The countdown to Qualifying is on in Miami, so we’ve hand-picked the best odds available to bettors.
GameStop is reportedly preparing a potential offer for eBay, an unusually ambitious move given that eBay's roughly $46 billion market value is nearly four times GameStop's. Reuters reports: GameStop is preparing an offer for eBay as CEO Ryan Cohen pursues plans to boost the struggling videogame retailer's market value more than tenfold, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Shares of eBay, which has a market capitalization of about $46 billion, soared about 14% in extended trading. GameStop gained 4%. The company has a market value of nearly $12 billion.
GameStop has been quietly building a stake in eBay's shares ahead of a potential offer, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. If eBay is not receptive, Cohen could decide to take the offer directly to the e-commerce company's shareholders, the Journal said.
GameStop has been quietly building a stake in eBay's shares ahead of a potential offer, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. If eBay is not receptive, Cohen could decide to take the offer directly to the e-commerce company's shareholders, the Journal said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Zach Neeley writes in:
Russo, Mariona, Foord, Blackstenius, Smith all on the field. Slegers seems to have found her best team by filling it with attacking players. Also a tribute to how much Kim Little can still cover.
Continue reading...From Virginia to New York, the bugs drain vines, cut yields and leave growers resorting to one simple fix: squash them
Around grape harvest time about three years ago, an employee at Zephaniah Farm Vineyard in Leesburg, Virginia, noticed bugs, about 1in long with gray and black wings and a bright red underwing, atop some trees.
While the insects were pretty, they were there for the grapevines and not welcome guests at the vineyard, which sits atop a farm that the Zephaniah family has run since 1949.
Continue reading...GB News owner’s son, who wants Channel to be mined to stop migrants, is latest to have a go at transatlantic rightwing commentary
On a Los Angeles stage in 2011 Winston Marshall, then the banjo player for the folk rock band Mumford & Sons, could scarcely believe what was happening. Not only was he playing at the Grammys, he was playing alongside Bob Dylan, legendary composer of social justice anthems and one of his heroes.
About 15 years later, Marshall once again found himself stateside, this time on a very different stage. Appearing on Fox News in his new guise as a conservative YouTuber, Marshall advocated what he admitted was an “outlandish idea” to stop small boat crossings in the Channel.
Continue reading...The tech company Flock has 80,000 cameras across the US – and a report finds some officers are taking advantage
Who would you rate as the world’s most unlikeable tech tycoon? Elon Musk is obviously a major contender. The digital warlord Palmer Luckey is also up there.
While there’s a lot of competition, Garret Langley also deserves a shoutout. The CEO of the tech company Flock may not be a household name, but his controversial surveillance technology is rapidly worming its way into daily life. If you live in the US, there’s probably a Flock product on a highway or parking lot near you. The company, which largely sells its products to law enforcement, makes automated license plate readers (ALPRs) which capture license plate data and help track where a vehicle has been. (If you want to check if your license plate has been the subject of a Flock search you can do so at haveibeenflocked.com)
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the stories this week that dared to dream, slinked through the city, mourned their mothers, and visited ancient graveyards.
First, scientists studied thousands of dream reports and discovered that world events—like the COVID-19 pandemic—can manifest in our vespertine visions. Then: the science of urban snake rescues, the lonely lives of orphaned dolphins, and scientists fiddle with Rome’s ancient DNA.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
The dream of understanding dreams
Why do we dream? It’s a question that has kept people up at night for thousands of years. Now, scientists have taken a new crack at the mystery by collecting and analyzing more than 3,700 reports from 207 participants who described both their dreams and waking experiences between 2020 to 2024, as well as 80 participants who reported their dreams during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic from April to May 2020.
The results revealed possible links between personality traits and dream experiences, and suggested that dreams are influenced by external events such as the pandemic.
“During lockdown, dreams showed increased references to limitations and heightened emotional intensity, effects that gradually normalized over the following years,” said researchers led by Valentina Elce of IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. “These findings demonstrate that stable individual traits and incidental experiences jointly shape dream semantics.”
For the main dataset, Elce and her colleagues recruited 207 Italian adults ranging from 18 to 70 years old who were assessed for their psychological and cognitive traits, demographics, and sleep patterns. These participants recorded recollections of their dreams as soon as they woke up using a scale of descriptive elements, such as bizarreness, vividness, valence (emotional tone), and the level of agency they had over events in the dream. This sample of dreamers was also prompted to record their waking experiences throughout the day.
The team used natural language processing models to quantitatively analyze the semantic structure of the dream reports and correlations between individual traits and dream experiences. For example, people who let their mind wander in their waking hours reported having more bizarre dreams.
“Our findings indicate that dream bizarreness is associated with a higher tendency of the individuals to mind-wander, which also drives frequent shifts in narrative settings,” the team said. “This is in line with accounts suggesting that dreaming and mind-wandering may share a common neural and cognitive foundation.”
The lockdown group, meanwhile, was composed of 60 women and 20 men who recorded their dreams in diaries during spring 2020. By comparing the two samples, the researchers suggest that “external emotionally salient events, in this case the COVID-19 pandemic, might affect dream experiences and how such effects develop over long time spans,” according to the study.
“Notably, themes concerning healthcare, which were heavily represented in daily life during the pandemic, showed no significant changes,” the researchers said. “However, in a continuous line with what was happening in the daylight world, the actions of the individuals while they were dreaming were described as limited by physical or metaphorical constraints and the recalled emotional states carried a stronger intensity.”
Godspeed to the oneirologists—the term for scientists who study dreams—for finding new ways to probe these ephemeral experiences that constantly elude explanation.
In other news…
Hey, I’m slithering here!
In cities with urban snake populations, such as Hyderabad in India, millions of people live alongside venomous snakes—including deadly Indian cobras and Russell’s vipers—that have been displaced by rapid habitat loss.
To discourage people from just killing these cosmopolitan cobras, an organization called the Friends of Snakes Society performs “snake rescues” with trained handlers who remove snakes and transport them to safer locations. By analyzing 55,467 snake rescue records in Hyderabad from 2013 to 2022, a team found that snake rescues rose nearly 17 percent over the decade, and that about 54 percent (n = 30,189) of rescues involved venomous snakes.
“Snakes have either become locally extinct or have adapted to the city as their habitat, resulting in intensified human–wildlife interactions in Hyderabad and its neighboring areas,” said researchers led by Avinash Visvanathan of the Friends of Snakes Society. “The dataset demonstrates that standardized snake rescue operations not only mitigate immediate risks but also generate valuable ecological information.”
As always, The Simpsons already did it with the 1993 episode “Whacking Day,” though in that case, a mass snake rescue was made possible by the dulcet tones of Barry White rather than a helpline. Perhaps the efficacy of baritone vocals in urban snake management could offer a future avenue of study.
Orphans of the sea
Dolphins, like humans, invest a lot of maternal care into their young, typically nursing calves for two to three years. But scientists now discovered that months-old orphaned calves can survive the deaths of their mothers—though they are negatively impacted by their losses.
Ali, an Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin born in February 2011, suddenly lost her mother Millie in October that same year; Rocket, a member of the same species born in February 2022, was orphaned at seven months old after her mother Ripple disappeared.
Ali is probably still alive and birthed her own calf in 2025, though it sadly died of blunt force trauma at a few weeks old, possibly due to infanticide or a boat strike. Rocket endured for three years, and was sometimes spotted with a mother-calf pair that may have cared for her, before she was killed by a boat strike last year. Both Ali and Rocket displayed maladaptive behavior, especially getting too close to boats.
The study “provides rare empirical evidence that young-of-year calves can persist without maternal care,” said researchers led by Cristina Vicente-Sánchez of Flinders University.
It’s a bittersweet finding, demonstrating that when young calves are forced to sink or swim, some can make it—but they may bear lifelong signs of bereavement.
The fall of Rome, according to DNA
Oceans of ink have been spilled on the rise and fall of the Roman empire, but scientists have now read the story that is written in the genomes of people who lived in the aftermath.
A new study analyzed ancient DNA from 258 individuals found at grave sites in southern Germany who died between the years 400 and 700. These reconstructed lineages “reveal a major demographic shift coinciding with the late fifth century collapse of Roman state structures, when a founding population of northern European ancestry mixed with genetically diverse Roman provincial groups” said researchers co-led by Jens Blöcher and Leonardo Vallini of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
These intermarriages eventually formed ”a population resembling modern Central Europeans by the early seventh century,” and reflected the rise of “Christian ideals such as lifelong monogamy, with minimal divorce or remarriage after widowhood” and “strict incest avoidance,” according to the study.
While this time of transition “has traditionally been framed as a conflict between northern ‘barbarians’ and a Roman Empire in decline, newer studies reveal a multifaceted transformation,” the team added.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, so the saying goes, and its flamboyant collapse is arguably still in motion, inspiring new interpretations and never-ending material for history podcasters.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
Professor Volker Steinkraus, een van de vooraanstaande dermatologen van Europa, heeft een ontnuchterende boodschap voor de cosmetica-industrie. In zijn nieuwe lifestyle-gids stelt hij dat wat je huid werkelijk nodig heeft, niet in de badkamer te vinden is – maar in de keuken, de slaapkamer en je sociale leven.
De huid als spiegel van je levensstijl
"De huid weerspiegelt niet alleen zichzelf, maar ook onze levensstijl en de gezondheid van onze inwendige organen," legt Steinkraus uit. Terwijl de schappen van drogisterijen kreunen onder serums, retinol-crèmes en anti-aging behandelingen, wijst wetenschappelijk onderzoek op heel andere prioriteiten. De belangrijkste factoren voor een gezonde huid zijn volgens Steinkraus: voeding, slaap, emotioneel evenwicht en – indien nodig – medicatie.
De huid weerspiegelt niet alleen zichzelf, maar ook onze levensstijl en de gezondheid van onze inwendige organen.
Het voedingsadvies van de professor is helder: vooral plantaardig, antioxidantrijk voedsel. Groenten, peulvruchten, fruit, groene thee en plantaardige vetten in gematigde hoeveelheden, afgewisseld met periodes van vasten. Nederlands onderzoek toont aan dat consumptie van groenten en fruit essentieel is voor een gezonde huid, terwijl junkfood en producten met een hoge glycemische index worden geassocieerd met huidproblemen als acne.
Chronische eenzaamheid werkt als een stille ontstekingsprikkel in het lichaam – cellen raken gestrest, hormonen ontregeld, en regeneratie wordt moeilijker.
Chronische eenzaamheid: een stille ontstekingsprikkel
Opvallend is Steinkraus' waarschuwing over sociale isolatie. "Chronische eenzaamheid werkt als een stille ontstekingsprikkel in het lichaam," schrijft hij. Cellen raken gestrest, hormonen raken minder goed gereguleerd en regeneratie wordt moeilijker – wat zich kan manifesteren als een vale teint, droogheid en rimpels.
Het belang van slaap
Ook slaap krijgt bij Steinkraus een hoofdrol. "Duurzaam slaaptekort – minder dan zes tot zeven uur per nacht – versnelt niet alleen de huidveroudering, maar laat ons er ook ouder uitzien, droogt de huid uit en geeft haar een grijsachtig koloriet," waarschuwt de dermatoloog.
Lessen uit de Blue Zones
Steinkraus haalt inspiratie uit de zogeheten Blue Zones: gebieden zoals Okinawa (Japan), de Nicoya-schiereiland (Costa Rica) en Sardinië, waar mensen bovengemiddeld oud worden. Daar bewegen mensen niet gericht door te sporten, maar ontstaat lichaamsbeweging vanzelf door tuinwerk, handwerk en het mijden van technische hulpmiddelen. Deze natuurlijke, actieve leefstijl zonder stress blijkt effectiever voor de huid dan welke crème ook.
