US tech giant agrees to establish further protections for teens such as daily usage limits and blocks on nighttime use

Meta reached an agreement to settle a landmark case brought by states across the US that accused the tech giant of addicting and harming children with dangerous products, according to a court filing released on Wednesday.

The agreement will require the social media company to pay up to $17bn. Meta agreed to establish safeguards for teenage users, including daily usage limits and nighttime blocks nationwide in the US. This is the first time Meta has been forced to change how its platforms function. As part of the settlement, the company denies wrongdoing.

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Scientists found those who had used hormone replacement therapy were 10% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia

Hormone replacement therapy may reduce the risk of dementia, a study has found.

Scientists tracked more than 180,000 postmenopausal women in the UK in the largest study of its kind. They found that those who had used HRT were 10% less likely to develop any type of dementia and 16% less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the most common form, compared with those who had never used it.

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The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

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Je zit nietsvermoedend op je telefoon als plots een behoorlijk verontrustende melding verschijnt. Google zou hebben ontdekt dat er via jouw telefoonnummer spam is verstuurd. Vervolgens krijg je een eenvoudige vraag voorgeschoteld: heb jij die berichten verzonden? Met twee knoppen eronder lijkt de oplossing simpel. Even ‘nee’ aanklikken en klaar. Maar doe dat vooral niet.

Cybercriminelen verspreiden namelijk een overtuigende phishingtruc waarbij een beveiligingsmelding van Google wordt nagebootst, meldt het Duitse technologiemagazine Chip. Het doel is niet om je account te beschermen, maar om je naar een pagina te lokken waar persoonlijke gegevens kunnen worden buitgemaakt.

Paniek is onderdeel van de truc

De fraudeurs spelen handig in op twee menselijke zwakheden: ons vertrouwen in bekende merken en onze neiging om snel te handelen wanneer er iets mis lijkt te zijn.

Wie onverwacht leest dat zijn telefoonnummer voor spam wordt gebruikt, wil het probleem onmiddellijk rechtzetten. Een scherm in de vertrouwde Google-stijl maakt het verhaal extra geloofwaardig. Je krijgt ogenschijnlijk slechts twee mogelijkheden om te reageren, maar die keuze is nep.

Zowel de ene als de andere knop kan je verder het frauduleuze proces in sturen. Daar wacht bijvoorbeeld een nagemaakte inlogpagina waarop slachtoffers worden aangespoord hun Google-gegevens of andere gevoelige informatie achter te laten.

Eén detail verraadt de oplichters

Het goede nieuws: de vervalsing is niet perfect. Kijk daarom niet alleen naar logo’s, lettertypes en andere herkenbare vormgeving, maar vooral naar het webadres.

Een officiële Google-pagina hoort bij een herkenbaar domein van Google. Bij deze phishingcampagne zijn juist onbekende adressen opgedoken, waaronder pro.quicksala. Dat is een enorme rode vlag.

Ook andere vreemde onderdelen kunnen de fraude verraden. Zo kunnen er op dezelfde site dubieuze advertenties of aanbiedingen voor bijvoorbeeld TikTok-baantjes staan. Dat past natuurlijk totaal niet bij een serieus beveiligingsbericht van Google.

Dit moet je doen

Zie je zo’n melding, probeer dan vooral niet via de knoppen op het scherm uit te zoeken wat er aan de hand is. Sluit het tabblad of de browser en open Google daarna zelf via een vertrouwde app of door handmatig naar de officiële website te gaan.

Controleer daar rechtstreeks de beveiliging van je account. Zo voorkom je dat een link uit een verdachte melding bepaalt waar je terechtkomt.

Heb je op de neppagina al een wachtwoord ingevuld? Verander dat dan zo snel mogelijk via Google zelf en controleer welke apparaten toegang hebben tot je account. Gebruik je hetzelfde wachtwoord elders, wijzig het daar eveneens.

De belangrijkste vuistregel bij dit soort digitale paniekmeldingen is simpel: hoe harder een onverwacht scherm je probeert te dwingen onmiddellijk iets aan te klikken, hoe verstandiger het is om juist even helemaal niets aan te raken.

Bron: Panorama

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - Ook Corendon en Transavia maken zich grote zorgen over de forse verhoging van de Nederlandse vliegbelasting. "Die ligt straks veel hoger dan in de landen om ons heen. Dat verschil is niet meer uit te leggen. De overheid behandelt de Nederlandse reiziger steeds meer als melkkoe", zegt een woordvoerster van Corendon.

Een dag eerder haalde de Ierse luchtvaartmaatschappij Ryanair fel uit naar het kabinet-Jetten vanwege het "volledige falen" om iets te doen aan de "schadelijke" Nederlandse vliegtaks. De maatschappij zegt niet verder te willen groeien in Nederland zolang deze "nep-groene belasting" niet wordt afgeschaft.

Volgens Corendon worden vooral "gewone mensen die het hele jaar sparen voor één of twee weken vakantie" hard geraakt door de hoge vliegbelasting. "We zien nu al dat Nederlanders vaker kiezen voor een luchthaven over de grens, met name in Duitsland. Daarom vliegen we vanaf december rechtstreeks van Düsseldorf naar Curaçao, en breiden we ons aanbod vakantie vanaf die luchthaven uit."

AMSTELVEEN (ANP) - Nederland heeft er het afgelopen jaar tienduizenden AOW'ers bijgekregen. De Sociale Verzekeringsbank (SVB) meldt woensdag dat ruim 3,7 miljoen mensen eind juni een AOW-uitkering ontvingen. Dat zijn 78.569 mensen meer dan eind juni vorig jaar.

De stijging komt volgens de SVB overeen met de verwachte toename van het aantal AOW-gerechtigden door vergrijzing. Ruim 1,1 miljoen AOW-gerechtigden zijn boven de 80 jaar en meer dan 2800 personen zijn 100 jaar of ouder. Iets meer dan de helft van de mensen die deze uitkering ontvangen, is vrouw.

Het aantal gerechtigden met een onvolledige AOW-uitkering blijft volgens de SVB stijgen. Onder in Nederland wonende mensen nam dit met ruim 12.000 toe en onder mensen in het buitenland met bijna 4500. Hierbij gaat het om mensen die een periode (onverzekerd) in het buitenland hebben gewoond of gewerkt of op latere leeftijd naar Nederland zijn verhuisd en daardoor geen volledige AOW hebben opgebouwd.

KATHMANDU (ANP/AFP) - Het dodental door de overstroming in Nepal is opgelopen tot 31, melden de autoriteiten in het land volgens de BBC. Er zijn 93 mensen gewond geraakt. Over de grens in China zijn volgens staatsmedia ook veel slachtoffers. Daar ontbreken cijfers.

De krijgsmacht van Nepal zegt bezig te zijn met een grote reddingsoperatie, waarvoor onder meer helikopters worden ingezet. De Chinese president Xi Jinping spreekt ook van een grootscheepse reddingsactie.

De oorzaak van de overstroming is nog niet duidelijk. Het kennisinstituut ICIMOD in Kathmandu denkt dat een ijs- en steenlawine mogelijk de rivier Lhende Khola heeft geblokkeerd. Die lawine is mogelijk op zijn beurt weer veroorzaakt door een aardbeving.

De autoriteiten van Nepal meldden eerder dat 384 toeristen werden vermist, onder wie 291 buitenlanders. Nepal meldt dat ook een Nederlander wordt vermist, al sprak het betrokken reisbureau waarnaar verwezen wordt dat tegenover ANP tegen.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Energiebedrijven zijn op dit moment niet bezorgd dat Nederland te weinig gas heeft deze winter. Dat laat brancheorganisatie Energie-Nederland weten, nadat Gasunie eerder woensdag verwachtte dat ons land het vuldoel voor de gasvoorraden voor de winter niet gaat halen.

"Voor een koude winter is het gassysteem goed toegerust", licht een woordvoerder van Energie-Nederland toe. Daarnaast is de gasmarkt volgens hem Europees. "De vulgraad van Nederlandse gasopslagen alleen is daarom niet doorslaggevend voor de beschikbaarheid van gas." Verder spelen gasopslagen volgens hem een kleinere rol dan enkele jaren geleden, door de sterk toegenomen lng-importcapaciteit en het verminderde verbruik.

Doordat de gasprijs is gestegen sinds de blokkade van de Straat van Hormuz, is het voor marktpartijen minder aantrekkelijk geworden om de gasopslagen te vullen. Staatsbedrijf EBN helpt ze daar nu mee. Gasunie stelde onlangs dat de markt de voorraden te langzaam bijvult.

ONHAYE (ANP/BELGA) - De doodsoorzaak van de twee gevonden overleden personen in België, waarschijnlijk het 5-jarige vermiste jongetje Tyméo en zijn vader, is nog niet bekend. Dat meldt het parket van Namen na autopsie op de lichamen.

Het parket stelt met "aan zekerheid grenzende waarschijnlijkheid" dat het gaat om de lichamen van Tyméo en zijn 29-jarige vader. DNA-onderzoek zal dat nog moeten bevestigen. Het parket kan ook nog geen verder uitsluitsel geven over wat er precies gebeurd is met het tweetal.

De twee waren sinds 27 juni vermist. Op maandag werd langs de N97 in Onhaye in het zuiden van België een lichaam gevonden, hoogstwaarschijnlijk van het jongetje. Het vermoedelijke lichaam van zijn vader werd de dag erna verderop langs dezelfde autoweg gevonden.

De auto van de vader werd een paar dagen nadat de vermissing was opgegeven, gevonden op de parkeerplaats van een lokale voetbalclub. Die lag ongeveer 2 kilometer verwijderd van de plek waar het eerste lichaam werd gevonden.

Amazon Web Services has bought DuckLabs, the support and development company behind open-source DuckDB. The deal — the financial details of which were not disclosed — will see DuckLabs, founded by authors of the in-process OLAP database, become part of AWS. AWS said DuckDB and its related projects would remain free and open source under their MIT licenses, with the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation continuing to guide them. Written in C++, the database is embedded within a host process and, as such, there is no DBMS server software to install, update, or maintain. For example, the DuckDB Python package can run queries directly on data in Python software library Pandas without importing or copying data. The brainchild of academics at Amsterdam's Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica mathematical and theoretical computing research center, DuckDB first went public in 2022 and has gathered a strong following among developers and analytics users. It achieved its 1.0 release in 2024 and has since launched into data lakes with DuckLake, which uses DuckDB as metadata storage to get around the “small changes” problem experienced by data lakes. AWS has been a fan for a while. Speaking to The Register last year, AWS veep and distinguished engineer Andy Warfield said the cloud giant's engineering team was "super excited" about the DuckLake announcement. "It was passed around broadly across the teams, and people have been playing with it. It's captured people's imaginations for sure," he said. The AWS and DuckLabs teams have already collaborated around S3 Tables, announced by AWS in December 2024, to ensure “we built first-class support for S3 Tables in DuckDB,” Hannes Mühleisen, co-founder and CEO at DuckLabs told The Register on Wednesday. Although the database itself is fully open source under the MIT License, most of the contributions and strategic direction have come from DuckLabs. However, following the merger, Mühleisen sees a greater role for the independent DuckDB Foundation in avoiding any potential conflicts of interest with other technology giants. The database can read and write to Google Sheets and query and manage Google BigQuery datasets via an extension, for example. “We can expand the role of the Foundation as a place where the stakeholders or the people that are building things with DuckDB are coming together. We are thinking about adding a Technical Advisory Board to the Foundation, so that whoever is betting on DuckDB can come together in the Board and have a communication channel through the Foundation, which stays independent,” Mühleisen said. The Foundation, which is led by Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, DuckLabs CTO and co-author of the database, has yet to decide the exact governance and voting rights which will determine the direction of the project’s development. Nonetheless, Mühleisen said it would create a mechanism by which the community could play a greater role. In a prepared statement marking the merger, AWS’s Warfield said: “DuckDB is an incredible open source project with an amazing community; it is broadly used and very much loved by S3 customers today. After about two years of working closely with Mark, Hannes and the team at DuckLabs, I’m excited at the opportunity to help the project have an even broader impact. A lot of what has made DuckDB so successful is the fact that it is completely open source and easily embeddable in so many types of applications. We are committed to the project's continued development in open source and under the stewardship of the DuckDB Foundation.” The DuckLabs team will continue to be based in Amsterdam.®

Bill Gates thinks that experts underestimate the potential havoc AI will wreak on society and says preparations to ease the transition are inadequate. The Microsoft founder and former CEO is usually a cheerful proponent of AI tech, talking up its potential to transform healthcare, education, and business productivity. Yet in a missive posted to his personal website, the billionaire philanthropist says the AI era is likely to be one of the most turbulent times in human history, and how we allow it to play out will determine whether the world becomes a fairer place or if the divide between rich and poor becomes greater than ever. This kind of talk will sound dangerously close to socialism for many Americans. There are always winners and losers in a market-led economy, so why should things be any different with AI? Those wealthy enough to invest in it and control it will prosper, as others will find themselves on skid row. But, Gates says, this time it will be different. Previous technology transitions happened over several generations and created new jobs where human cognition was required, whereas AI is starting to replace human cognition. The winners are likely to be a small group of people, and the losers will be everyone else. It will not affect just one or two sectors, according to the AI fab club: AI will replace human roles in fields as diverse as law, customer services, medicine, software, and manufacturing. And it will hit these industries rapidly, over the course of a decade or less, rather than taking a few generations. Gates wrote: There will be some new jobs created, Gates says, but without the right policies in place there will be far fewer than today, and entry-level jobs are among those most likely to vanish (as we're already seeing in the tech industry). Blue-collar jobs will also be affected, as AI-powered robots are advancing faster than people realize - much of the progress is happening in China. These may begin to compete with people on some physical tasks, such as in the construction and hospitality industries, within a few years. Gates says there are several big risks from AI adoption, foremost of which is that many work roles are set to disappear forever. He notes that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, unemployment in the US hit 25 percent and remained in double digits for much of that decade, but ultimately recovered as demand, investment, and growth returned. He fails to mention, however, that it took a global war for that to happen. The biggest shift comes when AI operates error-free operation, without humans prepping its work or checking its output. Gates says we need to think now about reducing job losses, or risk much of society ending up unemployed. Another danger, Gates says, is that AI empowers people to do harm: AI-driven malware already lets low-skilled attackers launch cyberattacks, while generative AI makes fraud, disinformation, and deepfakes easier to produce. The third big threat is that AI systems could stunt the mental development of children, and crowd out human relationships. So how is society meant to avoid this apocalyptic vision and ensure AI becomes the force for good that Microsoft’s progenitor believes it to be? Gates says AI needs both a domestic and international framework. Nationally, that means bodies that can set priorities across government agencies to ensure every risk is accounted for. Yet even a nation with its own house in order remains exposed to cross-border risks, so an international body must be built in parallel. If that sounds like wishful thinking, get in the queue. Gates notes it would require US-China cooperation, and under the current Washington administration, that's about as likely as pigs flying.. Beyond that, some jobs - social care for instance - should stay human. Gates also thinks the tax system will need rebalancing, as more people out of work means less income tax to fund government itself. A starting point, he suggests, is taxing AI tokens and robots to reduce corporations' incentives to swap meatbags for machines. This could fund retraining and a stronger safety net, but would need careful targeting so it doesn't hinder beneficial uses of AI, like drug discovery and better education Again, critics will likely dismiss this as socialism and point out that Microsoft was ruthless in pursuing profits under Gates' leadership. In a final message to world leaders, Gates urges them to act now, “before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting, and public trust has eroded.” This marks a shift for the Microsoft founder, who two years ago told people not to worry about AI, in particular energy use and increased greenhouse gas emissions, arguing AI would eventually solve the problems it creates. ®

By Naomi Mihara for the BBC.com:This year, at the height of Europe's June heatwave, Ileana Okumus couldn't understand why she was struggling so much more than other people. "As soon as I left my apartment, my face started to sweat," she says. Living in a top-floor Brussels apartment without air conditioning, the 28-year-old sought relief wherever she could find it – the office, local cafes. But it wasn't enough. ... The intensity of the heatwave was nothing new for Okumus, who has lived through 40C [104F] summers elsewhere in the world. Yet it was the first time the heat had hit her this hard. Only after seeing social media posts from people with similar symptoms did she make the connection between the heat and the medicines she'd started taking two years ago for depression and anxiety.

...it's not just psychiatric medicines that can increase vulnerability to heatwaves. Blood pressure and heart medicines are another group of drugs that affect heat sensitivity. Diuretics, ACE (angiotensin-converting enzyme) inhibitors and ARBs (angiotensin II receptor blockers), commonly used to treat high blood pressure, can increase the risk of electrolyte imbalances. The latter two can also interfere with the hormone that normally triggers thirst. As we age, it becomes harder for our bodies to manage heat. Moreover, "temperatures don't have to hit 90 or 100 degrees to be dangerous; they only have to rise beyond a region's normal range." To add insult to injury, heat can supposedly accelerate aging. As we know now, many medications make the heat worse for everyone, including younger people. With all that in mind, please take heed and take care!

The new "Indian problem"

(slTheWalrus) I'm orignally from the American South where racism against Black people is--and a lot of my fellow Southerners bristle at this--is common as breathing. And now I live in Canada where racism against Indigenous people--and a lot of my fellow Canadians bristle at this--is also common as breathing.

Opnieuw heeft de politie een zoekactie gehouden in de Ringvaartplas in Rotterdam-Prinsenland. De afgelopen weken werd in het water gezocht naar een vuurwapen in verband met de vergismoord op Rob Zweekhorst. Nu wordt een nieuwe zoekmethode gebruikt, waarmee nog dieper in de plas kan worden gezocht.

Last week we published a story that revealed an Amazon warehouse where the company scans and destroys thousands of books for AI training data. The following is an interview with one of the Amazon employees at this warehouse. We granted this employee anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. 

The employee worked at Amazon’s VGT3 warehouse, which is housed in the same facility as LAS8, where Amazon operates its print-on-demand business. Both operations are part of a larger complex of Amazon facilities in Las Vegas, Nevada. 

We discovered that VGT3 was used to destructively scan books for AI training data by placing a tracking device in a shipment of rare books that a bookseller suspected was being acquired by an anonymous AI company. We saw the shipment travel across the country before finally landing at VGT3. Online, Amazon employees who worked at VGT3 described the work of receiving shipments of books, cutting the spines off of them, and scanning the loose pages. 

The Amazon employee I talked to described what that operation looks like from the warehouse floor. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

404 Media: What do you do when you get to work at VGT3?

Anonymous: We have to walk past everything to get to the back of the warehouse. That's where I first saw all the scanners, and I was really wondering what was going on. I remember I even asked someone what they were doing and they said they’re not sure even the people who work there know what they’re doing. Of course, once I got over there and started putting two and two together, I kind of understood. And you know, I think people who work there probably know what was going on over there, but probably just didn't want to talk about it. 

We also saw them cutting the spines off the books and everything. And after they scan it, they throw all the loose leaf papers into a big shuttle. [Editor’s note: Shuttles is how Amazon refers to gaylords, which are big open cardboard boxes that are often used to store books in bulk.] So they're all mixed together. There's no way to put the book back together or anything. Where I worked, primarily they would bring us boxes of books, or sometimes there's shuttles of books.

What kind of books?

All kinds of books. When we first started a lot of them were brand new. Some of them are used as well. Like you could tell, they were liquidated from a library or something like that. We were even getting boxes of stuff from London. There were a lot of books from the University of London. There was even like, I don't know what you would call them, but it was like kind of stapled together papers that said that they were presented to Parliament on the behalf of Her Royal Majesty the Queen. So they were like government documents. I don't know if they're public. Probably they're public, but it was just interesting that we found all that in there. 

What did you think the books were for?

That's what we were wondering, and we were kind of like, ‘this is a lot of random information.’ They have literally any kind of book you could think of. They have ones in different languages. We saw a lot of German and Russian books, and we actually got whole pallets of Japanese books. Some of these books are brand new and they're like still sealed. A lot of the Japanese ones were, but yeah, we do get the stuff from the libraries, and that's the stuff I think is more mixed because they're not all nice in boxes and everything like that. They're kind of just thrown into the shuttle. 

What was it like working there?

Our job was to unbox the books, and honestly, they seem like a mess over there. Like they're not really well managed or organized at all. Their process wasn't solid. Their process changed every day. But we were pretty much putting them in a tote [a small plastic stackable bin] so that they can go be scanned in and sorted, so that they can go over to the people to cut the bindings off. 

They take them off the truck. The dock's right there, and then they stage them, which is just putting them on standby. People pick up the books and bring them to our station and we stack up the totes until it’s a whole pallet, and then the people with the pallet jacks come and they take the whole pallet.

And I think the next area, I think they call it receiving. What I've heard they do there is that they're scanning all the barcodes pretty much to see if they need it and just weed out duplicates. Something else they had us do was—we call it the trash but we don't we don't know exactly what they do with them—but one day we were taking all the duplicates and all the ones they said, “oh, we don't need these,” and we were throwing those in different shuttles. They're like yeeted in there, like they're not nicely placed in there or anything. And they say they're returning them to the vendors, but I'm like, you know, ‘do the vendors go through it and see which ones are actually worth it?’ Because it's like a tall shuttle that's probably six feet tall, six or seven feet tall. They're just piled in there. It’s also right next to where they start cutting the spines, and so I think right after that, that's where it's going [the trash]. 

What does it look like when they cut the spines off the books?

It's a machine people operate. Each of these machines is just like a little workstation, and there'll be one person at each of these stations. It's really safe because it has a little cover and it has a little area where you slide the book into, remove your fingers from the area, and then you press a button, and it just comes down and slices it. And then you remove the books after the blade is gone. 

After they cut the spines they have these kind of library carts, kind of like how you would stack  books, but instead, it's a stacks of paper and little cardboard things to separate—I'm guessing— the different books.

I saw the pages being thrown in a shuttle after they were scanned. We were walking by and we went over to one of the shuttles and looked into it because we could tell they were throwing the old books in it or the cut books in it, and it's just a bunch of loose paper like just sheets thrown in there.

Did you see the scanners?

They probably have like at least 20 scanners, maybe 25. They look like machines that count cash, it flips through the pages really fast. It kind of has something like that they load it into, and I can see their screens, and on their screens, you can see the scans of the book, and it's going really fast. 

What do you think about Amazon doing this?

At first what they were telling people is that it was for Kindles, but I just didn't believe that. I instantly was like, I don't think that's how they do it because of publication rights and stuff, copyright and everything. Then I saw it was for AI. I don't like it only because I wish I could take these books. There's so much knowledge and so much stuff in them and some of them look like they might be rare, and I've heard that they order rare books, and that's why I say some of these are so obscure. I definitely don't like the idea that they can't be reused or anything like that afterwards. They're reducing the amount of available copies for other people.

Cadillac drivers Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas believe there are lessons to be taken from last weekend's Dutch Grand Prix, with the former stating "the pace was very strong" despite failing to score any points.

Another World Photography Day is in the books and once again the community brought some serious competition to our annual contest. Our category regulars like Nature, People, Animals and Urban were joined this year by Film, and with so many incredible submissions, our judges had their work cut out for them.

This year’s contest winners are taking home a MODE Festival Mystery Box that includes 3 Day VIP passes to our inaugural photography festival happening September 18-20 in Minneapolis, MN. We’ll also be featuring their winning photos at the festival for the whole community to enjoy. Each winner is getting a year of Flickr Pro. So let’s meet the people and the photos that took top spots this year!

Nature Category

Bernd Leicht with Dangerous lighthouse trip

Meet the photographer:

Bernd is a passionate hobby photographer from southwestern Germany and focuses his photography on landscapes. He shared with us a bit more about this dangerous trip that brought him to his winning lighthouse photo. “It was a trip with a Zodiac boat from the port of Audierne (Bretagne) to the lighthouse Phare de Tevennec (also called Hell). The trip took place under rough seas and was at the limit of feasibility. The guide had everything well under control, you are not allowed to drive there alone, too dangerous.”

“The tour led through the Raz du Sein, also known as the Cape Horn of Europe. There are a lot of wrecks and drowned sailors here. The tidal current is incredibly strong in the passage. It was not easy to photograph because I had to hold on to not be thrown around in the boat. Taking a picture in Libra was almost impossible. The trip passed the Phare de la Vieille and had a total time of 3 hours. At first we were accompanied by a large dolphin school that jumped next to the boat.”

Animals Category

Per Thyrén with Muskox with calf – Myskoxe med kalv

Meet the photographer:

Per Thyrén is retired journalist who lives outside of Nyköping, a small town 100 kilometers south of Stockholm, Sweden. “I have been interested in animals and nature since I was young and I am often out in nature with my camera. My longest photo trip was to British Columbia where I photographed spirit bears and coastal wolves.”

Urban Category

Giorgio Ghezzi with Man at the window in I3 / Uomo alla finestra in I3

Meet the photographer:

Giorgio lives in Rome, Italy, where he was born 76 years ago. He’s retired after working in the insurance industry and now we are lucky enough to enjoy the photography he takes in these years of retirement. Giorgio loves this building and shares, “I took the photo in St. Julian, Malta, nine years ago. I used an old smartphone. I love this crazy and colourful building!”

Film Category 

Byron Segraves with we met in a parking lot…

Meet the photographer:

Byron is a self-taught photographer based in California. “My work is rooted predominantly in the streets of Los Angeles, where I developed my style through endless hours of walking, seeing, shooting, and editing. I shoot mainly candid, looking for the unpredictable theatre of the everyday. My work has primarily been shared and developed through Flickr and online communities, rather than galleries or formal education. I’ve also had my work shown and reviewed on several episodes of the podcast The Candid Frame.”

“As far as the actual photo itself, and like most all my work, it’s a candid street shot. I love the thrill of finding little moments that others seem to miss, and sharing them with my loyal friends on Flickr. I love the community, support and inspiration they all provide. This was made with a recently acquired 1971 Nikon F2 and shot on Tri-X 400. I had noticed the VW and little pug approx 1/2 block away, from my car, as I was sitting at a red light, near Sunset Blvd and Western Ave, in Hollywood, California, where I live. I always have my camera with me, for moments like this, so I fired off a shot from distance. As the light changed, I noticed the little dog was still waiting for it’s owner, legs out, still in the same position as before, so I pulled into the parking lot, I think it was Walgreens, positioned my car directly in front of the VW and prayed the dog would hold it’s position, refocused and fired off one shot, never leaving my drivers seat. The owner of the VW happened to be coming out of the store as I pulled up, laughed at his pups pose, and pleasantries were exchanged. Having never left the driver seat, I then pulled out of the parking lot and headed west on Sunset Blvd.”

People Category

Daniels Stramkaļs with Untitled

Meet the photographer:

Daniels is an up and coming photographer based in Riga, Latvia. “I started out with football photography after ending my players career last year, which lasted for 9 years. Now, I have opportunities that I could only dream of such as photographing Latvian national team and UEFA games.”

“This photo was taken at FK Auda vs FC Dinamo City Conference League, 3rd qualifying round. The atmosphere was moody and it was towards dawn, so I knew that the photos were going to be good. I spent quite some time on this edit but it was definitely worth it, because this is now one of my favorite football photos I ever took.

Celebrating photography everyday!

Congratulations to this year’s contest winners and everyone who participated in the contest. Each year we look forward to seeing the beautiful shots you all share to our World Photography Day contest and this year definitely raised the bar. To see more of our favorites, stay tuned for our Honorable Mentions gallery that will go live here on the Official Flickr site. We’ll also be featuring so many other great submissions in our upcoming September Explore Takeover so don’t miss it!

Until next time!

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Smithsonian Magazine: The brain is one of the first organs to begin decomposing after death. Yet archaeologists have discovered more than 4,400 preserved human brains around the world, some of which have remained intact for the last 12,000 years. In hundreds of cases, the brain was the only soft tissue left among otherwise skeletal remains. But how and why do brains sometimes persist for millennia while all other types of soft tissue disappear? This preservation paradox has stumped scientists for years. Now, however, a team of researchers say they may have solved the mystery.

If a brain ends up in a wet, oxygen-starved environment, the processes that usually cause decay can have the opposite effect, researchers report in a study published in the August 7 issue of the Journal of Proteome Research. "Under the right conditions, preservation actually arises from decay itself: The same reactions that degrade tissue can also weld the breakdown products together into something far tougher," study co-author Alexandra Seviour, a paleobiologist at the University of Oxford in England, tells Live Science's Victoria Atkinson.

Following experiments on 72 mouse carcasses (described in the article) the scientists think they know why. When oxygen is abundant, it triggers a cascading, chemical chain reaction that causes brain proteins to break down rapidly. This sequence hinges on free radicals, highly reactive, unstable molecules that "steal" electrons from nearby atoms and molecules. The process happens in the brains of living people too, and if left unchecked, can cause health problems. In low-oxygen environments, however, this chemical sequence appears to play out differently. The researchers' analyses hint that free radicals instead react and bond with nearby proteins, making the overall tissue tougher and more resistant to decomposition, Seviour tells Chemical and Engineering News' Anirban Mukhopadhyay. The findings show that "decay is not the opposite of preservation but, under specific chemical constraints, one of its mechanisms," the researchers write in the paper.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.