gecko47 has added a photo to the pool:
I am fairly confident that this is a Grey Fantail, but I can't decide which. It seems to be darker than it should be on the chest and throat. It might be young - it certainly looks cute!
Leggeypics has added a photo to the pool:
A secluded group of very dated holiday rental units.
Margate Beach, Margate, Queensland, Australia.
7th of April, 2008
The prime minister has a once-in-a-generation chance to reintroduce compassion to welfare. He has to seize the moment
Back in 2009, months before the coalition government unleashed sweeping austerity, the then Conservative backbencher Iain Duncan Smith produced a study that would go on to lay the foundations for the rollout of universal credit. Now, nearly two decades later, Duncan Smith and his thinktank, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), has published State of Dependency: a landmark report promising to expose “the full scale of Britain’s worklessness crisis”.
The study paints a picture of mass benefits reliance: it identifies 3,400 local areas where more than half the working-age population are on out-of-work benefits, or “economic opiates”, as the authors call them. They’ve even provided an interactive map (in the yellow and black colours of a road hazard sign, no less) so members of the public can type in their postcode to see if their neighbourhood is “a welfare hotspot”.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...This moreish, flapjack-style oaty bake, flavoured with maple syrup and dotted with sour cherries, works as well for dessert as it does for breakfast
I’ve been making versions of these baked oats ever since discovering Heidi Swanson’s recipe in Super Natural Every Day. This is my favourite store-cupboard version, for when stone fruit and berries have slipped out of season. Morello cherries are a dark, tart variety of sour cherry, with an intensity of flavour and bright acidity that stand up particularly well to baking. I love them here paired with almonds and coconut drinking milk (the light kind sold in cartons, not the rich tinned variety). The cherries I use are whole fruit in syrup, which I drain and dot over the oats – they remain distinct while becoming deliciously jammy as they bake. Almost any fruit compote or jam will work here, though, so choose your favourite.
Continue reading...Rights group says Youssef al-Manasif was tortured and first met his lawyer five years after arrest for non-violent crimes
A young man faces imminent execution in Saudi Arabia for attending protests and funerals when he was aged 15 to 17, say human rights groups, in the latest example of the kingdom’s surging use of the death penalty for non-violent crimes.
Youssef al-Manasif was arrested in 2017 and accused of crimes including joining demonstrations for religious freedom by the Shia minority and attending funerals that the Saudi authorities deem to be protests. He was convicted and sentenced to death by the specialised criminal court, a secretive tribunal set up for terrorism-related cases.
Continue reading...How architects worked with harsh environment to create sustainable building in location where fossils were found
Viewed from afar, the silver-hued Hami Pterosaur Museum almost looks like a space base on Mars. Viewed from above, it resembles a collection of dinosaur eggs in the sand. Nestled in the Gobi desert, in north-west China, the new tourist attraction showcases hundreds of impressive fossils of pterosaurs, ancient flying reptiles related to dinosaurs. But far from reflecting its prehistoric exhibits, the building itself is a modern-day architectural specimen.
Designed with underground exhibition halls, giant light funnels and sprawling solar farms, the museum is able to operate sustainably while withstanding an extremely harsh environment.
Continue reading...Shevaun Haviland argues PM is right to revisit Labour’s EU red lines as current trading relationship is bad for business
Repairing the economic damage of Brexit should be the top priority for Andy Burnham as he reconsiders Labour’s red lines on EU membership, the head of one of Britain’s leading business groups has said.
Shevaun Haviland, the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), said she welcomed the prime minister reopening the Brexit battle lines despite the uncertainty it could create, arguing that the UK’s current trading relationship with the EU was bad for business.
Continue reading...
Het besef is snel gegroeid: Europa moet zich bevrijden van de enorme afhankelijkheid van Amerikaanse technologie. Maar kan Europa dat wel op eigen houtje? Of moeten we daarvoor, hou je vast, aansluiting zoeken bij China?
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Aan de Herman Robbersstraat in Rotterdam-Crooswijk is voor de tweede nacht op rij een explosie geweest. Deze keer werd er een pand van een administratiekantoor getroffen. Voor zover bekend is er nog niemand aangehouden.
Aan de Herman Robbersstraat in Rotterdam-Crooswijk is voor de tweede nacht op rij een explosie geweest. Deze keer werd er een pand van een administratiekantoor getroffen. Voor zover bekend is er nog niemand aangehouden.
Vrij veel bewolking vanochtend met plaatselijk nog een streepje zon. Vanuit het westen zou al een eerste drup regen kunnen vallen, maar vanmiddag wordt die kans veel groter als er vanuit het westen een gebied met regen over de regio trekt. Het wordt een graad of 18.
Wie volgend jaar naar Turkije of Egypte vliegt, is meer kwijt. En dat is pas het begin. Brussel wil vanaf 2029 ook vluchten naar bestemmingen buiten Europa onder de CO2-handel brengen. De luchtvaart is daar fel op tegen.
Wat Brussel wil
Eurocommissaris Wopke Hoekstra presenteerde op 17 juli een herziening van het Europese emissiehandelssysteem ETS. Luchtvaartmaatschappijen moeten dan ook emissierechten kopen voor vluchten die uit Europa vertrekken naar bestemmingen tot 5000 kilometer van Frankfurt. Frankfurt geldt daarbij als middelpunt van de EU.
Binnen die cirkel liggen onder meer Istanbul, Noord-Afrika, Dubai en Doha. Vluchten naar de Verenigde Staten of China vallen er niet onder. De regel moet in 2029 ingaan, maar het Europees Parlement en de lidstaten moeten nog instemmen.
Binnen Europa betalen maatschappijen al langer voor hun uitstoot. Sinds dit jaar krijgen ze daarvoor geen gratis emissierechten meer.
Luchtvaart wil Corsia
De wereldwijde luchtvaartkoepel IATA wil dat het plan wordt geschrapt. Topman Thomas Reynaert wil liever Corsia uitbreiden, het internationale compensatiesysteem voor de luchtvaart. Een Europese alleengang benadeelt volgens de sector Europese maatschappijen vergeleken met concurrenten uit de Golfregio en Turkije.
IATA rekent voor dat de ETS-kosten voor de luchtvaart door de uitbreiding met 40 procent stijgen, tot 280 miljard euro over de periode 2027-2040. Milieuorganisaties zien dat anders. Zij schatten de meerprijs voor een ticket naar Istanbul op zo'n 30 euro.
Dure groene kerosine
Daar komt de bijmengplicht voor duurzame vliegtuigbrandstof bij, kortweg SAF. Sinds 2025 moet 2 procent van de kerosine op Europese luchthavens duurzaam zijn. In 2030 wordt dat 6 procent, in 2035 al 20 procent.
SAF kost twee tot vijf keer zoveel als gewone kerosine. Ook gewone kerosine is duur: door de oorlog met Iran verdubbelde de wereldwijde prijs tussen november vorig jaar en april, tot 188 dollar per vat.
Vliegbelasting gaat omhoog
Voor Nederlandse reizigers komt de eerste klap eerder. Op 1 januari 2027 verandert de vliegbelasting. Nu betaalt elke vertrekkende passagier 30,25 euro, waar hij ook heen gaat. Straks hangt het bedrag af van de afstand:
- tot circa 2000 kilometer: €31,04
- 2000 tot 5500 kilometer, zoals Egypte en Turkije: €49,87
- verder dan 5500 kilometer: €74,81; het kabinet wil dit verlagen naar €59,43, maar de Tweede en Eerste Kamer moeten daar nog mee instemmen.
Een rekenvoorbeeld: een gezin van vier dat naar Egypte vliegt, betaalt straks bijna 200 euro vliegbelasting. Dat is ruim 78 euro meer dan nu. De belasting geldt alleen voor de vlucht vanaf Nederland, niet voor de terugreis.
Wat betekent dit voor jou?
Hoeveel duurder je ticket precies wordt, staat nog niet vast. Maatschappijen beslissen zelf hoeveel van hun kosten ze doorberekenen, en het Europese plan kan in de onderhandelingen nog veranderen.
De richting is wel duidelijk. Vliegbelasting, emissierechten en groene brandstof komen bovenop elkaar. Daarmee raakt de spotgoedkope zonvakantie verder uit beeld.
Meer weten?
- Rijksoverheid: belasting op luchtvaart
- Nederlandse Emissieautoriteit: bijmengverplichting SAF
- Dagelijkse Standaard: vliegtickets mogelijk duurder door nieuw EU-plan
Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
Scientists have made a breakthrough toward the mind-bending goal of creating computers made of brains by demonstrating that human neural tissue can classify letters of the Braille alphabet, according to a study published on Friday in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.
A team transmitted electrical signals corresponding to Braille letters to human brain organoids, which are living neural tissues derived from stem cells. The results revealed that a single organoid, consisting of about 10,000 neurons, could classify the letters with about 61 percent accuracy, while teams of three organoids reached 83 percent accuracy.
“The human brain can perform incredibly complex information processing while consuming relatively little energy, and artificial neural networks were originally inspired by biological nervous systems,” said Tianyi Liu, a PhD candidate at Bristol University who led the new study, in an email to 404 Media.
“If we've been trying to imitate biological neural networks all along, why not try using real biological neural networks directly?” she continued. “What kind of information processing capabilities might these tiny neural organoids have? Could they show some form of learning or adaptation? These are all questions we're very interested in.”
The new study falls under the emerging field of organoid intelligence, which aims to use organoids as biological “wetware” for computing applications. Previous studies have established that organoids are capable of recognizing speech Japanese vowels or even playing the classic game Pong.
Since Liu and her team specialize in how robots sense and respond to touch, they homed in on Braille as a way to convert tactile information into electrical stimuli that an organoid could receive, process, and classify.
In their experimental setup, the researchers used a tactile sensor to scan data from the 26 letters of the Braille alphabet, which is built from arrangements of raised dots. This data was converted into electrical stimulation patterns that were fed to the organoids, which are smaller than a millimeter in scale and positioned on arrays that keep them alive.
“Our original goal wasn't to prove that organoids could read Braille like humans, or that they were already ‘intelligent’ enough to understand Braille,” she added. “Rather, we wanted to use this task to explore whether real biological neural networks could participate in processing information from robotic tactile sensors.”
In other words, the researchers aimed to discover if these stimulated inputs could be decoded by the organoids and returned back in discernable responses corresponding to the Braille letters. The results revealed that a single organoid could accurately classify the letters nearly two thirds of the time, while an "ensemble" of three organoids performed even better, with an accuracy of 83 percent.
“We still don't know the exact mechanism behind this improvement,” Liu said. “Our hypothesis is that different organoids respond to the same stimulation in similar, but not identical, ways.”
She added that “you can think of it as three people looking at the same object. Although they're all looking at the same thing, each person might notice different details. Some features might not be obvious to one person but could be quite easy for another to spot. By combining their observations, you might be able to make a more accurate and reliable judgement.”
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The results are undeniably trippy, conjuring up the classic scifi trope of a hyperintelligent brain-in-a-vat. But Liu emphasized that this was an open-loop experiment, meaning that the organoids only received initial inputs without getting new feedback about their performance on the tasks. For this reason, the study does not prove that the organoids actually learned Braille, or were altered in any permanent way, just that they could classify Braille letters after receiving the electrical inputs.
“In the future, if we can build closed-loop systems where neural activity from the organoids actually participates in a robot's perception, decision making, and control, while the results of the robot's interactions with its environment are fed back to the organoids, we could begin to investigate whether these biological neural networks can adapt to new tasks through ongoing interaction,” she said.
Liu also noted that while there are many potential advantages to organoid intelligence, there are plenty of limitations to biological computing systems. For example, organoids cannot be standardized, leading to natural variations that can complicate results, plus they have to be kept alive in cultures that are more difficult to maintain than electronic devices.
“Compared with established computing chips, organoid systems still have a long way to go in terms of reliability, reproducibility, and scalability,” Liu said.
Even so, organoid intelligence “gives us the opportunity to explore a way of computing that's very different from traditional computers,” she concluded.