Crisis

At the beginning of this heartfelt, deeply researched inquiry into the history of mental illness in America’s Black population, journalist Antonia Hylton describes a regular meeting with a close relative in a park in Massachusetts. The relative – who does not want to be identified in the book – is suffering from a very specific paranoia: they believe that white supremacists are hunting them down.The relative has, Hylton writes, “covered up all of their windows with black gaffer tape… unplugged all their electronics,…

A privately funded satellite is set to push methane tracking into a new era, once it launches into space on Monday.A collaborative mission between Environmental Defense Fund, Google, the Government of New Zealand and several other partners, MethaneSAT will track methane emissions around the globe in attempts to identify and quantify sources spewing the climate-heating greenhouse gas. For 20 years after its release into the atmosphere, methane gas is 80 times more harmful than carbon dioxide in its ability to increase…

CEO Sam Altman will return to the board of OpenAI, the company said on Friday, just months after a boardroom dustup that saw him fired and rehired by the company behind ChatGPT.Altman was also found to have been wrongly fired in an internal investigation that was launched in the days after his chaotic dismissal last year, the company said.Elevate Your Tech Prowess with High-Value Skill CoursesOffering CollegeCourseWebsiteIndian School of BusinessISB Product ManagementVisitMITMIT Technology Leadership and…

Carbon dioxide emissions surged to record levels in 2023, with fossil fuel combustion and deforestation pushing total emissions to 40.9 billion metric tons, threatening global climate goals.Scientists’ annual checkup on Earth’s carbon cycle found that burning oil, coal, and natural gas is impeding progress to limit climate change.Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels rose again in 2023, reaching record levels, according to estimates from an international team of scientists. The continued rise in emissions from the…

It has been called the permacrisis – a state of perpetual turbulence that folds geopolitical tension into cultural polarisation and spins it all around in a furious vortex. It can feel like being knocked over in the sea, unsure which way is up, afraid that another wave will strike the moment you breach the surface. The usual political narratives aren’t adequate to explain what is happening. These books go deeper.To even stand a chance of running for parliament, candidates must pass through a party selection process that…

Big Blue Sky Games Big Blue Sky Games, a new studio of industry veterans, has revealed its debut game, Merchants of Rosewall. The project, set to launch sometime this year, is described as a story-driven, online shop-management game where the climate of its world impacts the availability and cost of resources. The game has been in development over at Big Blue Sky Games for the past two years. The small studio is comprised of 25 developers total, with 16 dedicated to the game. That talent comes from major publishers…

Air fryers are a time saver, but in return, you’ll need to give up a big chunk of counter space. If your kitchen is on the small side, this can be a problem. When you already have a microwave, kettle and toaster on the countertop – and then add an air fryer – it can leave you little room for food preparation. Enter Ninja’s Double Stack air fryer, which aims to solve this problem with a build that stacks two cooking drawers one on top of the other (as you may have guessed by the product name) instead of side by…

MTN Nigeria joined the expanding list of financially distressed companies in the country after its entire shareholders’ fund was obliterated by a sweeping after-tax loss precipitated by a dollar scarcity in Africa’s biggest economy. The wireless carrier, which executes the majority of its transactions with trade partners in foreign currencies, incurred N740 billion in net foreign exchange loss last year following sharp jumps in the rates of exchanging the naira for the dollar. That turned its shareholders’ fund…

It’s not like artificial intelligence caught Sundar Pichai off guard. I remember sitting in the audience in January 2018 when the Google CEO said it was as profound as electricity and fire. His proclamation stunned the San Francisco audience that day, so bullish it still seems a bit absurd, and it underscores how bizarre it is that his AI strategy now appears unmoored. The latest AI crisis at Google — where its Gemini image and text generation tool produced insane responses, including portraying Nazis as people of…

It’s Sunday evening at the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds and business appears to be booming. There is a blues festival in one of the two 400-capacity rooms and the rising US singer-songwriter Sam Evian in the other. The lounge between is packed with students watching Liverpool beat Chelsea on TV. However, the owner-promoter Nathan Clark is nervous: “The picture isn’t as rosy as it seems.”Yesterday, for instance, he was all set to put on the Australian psych-rockers Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, who had pulled 1,000 people…