"We see you. We know what you’re doing. If the Yantar travels south this week, we are ready," Defense Secretary John Healey said in a messaged aimed at Putin.
Lukoil enjoyed a near-monopoly in Bulgaria through a network of oil depots, petrol stations and firms supplying ships and aircraft.
Well, this is downright infuriating. One of our country’s most beloved museums is mired in a truly sickening case of corruption: The President of the American Museum of Natural History has stepped down after being caught making bone broth with a T. rex femur.
Absolutely shameful. Hopefully this man is placed in prison and never allowed near dinosaur bones for the rest of his disgusting life.
Earlier today, Sean M. Decatur officially resigned as President of the Museum of Natural History after security cameras caught him sneaking into the building after hours to make over 200 gallons of bone broth using a tyrannosaurus rex femur from the museum’s collection. According to reports, Decatur was confronted by museum security personnel stationed at the loading docks behind the building while he was attempting to shove an industrial barrel of T. rex bone broth into the back of his Mercedez-Benz. Decatur insisted he’d made the broth with bones he’d brought from home, and was only using the museum’s staff kitchen because the stove in his penthouse “was too small” for the amount of broth he needed to make for the Thanksgiving gathering he was hosting for “6,000 cousins.”
Decatur’s story fell apart when a guard on night shift followed a rich, savory aroma to the museum’s dinosaur exhibit, and noticed that the T-Rex’s femur was wet and steaming. Decatur allegedly tried to buy the security staff’s silence, bribing them with one gallon of T. rex bone broth each, but by then, they’d already called the police.
In a confession he gave before posting bail, Decatur admitted that he had no cousins, revealed that he doesn’t even celebrate Thanksgiving for political reasons, and said that the T. rex bone broth was intended for his own personal use exclusively, explaining that he never planned to sell the broth to private collectors or restaurants for financial gain. “To see those giant dinosaur fossils collecting dust on display when they have so much protein, collagen, and minerals in them, I thought it was just such a waste,” Decatur wrote in his resignation statement. “I tried one sip of the T. rex bone broth and it tasted incredible, and I was so excited to make lentil soup with it, but I still regret my actions. I’m sorry for betraying your trust.”
Hey, here’s a better use for all that illegal dinosaur bone broth: boiling this greedy, corrupt bastard alive in it!
Clearly, the Museum of Natural History needs to start vetting their leadership better and install security measures to prevent this from happening ever again. It just goes to show how easily some people are corrupted by their positions of power, huh? What a dark day for natural history…sigh.
Tsinghua University collected 4,986 AI and machine learning patents between 2005 and the end of 2024. The Beijing institution has received more than 900 patents last year alone. The total exceeds the combined patent count from MIT, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard during the same period. China now accounts for more than half of all active patent families globally in AI and machine learning fields, according to data analytics service LexisNexis.
The university also has more AI research papers among the 100 most cited than any other school at last count. The US still holds the most influential AI patents and the top performing models. Harvard and MIT consistently rank ahead of Tsinghua in patent influence. American institutions produced 40 notable AI models in 2024 compared to 15 from Chinese organizations, according to Stanford's AI Index Report. China's share of the world's elite AI researchers -- the top 2% -- rose from 10% in 2019 to 26% in 2022. The US share fell from 35% to 28% during the same period, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.
The university also has more AI research papers among the 100 most cited than any other school at last count. The US still holds the most influential AI patents and the top performing models. Harvard and MIT consistently rank ahead of Tsinghua in patent influence. American institutions produced 40 notable AI models in 2024 compared to 15 from Chinese organizations, according to Stanford's AI Index Report. China's share of the world's elite AI researchers -- the top 2% -- rose from 10% in 2019 to 26% in 2022. The US share fell from 35% to 28% during the same period, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Version 4.21 also brings advances in the datacenter, on ARM, and RISC-V
The Xen Project today delivered a major release of its hypervisor and associated tools, including contributions from automaker Ford, which quietly joined the project in June.…
A reactor at the site suffered a partial meltdown in 1979
The Trump administration is so eager to get extra power into the grid that it is offering a $1 billion loan to Constellation Energy to help it restart the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear facility.…
When Manuela Solano delineates a cheekbone or shapes the chiseled torso of a cowboy standing tall, precisely placed nails, tape, and pipe cleaners offer guidance. The artist, who is blind, works intuitively, feeling out the areas she and her team have marked and trusting that together, the desired imagery will emerge. “I try to force myself to keep [the shapes] faster and looser, which feels great,” she adds. “It makes the process more playful.”
At just 26, medical malpractice in her HIV treatments caused Solano to lose her sight. She’s since adapted to new ways of working, as she taps into both her memory and imagination to produce paintings that reflect her concerns and joys. “My work is always, on some level, about myself. I make work about either my taste, my yearnings, or something I see of myself in someone else,” she says.
A beautiful film by Barbara Anastacio for T Magazine—which was made in 2018 before the artist’s gender transition—visits Solano’s then-studio in Mexico City and glimpses her process in detail. We see the artist flip through work made before she lost her sight in 2014 as she traces her practice from art school to the present.
Snowy scenes and portraits appear throughout the sketchbook and offer a visual throughline to her work today. Recent paintings like “Walking on Water” retain the vast landscapes of her earlier pieces as ripples pulse across the sea’s surface. “Me and my team are constantly figuring out the best way to paint textures or effects we haven’t painted before. In that way, we are continually learning,” she adds.
Similarly, a collection of self-portraits presented in her solo show Egogénsis, held earlier this year in Madrid, reflects a complex evolution of identity through a variety of tender portraits. Gender is fluid in this body of work, and the connection between humans and nature is intrinsic, as parts of the environment seem to imprint themselves onto her figures.
While Solano does pull from memory, she’s quick to clarify that this process isn’t unique to her practice. “I’ve heard that memories change every time we revisit them,” she says. “This means everybody faces the problem of remembering things a different way than they actually look.”
Having recently relocated to Berlin, Solano incorporates parts of her daily life into much of her practice, allowing her ongoing experiences and dreams to mix with imagery from the past and produce new compositions. She explains:
Nowadays, I am making a lot of work about my current comings and goings, all of it things I obviously have never seen. I think there is a common misinterpretation that my work is perhaps about memory, that I am painting the things I saw. And this often comes with the rather ableist worry that someday I might run out of memories to paint. But this is not the case at all. I am originating new images and putting them in my work all the time.
Solano is also a writer and often pens poems and stories to accompany her paintings. A recent piece, which she refers to as a manifesto, will accompany her new Blind Transgender and Wild series. If you’re in Mexico City, you can see the artist’s pop-culture works through January 4 at Museo Tamayo, before the exhibition travels to CAAC Sevilla in 2026. Find more of her work on Instagram.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Memory and Novelty Converge for Manuela Solano, Who Adopted a New Process After Losing Her Sight appeared first on Colossal.
Roderick en Annemijn laten weten dat ze zichzelf belangrijker vinden dan jij, omdat zij in hun eerste studentenjaar wél vernederd zijn. Volgens hen geeft dat automatisch ‘meer legitimiteit’.
Annemijn benadrukt dat iedereen die ooit lid is geweest een bepaald soort ‘basisvernedering’ heeft ervaren die jij nooit hebt gehad. Ze verwijst naar de kennismakingstijd, waarin ze naar eigen zeggen ‘een reeks traditionele opdrachten’ moest uitvoeren. “Dat doe je nu eenmaal,” zegt ze. “En precies daardoor word je net even prominenter. Wij hebben tenminste het traject doorlopen.”
Daarnaast geven ze aan dat het voor hen lastig blijft om mensen die nooit lid zijn geweest serieus te nemen. “Ik heb niks tegen knorren,” zegt Roderick, “maar ik ga ze natuurlijk nooit als gelijkwaardig zien.”
Volgens het duo is het daarom logisch dat jij anders in elkaar zit. Roderick noemt het ‘geen oordeel, meer een constatering,’ maar benadrukt wel dat je zonder die ervaring “altijd een beetje buiten de rangorde valt”. “Anti VO,” voegt Annemijn er aan toe.
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ik zat laatst te drieten op de plee
en ik persen als een idioot maar 't duurde wel een uur of twee
En dat was het moment dat er een deken van herkenning over de zaal viel, alle Nederlands- en Engelstalige nummers overboord gingen en Normaal besloot gewoon Normaal te zijn, en de rest is geschiedenis. Laat het vandaag Wereld Toilet Dag zijn, de dag waarop we vieren dat we allemaal zes keer per dag (jullie minder?) naar de stilteruimte gaan om er een tandje gelukkiger van terug te komen dan we erin gingen. Vandaag geen verhalen over Ans de Vries of al die andere mensen met namen als Thom en Dilan en Henri en Rob die joekels van kluiten eruit bouten als totale volwassenen. Wereld Toilet Dag, vier het.
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You know when you get your iPhone passcode wrong after several attempts and it locks you out for 10 minutes? And if you keep putting in the wrong code after that, it will lock you out for over an hour? Well, that happened to me the other day as I had my phone in my jacket pocket — I must have been tapping the screen without realising.
Last weekend, I was out in the park with my family as they had come down to visit us – which doesn't happen often as I was looking after my son. As we arrived, I looked at my phone, only to be confronted with any phone-addict's biggest nightmare:
"iPhone Unavailable – try again in 1 hour."
As I'm sure you may know from your own experience, this made me a little uncomfortable. I felt completely cut off from the world. Like most people, where I go, my phone goes with me, and being unable to check emails or social media felt isolating. But then, after a while, I started to see the situation differently.
Other than learning not to mess with my phone while it's in my pocket, I realised that I have an unhealthy relationship with it — and I'm sure I'm not the only one facing this uncomfortable truth.
My isolation (although brief) from my iPhone taught me a few lessons about the need for digital shutdowns, or "digital sabbaths" as others say. I felt more present and less anxious, and I was able to spend more meaningful, joy-filled time with my son. He had my undivided attention, not my phone – the way it should be. The moment I got my phone back, I went straight back onto X (Twitter), only to be confronted by a stream of posts featuring people getting caught up in heated debates with others.
All of this got me thinking: if I could be more present and attentive when I was out with my family, just imagine the impact this could have in other areas of my spiritual life. Whether it's more time in prayer or studying God's Word, we need ways to manage our screen time effectively and maximise the things that matter and bring us closer to God.
AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De aandelenbeurs in Amsterdam is met winst gesloten. Beleggers wereldwijd zijn in afwachting van de kwartaalresultaten van chipontwikkelaar Nvidia, die worden gezien als barometer voor de groei van de AI-sector. Eerder maakten zorgen over mogelijk te hoge waarderingen voor techbedrijven en forse investeringen in datacenters beleggers nerveus.
Op het Damrak leek het vertrouwen in de techsector wat te herstellen. Chipbedrijven ASML, ASMI en Besi zaten bij de winnaars van de AEX met plussen tot 2,5 procent. De hoofdindex zelf won 0,3 procent tot 933,34 punten.
De MidKap steeg 0,5 procent tot 862,69 punten. De beurzen in Frankfurt, Parijs en Londen noteerden verliezen tot 0,5 procent.
Binnen de AEX was Universal Music Group (UMG) de sterkste stijger met een winst van ruim 6 procent. Persbureau Bloomberg meldde dat de Europese Commissie waarschijnlijk niet akkoord gaat met de overname van het Amerikaanse platenlabel Downtown door UMG. Met die deal is 775 miljoen dollar gemoeid.
DEN HAAG (ANP) - Het is riskant wanneer de overheid openbare informatie over burgers gaat verzamelen om te controleren of ze zich aan de regels houden. Daarvoor waarschuwt de Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP). De privacytoezichthouder wil daarom dat er strenge regels komen voor zulk onderzoek. Die moeten zorgen voor "het juiste evenwicht" tussen de belangen van de overheid en de rechten van burgers.
Het ministerie van Justitie wil met speciale software openbare bronnen als sociale media, advertentiesites en webfora afstruinen op zoek naar informatie. Dat heet open source intelligence (OSINT). Volgens AP-voorzitter Aleid Wolfsen kan dit heel ingrijpend zijn, ook als de informatie openbaar is. "De vraag is wanneer en onder welke voorwaarden zoiets gerechtvaardigd is. Daarop ontbreekt nu nog het antwoord, omdat er nog geen wettelijk kader voor is", aldus Wolfsen.
De toezichthouder zegt dat het verzamelen van informatie zonder duidelijke regels kan gaan lijken op "een surveillancemaatschappij waarin burgers voortdurend in de gaten gehouden kunnen worden".
ZEERIJP (ANP) - Bij het Instituut Mijnbouwschade Groningen (IMG) zijn sinds de beving in Zeerijp van vorige week 2517 meldingen van schade binnengekomen, meldt de organisatie woensdag. Daarmee is het aantal met 400 toegenomen sinds dinsdag.
Van de 2517 meldingen komen er volgens het IMG 1751 uit het effectgebied van de beving. Dat is het gebied waarin de beving een trilling van 2 millimeter per seconde of hoger veroorzaakte.
In totaal zijn er 68 meldingen gedaan van acuut onveilige situaties. Dat wil zeggen dat iemand zich onveilig voelt in een woning of ander gebouw door aardbevingsschade. Tot dusver waren bij negen meldingen maatregelen nodig. Vijf meldingen moeten nog worden geïnspecteerd.
De aardbeving met een kracht van 3.4 vond plaats in de nacht van donderdag op vrijdag. Het was een van de zwaarste bevingen ooit gemeten in Groningen. De bevingen hangen samen met de jarenlange gaswinning in het gebied.
Digital_trance has added a photo to the pool:
