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Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
WASHINGTON (ANP/AFP) - Al 47,9 miljoen Amerikanen hebben hun stem uitgebracht voor de midterms van volgende week. Dat is nu al meer dan het vorige record van 2022. Toen stemden 45,9 miljoen mensen voor de verkiezingsdag zelf.
De verkiezingen voor de Senaat, het Huis van Afgevaardigden en in sommige staten ook gouverneurs, vinden plaats op 3 november. Volgens het Verkiezingslab van de Universiteit van Florida hebben tot nu toe meer geregistreerde Democraten hun stem uitgebracht dan Republikeinen.
Het vervroegd stemmen kan per post of fysiek bij stembureaus die al open zijn. Afgelopen weekend deed ook president Donald Trump dat al in zijn thuisstaat Florida.
MONTREAL (ANP) - Canada gaat 500 miljoen euro bijdragen aan de EU-lening aan Oekraïne, maakt premier Mark Carney vrijdag bekend na afloop van de top met de EU in Montreal. Hij maakte die verduidelijking nadat de EU en Canada waren overeengekomen dat Canada zou bijdragen aan de lening aan Kyiv.
De EU heeft vorig jaar een lening van 90 miljard euro toegezegd aan Oekraïne voor 2026 en 2027. Het lijkt erop dat Canada daarvan dus een half miljard gaat afdragen.
De Oekraïense president Volodymyr Zelensky liet eerder deze maand de EU weten voor volgend jaar nog 70 miljard euro extra nodig te hebben om het gat in de begroting te dichten.
Eventuele verdere financiering vanuit de EU aan Oekraïne staat in november op de agenda tijdens een informeel overleg van EU-leiders in Dublin en later die maand tijdens een ingelaste EU-top in Brussel.
MEXICO-STAD (ANP) - Kampioenschapsleider Kimi Antonelli is fit genoeg om de eerste vrije training voor de Grote Prijs van Mexico-Stad te rijden. Het Formule 1-team van Mercedes plaatste een video op X waarop te zien is dat de jonge Italiaan is gearriveerd op het Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez. Antonelli sloeg donderdag nog de mediadag over omdat hij last had van een virusinfectie.
De eerste vrije training begint om 19.30 uur Nederlandse tijd. De 20-jarige Antonelli heeft nog 2 WK-punten nodig om zich zondag tot jongste wereldkampioen ooit te kronen. Daarvoor volstaat een plek bij de eerste negen.
HEERENVEEN (ANP) - Shorttrackster Michelle Velzeboer komt voorlopig niet in actie. De 23-jarige Nederlandse heeft een breukje in haar kuitbeen, heeft onderzoek uitgewezen.
Velzeboer liep de blessure vorig weekend op tijdens de eerste wedstrijd uit de World Tour in Vancouver. Ze moet nu zes weken rust houden en mist daardoor de vier resterende ontmoetingen van dit kalenderjaar uit de World Tour, meldt schaatsbond KNSB.
De tweede wedstrijd uit de World Tour is dit weekend in Montreal.
In closing speech, prosecutor says six women had ‘bravely’ come forward after realising they were not alone
Six women who have been “haunted” by their encounters with Russell Brand came forward to give evidence against him with nothing to gain and no appetite for fame, a court has heard.
The prosecutor, Riel Karmy-Jones KC, said the women, who do not know one another, had not been compelled to make police complaints by the “magic force” of media reporting on Brand’s alleged misconduct.
Continue reading...More than 100,000 species are traded globally, whether illegally smuggled, sold as ornaments or in fisheries, timber and fashion industries, study finds
The number of plant and animal species in use or sold in the wildlife trade is more than twice as high as previously thought, researchers have discovered.
A study, published in Science Advances, warns that there are huge gaps in global assessments of how wildlife is traded, and that past estimates have failed to keep up with changes such as the boom in the online exotic pet trade, where sellers offering to post spider eggs across the world or sneak reptiles on to planes are just a click away.
Continue reading...Replacing government grants with revenue streams from taxation will not in itself reduce regional inequalities. But the political implications are radical
Following Wednesday’s budget, the Treasury minister, Torsten Bell, was challenged by the BBC’s Evan Davis on whether its modest series of “breathing space” measures could truly be said to have ended “40 years of neoliberalism”. This line of questioning is becoming a familiar one. Andy Burnham’s ringing declaration of long-term intent is now being regularly deployed by commentators to suggest an emerging gulf between rhetoric and action.
Mr Bell’s response was a good one. Recalling how “Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s hugely hollowed out local government [and] tried to emasculate our big cities”, he called the fiscal devolution roadmap unveiled in the budget a step change and a really big deal.From 2028, mayoral strategic authorities will for the first time receive a share of income tax receipts, and from next year they will be allocated 20% of business rates revenue. That figure will potentially rise to 100% by the end of the decade, while a new overnight visitors levy will add another local income stream.
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Continue reading...Richard Dawkins’ first work has thrilled fans and frustrated critics for five decades. The science has moved on, but any writer looking to supplant its place must learn its lessons
Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was not predicted to be a success. Its initial print run, published this week in 1976, was just 5,000. It went on to sell millions, and is perhaps the most influential work of pop-science ever. For 50 years, it has been the go-to resource for the layperson seeking to understand evolution.
What accounts for its enduring power? Prof Dawkins’ central claim, that “we are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes” was provocative, stripping the messy stuff of human and other life down to a simple law. And yet the book is primarily concerned with proving that complex, selfless behaviour such as altruism in animals can emerge from these basic “selfish” drives, satisfyingly resolving an apparent paradox. Prof Dawkins – a zoologist by training – also succeeded in conjuring entertaining, vividly drawn vignettes of the lives of animals, from lions and ants to hawks and honeybees, to make his points.
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Continue reading...
Researchers have amassed a trove of more than 25,000 calls to a support hotline for people during and after psychedelic trips, making it “the largest dataset of psychedelic support interactions ever assembled—exceeding the combined sample sizes of all published psychedelic clinical trials by an order of magnitude,” according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances.
Despite the popularity of psychedelics as recreational drugs, and increasing interest in them as medically-prescribed therapeutic treatments, there is very little research about the effects of these substances outside of clinical settings with carefully-selected patients. That, scientists say, is limiting what we can learn about the effects of these drugs, because the vast majority of psychedelics are consumed by all kinds of people in homes, festivals, ceremonial gatherings, or other uncontrolled environments.
The Fireside Project, a nonprofit founded in 2020, has filled this knowledge gap with its Psychedelic Support Line, which connects callers who are on bad trips, or who are seeking more information about psychedelics, with trained volunteers who offer confidential peer support.
The team has now published a compendium of 25,419 anonymized interactions with 220 hotline volunteers that took place between April 2021 and February 2026. The database opens an unprecedented window into the experiences of people on psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA, LSD, ayahuasca, and even cannabis, which is not generally considered a psychedelic but can trigger similar effects, such as mild hallucinations.
It’s a “treasure trove,” said Félix Schoeller, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, a California-based nonprofit, who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “In general, we're really lacking any evidence and data beyond what exists in the underground world, if you will, for psychedelic therapy.”
“There's different types of knowledge,” continued Schoeller, who is CEO of ReWire Neurotechnologies, a startup focused on novel experiential treatments for depression. “Some cultures and communities have been doing that for thousands of years. But there's a question about how to do this in a way that follows the principles of biomedical science.”
The interactions included phone calls and text exchanges with hotline volunteers who provided support by talking through the experience or connecting callers with emergency services in the most urgent cases. About 40.2 percent of callers (10,208 interactions) were actively tripping, while 32.1 percent of callers reached out after they had tripped, a period known as “integration.”
The rest of the calls fell into smaller categories, such as informational inquiries about certain substances, requests to prepare or buy drugs, or calls from “trip-sitters” assisting a person on psychedelics.
Psilocybin was the most commonly reported substance (9,348 callers), followed by LSD (2,247callers), cannabis (2,004 callers), and ketamine (1,194 callers), and MDMA (682 callers), with ayahuasca and other drugs logging much smaller numbers.
Surprisingly, callers who had used cannabis reported the highest distress rate—47.2 percent had bad experiences with the drug. Though cannabis has a reputation as a low-stakes substance, the study confirms that it can induce real distress in some cases that warrant consideration for harm reduction. The distress rates for the rest of the commonly used psychedelics were only slightly lower than cannabis, ranging between 40 to 42 percent.
The study also revealed 43 rare but disturbing instances of “facilitator abuse,” including at remote retreats or ceremonial gatherings involving ayahuasca. In these cases, callers reported abuse from the people providing psychedelics, such as reports they had deliberately been given extra doses without consent.
Those reports “provide the first quantitative documentation of this phenomenon in a community help-seeking sample,” according to the study. “The pattern of these reports—clustering in ceremonial settings involving plant medicines, presenting primarily as trauma-processing calls, and involving callers with elevated rates of prior PTSD diagnoses—suggests that even modest surveillance through existing peer support infrastructure can detect harm occurring in unregulated psychedelic settings.”
Some calls also came from people who said they suffered from schizophrenia, or had taken multiple psychedelics, offering a rare glimpse of situations that could not be observed in clinical settings.
“This kind of data can inform us on these topics in the context of legalizing these drugs and making them accessible,” said Schoeller. “I'm glad that there's this data that exists that people can look into to support or contradict the claims that they make as to how these things should be done.”
The study also outlines several limitations, including its sample bias of people who are inclined to call a hotline in the first place—which is not representative of psychedelic consumers at large—as well as self-reported accounts of doses, among other factors that are impossible to verify.
Despite the noisiness of the data, however, it contains helpful clues about avenues for future research. In Schoeller’s view, one of the most important revelations was that the success of a call was strongly linked to the perception that the hotline volunteer showed genuine care and empathy toward the caller. Using 2,777 postinteraction satisfaction surveys, the team found that the few negative experiences with the hotline tended to stem from feelings that the volunteer was dismissive, or didn’t seem to care about the caller.
“My takeaway is that the number one thing that predicts whether a support call will not work” is “the volunteer being perceived as genuine,” Schoeller said. “That's something that, in many ways, poses a problem to the biomedical system of centralized hospitals. I'm not trying to be ideological in any way, but when you create a centralized institution where you throw everybody to a single place to get care” then “clinicians become burned out.”
For this reason, Schoeller and his colleagues plan to follow up on the role of perceived care and empathy in treatment, and to emphasize this factor in guidance for community-based peer support for people in crisis due to psychedelics. It also reinforces the value of the Fireside Project’s hotline, which provides a safe and confidential service for people who might be reluctant to contact emergency services because of the criminalization of these substances or fear of incurring medical debt.
“For many people, they have experiences with psychedelics, and they may not be required to go to the ER, but they still need someone to help them navigate the difficult experience,” Schoeller concluded. “The hotline can truly be a lifeline for them.”
U kunt natuurlijk wel roepen dat al het gezeik met box 3 laat zien dat we een onbetrouwbare overheid hebben, maar is dat wel zo? Ga maar na. Eerst heeft de overheid jarenlang belasting geheven over een rendement dat niet bestond, toen werd dat dankzij de rechter een pleuriszooi, het plan om die pleuriszooi te herstellen werd een pleuriszooi, het plan om die pleuriszooi te herstellen werd ook weer een pleuriszooi, en het plan om deze pleuriszooi te gaan herstellen is: u raad het al, opnieuw een pleuriszooi! "Door zowel het lage als hoge tarief in box 2 te verlagen, hoopt het kabinet dat ondernemers zichzelf meer winst uitkeren. Dat zorgt op de korte termijn voor extra belastinginkomsten. Maar later ontstaat er juist een groter gat. Zo was er in box 3 al een inkomstenderving van 7,7 miljard in de jaren na 2030. Dat loopt door de aanpassingen die Heinen nu wil doen op tot 9 à 10 miljard euro." Het was een pleuriszooi, het is een pleuriszooi en het blijft een pleuriszooi. Hartstikke betrouwbaar dus.
There are no generalized solutions to the three-body problem. Say you have three planets orbiting each other: it’s impossible to calculate how they will move using Newton’s laws of motion and gravity.
Unlike the two-body problem, the three-body problem has no general closed-form analytic solution. The differential equations that govern the motions of three gravitating bodies are not integrable and cannot be solved to give explicit formulas for the positions of the bodies as a function of time. For most initial conditions, the dynamical system for three orbiting bodies is chaotic, and the only way to predict their motions is to estimate them using numerical methods.
But thousands of stable three-body orbits have been found — their paths repeat after a given interval. The Three Body Orbits website is an atlas of some of those orbits: you can watch each three-body system play itself out in a wide variety of different shapes and complexities. There’s this simple figure 8, this slightly less simple one, and this one that looks like a spirograph.
The site even enables you to search for new stable solutions to the problem in your browser. This is what one of my unsuccessful tests looked like — two of the planets locked in a gravity death spiral while the other one peaces out in the other direction:
