Shale leaves proponents of a green energy future at a crossroads, Republicans said Thursday.

A University of Pittsburgh study suggested processing byproducts from natural gas production in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale basin could potentially meet nearly half of U.S. lithium needs. The typical electric vehicle (EV) requires nearly 18 pounds of lithium to power its battery. That figure grows exponentially for Teslas, according to reports.

Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, R-Pa., who represents much of the Marcellus territory, told Fox News he wants to see those on the left change their tune.

"Now nearly 40% of our nation’s domestic need for lithium can be found right here as a byproduct of fracking," he said. "I fully expect every single Democrat to join Republicans in supporting domestic natural gas development."

The U.S. military-built pier designed to carry badly needed aid into Gaza by boat has been reconnected to the beach in the besieged territory after a section broke apart in storms and rough seas, and food and other supplies will begin to flow soon, U.S. Central Command announced Friday.

The section that connects to the beach in Gaza, the causeway, was rebuilt nearly two weeks after heavy storms damaged it and abruptly halted what had already been a troubled delivery route.

“Earlier this morning in Gaza, U.S. forces successfully attached the temporary pier to the Gaza beach,” Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, told reporters by phone Friday. “We expect to resume delivery of humanitarian assistance from the sea in the coming days.”

Cooper said operations at the reconnected pier will be ramped up soon with a goal to get 1 million pounds of food and other supplies moving through the pier into Gaza every two days.

SEATTLE (AP) — William Anders, the former Apollo 8 astronaut who took the iconic “Earthrise” photo showing the planet as a shadowed blue marble from space in 1968, was killed Friday when the plane he was piloting alone plummeted into the waters off the San Juan Islands in Washington state. He was 90.

His son, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Greg Anders, confirmed the death to The Associated Press.

“The family is devastated,” he said. “He was a great pilot and we will miss him terribly.”

William Anders, a retired major general, has said the photo was his most significant contribution to the space program along with making sure the Apollo 8 command module and service module worked.

The photograph, the first color image of Earth from space, is one of the most important photos in modern history for the way it changed how humans viewed the planet. The photo is credited with sparking the global environmental movement for showing how delicate and isolated Earth appeared from space.

A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about an extremely important case that was being considered by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s top court. The central question was whether the judges considered that copyright was more important than privacy. The bad news is that the CJEU has just decided that it is:

The Court, sitting as the Full Court, holds that the general and indiscriminate retention of IP addresses does not necessarily constitute a serious interference with fundamental rights.

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IP addresses refer to the identifying Internet number assigned to a user’s system when it is online. That may change each time someone uses the Internet, but if Internet Service Providers are required by law to retain information about who was assigned a particular address at a given time, then it is possible to carry out routine surveillance of people’s online activities. The CJEU has decided this is acceptable:

EU law does not preclude national legislation authorising the competent public authority, for the sole purpose of identifying the person suspected of having committed a criminal offence, to access the civil identity data associated with an IP address

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The key problem is that copyright infringement by a private individual is regarded by the court as something so serious that it negates the right to privacy. It’s a sign of the twisted values that copyright has succeeded on imposing on many legal systems. It equates the mere copying of a digital file with serious crimes that merit a prison sentence, an evident absurdity.

For over four decades Pat Sajak was synonymous with the beloved gameshow, "Wheel of Fortune." On Friday, the 77-year-old host took his final spin on the iconic show after a stunning 41-year and 8,000- episode run.

“Well, the time has come to say goodbye. I have a few thanks and acknowledgments before I go. And I want to start with all of you watching out there. It’s been an incredible privilege to be invited into millions of homes night after night, year after year, decade after decade,” Sajak said in a preview ahead of the Friday broadcast released by the show.

“And I’ve always felt that the privilege came with a responsibility to keep this daily half-hour a safe place for family fun. No social issues, no politics, nothing embarrassing I hope, just a game,” he continued.

What started as a game turned out to mean so much more.

“But gradually it became more than that: a place where kids learned their letters, where people from other countries honed their English skills, where families came together along with friends and neighbors and entire generations.”

In the mid-1920s, two absolute giants in the world of physics, Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein, theorized the existence of a strange quantum state of matter that’d eventually be named in their honor: the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). The 20th century luminaries figured that if particles were cooled to ultracold temperatures—mere fractions of degrees away from absolute zero (-459.67 °F)—and kept at low densities, they’d form an indistinguishable whole.

Fast-forward some 70 years later, scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder proved Einstein and Bose correct. Since then, BECs have been a vital tool for exploring the quantum properties of atoms, and a series of advancements—whether getting the particles even cooler or getting them to form diatomic molecules—have made them more and more useful in the search for the underlying physics that governs the universe.

Now, physicists from Columbia University—in collaboration with Radboud University in the Netherlands—took the next step of this century-long BEC journey by creating a sodium-cesium condensate that’s only five nanoKelvin above absolute zero. While that’s an impressively cold temperature, the most important part of this impressive piece of experimental physics is that the resulting BEC is dipolar, meaning it has both a positive and a negative charge. The team utilized a previously peer-reviewed technique that uses microwaves to cross “the BEC threshold,” according to a press statement. The results of this study were published this week in the journal Nature.

Police in Los Angeles seized more than 2,800 boxes of stolen LEGO sets from a 71-year-old man's home Wednesday, authorities said.

Officers arrested 71-year-old Richard Siegel and his alleged accomplice, 39-year-old Blanca Gudino, after raiding the elderly man's Long Beach home, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

The individual boxes have a retail value ranging from $20 to well over $1,000, police said.

Detectives started investigating the case after a retailer in San Pedro identified Gudino as the suspect who had allegedly robbed them several times last December.

One of the major drivers of the exceptional heat building within Earth's atmosphere has reached levels beyond anything humans have ever experienced, officials announced on Thursday. Carbon dioxide, the gas that accounts for the majority of global warming caused by human activities, is accumulating "faster than ever," scientists from NOAA, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California San Diego found.

"Over the past year, we've experienced the hottest year on record, the hottest ocean temperatures on record, and a seemingly endless string of heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and storms," NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a press release. "Now we are finding that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing faster than ever."

The researchers measured carbon dioxide, or CO2, levels at the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory. They found that atmospheric levels of the gas hit a seasonal peak of just under 427 parts per million in May — an increase of 2.9 ppm since May 2023 and the fifth-largest annual growth in 50 years of data recording.

It also made official that the past two years saw the largest jump in the May peak — when CO2 levels are at their highest in the Northern Hemisphere. John Miller, a NOAA carbon cycle scientist, said that the jump likely stems from the continuous rampant burning of fossil fuels as well as El Niño conditions making the planet's ability to absorb CO2 more difficult.

It’s possible that our universe is the antimatter counterpart of an antimatter universe that existed earlier in time than the Big Bang. So claim physicists in Canada, who have devised a new cosmological model positing the existence of a “antiuniverse” which, paired to our own, preserves a fundamental rule of physics called CPT symmetry. Though many details in their theory still need to be worked out, the researchers claim that it naturally explains the existence of dark matter.

According to standard cosmological models, the universe—which consists of space, time, and mass/energy—exploded into being about 14 billion years ago. Since then, it has expanded and cooled, causing subatomic particles, atoms, stars, and planets to gradually form.

But according to Neil Turok of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, these models are beginning to resemble Ptolemy’s solar system description more and more because they rely on ad hoc parameters. The brief period of rapid expansion known as inflation, he claims, is one such parameter that can explain the large-scale uniformity of the universe. “There is this frame of mind that you explain a new phenomenon by inventing a new particle or field,” he says. “I think that may turn out to be misguided.”

Rather, Turok and his colleague Latham Boyle at the Perimeter Institute set out to create a universe model that relies solely on known particles and fields to explain all observable phenomena. They questioned whether the cosmos could naturally extend beyond the Big Bang, the singularity at which general relativity breaks down, and continue on the other side. “We found that there was,” he says.

Later this month, people in Berlin will be able to book an hour with an AI sex doll as the world’s first cyber brothel rolls out the service following a test phase.

Customers will be able to interact verbally with the AI dolls as well as physically.

“Many people feel more comfortable sharing private matters with a machine because it doesn’t judge,” says Philipp Fussenegger, founder and owner of Cybrothel.

“Previously, there was significant interest in a doll with a voice actress, where users could only hear the voice and interact with the doll. Now, there is an even greater demand for interacting with artificial intelligence.”

It's just one of many ways that generative AI is being used by the adult entertainment business.

(CNN) - Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Thursday moved to liquidate his personal assets, agreeing to demands from the families of Sandy Hook victims whom he owes more than $1.5 billion in damages over his lies about the 2012 school massacre.

The seismic move paves the way for a future in which Jones no longer owns Infowars, the influential conspiracy empire he founded in the late 1990s. Over the years, Jones has not only used the media company to poison the public discourse with vile lies and conspiracy theories, but also to enrich himself to the tune of millions of dollars.

Prior to Thursday, Jones had resisted converting his personal bankruptcy into a Chapter 7 liquidation. But facing mounting legal pressure, he reversed course and caved to the demands of the Sandy Hook families, who have still not seen a penny from Jones since juries in Connecticut and Texas found him liable in 2022 for defamation and emotional distress. His lawyers said in a filing that there was “no reasonable prospect for a successful reorganization” and that continuing down the path would only result in additional expenses incurred by Jones.

The legal maneuver ultimately “means [Jones’] ownership in Free Speech Systems is going to get sold,” Avi Moshenberg, an attorney who represents some of the Sandy Hook families, told CNN on Thursday night, referencing the parent company of Infowars.

“Converting the case to Chapter 7 will hasten the end of these bankruptcies and facilitate the liquidation of Jones’s assets, which is the same reason we have moved to convert his company’s case to Chapter 7,” Chris Mattei, another attorney representing Sandy Hook families, told CNN.

Senior author acknowledges manipulated figures in study tying a form of amyloid protein to memory impairment

Authors of a landmark Alzheimer’s disease research paper published in Nature in 2006 have agreed to retract the study in response to allegations of image manipulation. University of Minnesota (UMN) Twin Cities neuroscientist Karen Ashe, the paper’s senior author, acknowledged in a post on the journal discussion site PubPeer that the paper contains doctored images. The study has been cited nearly 2500 times, and would be the most cited paper ever to be retracted, according to Retraction Watch data.

“Although I had no knowledge of any image manipulations in the published paper until it was brought to my attention two years ago,” Ashe wrote on PubPeer, “it is clear that several of the figures in Lesné et al. (2006) have been manipulated … for which I as the senior and corresponding author take ultimate responsibility.”

After initially arguing the paper’s problems could be addressed with a correction, Ashe said in another post last week that all of the authors had agreed to a retraction—with the exception of its first author, UMN neuro-
scientist Sylvain Lesné, a protégé of Ashe’s who was the focus of a 2022 investigation by Science. A Nature spokesperson would not comment on the journal’s plans.

“It’s unfortunate that it has taken 
2 years to make the decision to retract,” says Donna Wilcock, an Indiana University neuroscientist and editor of the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia. “The evidence of manipulation was overwhelming.”

While teaching a class to high school students on Wednesday, Burlington police officers staged a surprise demonstration in which a masked gunman burst into the room and pretended to open fire.

The simulation, which occurred at the Burlington police station, was meant to show the unreliability of witness statements. But the lack of warning — and the loud gunshot sounds — sent students diving for cover in fear for their lives.

In response, the Burlington School District apologized to parents and offered counseling services. The Burlington Police Department, meanwhile, issued a statement on Thursday afternoon apologizing to any students “who were upset by the specific scenario and crime scene portion of the presentation.”

“The roll-playing [sic] scenario only involved three department personnel simulating a robbery scenario and was not directed at any students or faculty,” the statement said.

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It is like an episode of Reno 911, just saying

GameStop (GME) stock rose 47% on Thursday after a YouTube account believed to be tied to investor Keith Gill, also known as "Roaring Kitty" on social media, posted a livestream scheduled for Friday at noon ET.

This would be the first live appearance on the channel since Gill helped ignite the meme stock rally in 2021 via bullish videos and posts about the video game retailer.

"The Roaring Kitty channel and live streams are for educational and entertainment purposes only. I don't provide personal investment advice or stock recommendations during the stream," read the YouTube account's description.

The channel has more than 730,000 subscribers.

A controversy over a waterfall has cascaded into a social media storm in China, even prompting an explanation from the water body itself.

A hiker posted a video that showed the flow of water from Yuntai Mountain Waterfall - billed as China's tallest uninterrupted waterfall - was coming from a pipe built high into the rock face.

The clip has been liked more than 70,000 times since it was first posted on Monday.

Operators of the Yuntai tourism park said that they made the "small enhancement" during the dry season so visitors would feel that their trip had been worthwhile.

"The one about how I went through all the hardship to the source of Yuntai Waterfall only to see a pipe," the caption of the video posted by user "Farisvov" reads.

The topic "the origin of Yuntai Waterfall is just some pipes" began trending all over social media.

It received more than 14 million views on Weibo and nearly 10 million views on Douyin - causing such an uproar that local government officials were sent to the park to investigate.

They asked the operators to learn a lesson from the incident and explain the enhancements to tourists ahead of time, according to state broadcaster CCTV.