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Amid speculation over his future, Fernando Alonso has shared his thoughts on the factors that will influence his decision.
Lewis Hamilton believes “the opportunity is there” to challenge for title glory in 2026, even if Ferrari have “a real battle on our hands” to build on their recent strong form and overhaul early pace-setters Mercedes.
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Ha ja interessant meer dan 1,6 miljoen (EENKOMMAZESMILJOEN) Nederlanders slikken antidepressiva, we hebben weliswaar iets meer vissers, maar het scheelt niet veel. Tjonge nou, die zullen het wel nodig hebben dan, want zoals bekend zit er bij mensen met depressie iets mis in de hersens, iets met stofjes enzo, en die pillen corrigeren dat. Ho, nee, wacht, dat is gelul. Weliswaar gelul van het hardnekkige soort, maar gelul desalniettemin. Veel van wat we ooit dachten te weten (of spoedig te zullen ontdekken) over depressie, blijkt helemaal niet waar; we zijn dus op grote schaal iets wat we niet begrijpen aan het behandelen met iets waarvan we niet precies weten hoe het werkt (hetzelfde geldt min of meer voor ADHD). Deze week bij Triggernometry de geweldige Joanna Moncrieff, een Britse wetenschapper en psychiater, thans geen groot voorstander van de psychiatrie. Ze schreef onlangs een boek over de materie dat geweldig is, maar omdat het natuurlijk veel te godvergeten heet is om ook maar één pagina om te slaan kunt u het ook gewoon met deze podcast doen.
DEN HAAG (ANP) - Defensie houdt vast aan haar besluit geen vrijwillige compensatie te geven aan individuele slachtoffers van het Nederlandse bombardement op Hawija, waarbij zeker zeventig Irakezen omkwamen in 2015. "Ik ben er heel erg van overtuigd dat het standpunt dat Defensie jaren geleden heeft ingenomen, de juiste is in deze", zei minister Dilan Yeşilgöz donderdag in de Tweede Kamer.
Een flink deel van de Kamer staat daar wel open voor een individuele tegemoetkoming. Ook coalitiepartijen D66 en CDA zijn hier niet op tegen, de VVD wel. Financiële vergoeding voor individuen zou een precedentwerking voor de toekomst kunnen hebben, zei de minister. Bovendien zou het moeilijk uitvoerbaar zijn. "Je wilt geen willekeur."
Hoewel de aanval volgens het ministerie rechtmatig was en Nederland niet aansprakelijk is, geeft het wel vrijwillige compensatie aan de gemeenschap van Hawija. Ook bood de voorganger van Yeşilgöz begin dit jaar in de Iraakse stad persoonlijk excuses aan voor de burgerslachtoffers van de aanval op de IS-bommenfabriek.
ZOETERMEER (ANP) - Alle keuringslocaties van de RDW en het testcentrum in Lelystad zijn vrijdag vanwege de hitte gesloten. De vroegere Rijksdienst voor het Wegverkeer meldt dat mensen die een afspraak op een keuringslocatie hebben, worden gebeld voor een nieuwe afspraak.
Volgens de RDW is het besluit niet lichtvaardig genomen. "We begrijpen dat dit vervelend kan zijn, zeker als u hiervoor tijd heeft vrijgemaakt. Tegelijkertijd staat de veiligheid van onze klanten en medewerkers voorop."
De RDW heeft zestien keuringsstations verspreid over Nederland. Bij keuringsstations worden voertuigen gecontroleerd op bijvoorbeeld schade of na invoer uit het buitenland.
CUPERTINO (ANP/AFP/BLOOMBERG) - Apple gaat zijn wereldwijde verkoopprijzen voor onder meer MacBooks en iPads verhogen om de sterk gestegen kosten voor geheugenchips door de AI-hausse te compenseren. De prijs van de iPhone blijft wel gelijk.
Apple-topman Tim Cook had vorige week tegen zakenkrant The Wall Street Journal al gezegd dat er een prijsverhoging aankomt. Die is volgens hem "onvermijdelijk" vanwege de grote vraag naar geheugenchips en de prijsverhogingen die chipfabrikanten daardoor doorvoeren. Maar met hoeveel de prijzen zouden stijgen, gaf Cook toen niet aan.
Op de Amerikaanse website van Apple staat nu dat de verkoopprijs van de 14-inch MacBook Pro stijgt van 1699 naar 1999 dollar, omgerekend 1758 euro. De prijs van de iPad Air gaat van 599 naar 749 dollar (658 euro). Ook de HomePod-luidspreker en de streamingbox voor Apple TV worden duurder.
De parkeertarieven in Rotterdam gaan omhoog en in meer wijken wordt het betaald parkeren uitgebreid: dat bleek donderdag uit de uitgelekte plannen van de nieuwe Rotterdamse coalitie. De uitbreiding is vooral bedoeld om andere plannen te kunnen financieren. Toch zien veel mensen deze strategie niet zitten.
Micron has signed 16 "strategic customer agreements" (SCAs) that include a floor price the company says comes with "a very robust gross margin for Micron, well above our peak quarterly margins in any past cycle." Most of the deals run through 2030 and cover about 40% of Micron's revenue. The Register reports: Micron CEO, president and chairman Sanjay Mehrotra explained the SCAs in prepared remarks delivered during the company's Q3 earnings call. He explained that Micron has signed 16 SCAs, most of them covering 2026 to 2030, and that they involve a commitment to buy a certain quantity of product and pay for it in a pricing band that has a floor and a ceiling price. The floor price covers the historically high gross margins mentioned above, and the ceiling price means those who commit to an SCA are insulated if memory prices go even higher.
The CEO said 16 customers have signed SCAs and then explained why it's worth locking into the deals even though they bake in such high margins. "Our customers are recognizing that supply shortages in memory and storage will take considerable time to improve," he said. "Even as we expect industry supply to improve gradually in 2028, we currently do not have line of sight as to when memory supply will be able to catch up with increasing demand."
Even massive efforts to build new chip fabs aren't much help, he said, because the increasing complexity of new memory types means it takes longer to build factories -- and when they come online there still won't be enough capacity to build both the high-bandwidth memory needed for AI and other types of NAND and DRAM. "Supply is structurally constrained in its growth and ability to meet industry demand, despite our comprehensive efforts to increase supply," he said.
Don't assume that SCAs mean your suppliers get price certainty, because Mehrotra said the deals will account for 40 percent of Micron revenue -- meaning the company is reserving most of its inventory to sell at prices it can negotiate. The CEO did have a little good news in the form of predictions that Micron's DRAM output in 2026 will "grow in the low- to mid-20s percentage range, slightly above our prior outlook." He also revealed that the SCAs see customers pay up front, which helps Micron to fund its fab expansions.
The CEO said 16 customers have signed SCAs and then explained why it's worth locking into the deals even though they bake in such high margins. "Our customers are recognizing that supply shortages in memory and storage will take considerable time to improve," he said. "Even as we expect industry supply to improve gradually in 2028, we currently do not have line of sight as to when memory supply will be able to catch up with increasing demand."
Even massive efforts to build new chip fabs aren't much help, he said, because the increasing complexity of new memory types means it takes longer to build factories -- and when they come online there still won't be enough capacity to build both the high-bandwidth memory needed for AI and other types of NAND and DRAM. "Supply is structurally constrained in its growth and ability to meet industry demand, despite our comprehensive efforts to increase supply," he said.
Don't assume that SCAs mean your suppliers get price certainty, because Mehrotra said the deals will account for 40 percent of Micron revenue -- meaning the company is reserving most of its inventory to sell at prices it can negotiate. The CEO did have a little good news in the form of predictions that Micron's DRAM output in 2026 will "grow in the low- to mid-20s percentage range, slightly above our prior outlook." He also revealed that the SCAs see customers pay up front, which helps Micron to fund its fab expansions.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
It's almost quaint and retro when I start getting hammered by a botnet that is incompetently probing for WordPress exploits instead of incompetently trying to suck down everything in order to feed the plagiarism machine.
Yet another Martian rock formation has revealed what may be signs of ancient life on the Red Planet. While these findings aren't as scientist-wowing as those reported last year, they add to growing evidence that ancient Mars contained organic carbon and may once have been habitable. An international team of scientists working on examining Martian rock samples collected and analyzed by the Perseverance rover reported in Science Advances Wednesday that they’d found signs of macromolecular carbon (MMC) in the Martian rock dubbed Cheyava Falls. Like most of the other life-affirming samples collected from Mars, this one comes from Jezero Crater, where Perseverance has spent the entirety of its five-year mission. Jezero Crater, and particularly the long-dried riverbed known as Neretva Vallis that fed what’s believed to be a large lake that once filled Jezero, has been the site of several potential signs of ancient life on Mars, and it’s no different in this case. Two instruments at the end of Perseverance’s arm, the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) and the Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering (WATSON), were collectively responsible for the discovery of MMCs in Cheyava Falls. MMCs found on Earth are often associated with organic compounds essential to life, including carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids, and there's a distinct possibility that the MMCs found on Mars could have come from similar sources. The Cheyava Falls team was also excited to link their findings to a discovery made by Curiosity in 2018, which found evidence of similar materials more than 3,500 kilometers away in Gale crater. The potentially organic matter discovered by Curiosity was dubbed “kerogen” by that team. From a strictly scientific standpoint, kerogen can be used interchangeably with MMC, but the Cheyava Falls team opted to avoid that terminology in order to “avoid implications of biogenicity.” That said, it’s still exciting to the team, and the widespread discovery of MMCs across Mars could indicate that “habitability … and the availability of organics, may have been widespread across the planet billions of years ago.” This discovery hasn’t led the researchers to jump to conclusions, however. As they note in the paper, there are a number of lifeless sources of MMCs that could be the cause of their detections, with meteorite impacts and abiotic synthesis of organic matter that could both be responsible. “There are multiple potential pathways to form abiotic organics on Mars, including condensation from igneous systems and associated volatiles, serpentinization, carbonation, and the electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide in aqueous/hydrothermal fluids,” the team noted. In other words, this is nowhere near the confounding mystery that NASA admitted it had on its hands in September of last year. Perseverance drilled a core sample called Sapphire Canyon from the Cheyava Falls rock, which NASA said last year contained potential signs of ancient life that it couldn't readily explain through abiotic processes, though non-biological explanations remain possible. "A year ago we found what we believe to be signs of microbial life on Mars' surface," then-acting NASA administrator and transportation secretary Sean Duffy said at a press conference last year. "After a year of review [the scientific community] has come back and said it can't find another explanation." Jezero Crater has given up other signs that it may have been a vibrant, living ecosystem too. In March, researchers reported that the same region also turned up signs of nickel compounds that indicate the formation of enzymes related to bacterial biological processes, but again those signs are also explainable by non-biological action. Proof of life requires samples brought to Earth Both the report released Wednesday and the research leaders behind it are unequivocal on what it’ll take to confirm the growing body of evidence that there was once life on Mars: Samples need to be returned to Earth for inspection. “The instruments on the Perseverance rover were not designed to distinguish between rocks that formed through biologic or abiotic processes, but they are able to identify compelling rocks to sample for possible return to Earth,” SHERLOC principal investigator and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Kyle Uckert told us in an email. Uckert reiterated to us that humanity’s best chance at fully understanding whether the various organics detected in Jezero Crater is some sort of sample-return mission, and he explained that rocks they sampled for the study are packaged, sealed, and waiting for the possibility that something like that still happens. That’s far from a sure thing at this point, as NASA’s Mars Sample Return plans are essentially scuttled at this point - something Uckert and his co-lead author, Planetary Science Institute researcher Ashley Murphy, declined to weigh in on when asked. Meanwhile, China is already pressing ahead with its own Mars sample-return mission, with launches planned for 2028 and a sample return targeted for around 2031. China already has a leg up on the US in the sample return space, with the China National Space Administration returning samples from the far side of the Moon to Earth in 2024. NASA has collected samples from an asteroid and returned them to Earth, to be fair, but Mars is still a long way off, and life or no life, getting samples back to prove it is going to be a race that China may win if its current plans work out. ®
‘Ambitious and welcoming’ venue that opened in 2020 praised for ‘reimagining what being a museum can mean’
The Box in Plymouth has won the prestigious Art Fund museum of the year award, the largest such prize in the world, for its “ambitious and welcoming approach”.
Awarding it the £120,000 prize, judges called the Box “a revelation in so many ways” and “a true jewel in the crown of the south-west”.
Continue reading...Senior official alleges in court filing that damage included about ‘70 fence post tops thrown’ into the pool
A senior National Park Service (NPS) official has said a liner along the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool was “cut with a sharp knife or razor” earlier this month, repeating Donald Trump’s claims of vandalism.
Frank Lands, the deputy director for operations for NPS, made the allegation in a court filing on Wednesday, as part of a lawsuit brought by a non-profit group seeking to stop the US president’s renovation of the site.
Continue reading...Club owe HMRC £1.9m in tax and handed £1.25m penalty
Relates to investigation of transfers under Mike Ashley
Newcastle United have been hit with a demand for £3.2m from HM Revenue and Customs over a “deliberate” failure to pay tax, according to official disclosures that relate to a near decade-long investigation into player transfers under the club’s former owner, Mike Ashley.
The Tyneside club, which has been owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund since 2021, owes HMRC £1.9m in tax and has also been hit with a penalty of £1.25m, the newly released documents show. The bill emerged as a result of the tax authority’s regular publication of a league table of “deliberate tax defaulters”, with Newcastle United featuring at the top of the most recent list, released on Thursday.
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