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‘Who prefers our earlier work?” Yard Act frontman James Smith asks the audience, and it’s a question you get the sense he has been asking himself of late too. A crowd member is brought up on stage to spin a wheel, offering a one-time-only chance to hear a randomly selected song from the band’s 2021 debut EP Dark Days. It lands on the title track and the band dutifully bash out the kind of jagged post-punk that led to their rapid ascent during lockdown.Three years on, with the band seemingly feeling restricted by their own…

The UK is experiencing a boom in book clubs, according to new data from event listing companies.Book club listings on the ticketing site Eventbrite increased by 350% between 2019 and 2023 – a “much stronger” growth than the overall increase in UK-based listings over the same period. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, book club listings on the site rose by 41%.Another event listing site, Meetup, reported a 14% increase in the number of RSVPs to book clubs between January 2023 and January 2024, compared with a 4% increase in…

AI chatbots made headlines this week with a range of glaring flubs that were hard to look past. Tech companies are rushing to show off their non-offensive, error-free AI chatbots. They’re hoping to show investors that the billions of dollars spent on this technology was a good investment. This week, AI chatbots showed they are not ready for the spotlight just yet.Why is Everyone Suing AI Companies? | Future TechAI Off The RailsGoogle’s Gemini offended many users by refusing to generate white people and turning…

By Yoonjung Seo and Jessie Yeung | CNN Seoul, South Korea  — South Korean actor Lee Sun-kyun, known internationally for his role in the Academy Award-winning film “Parasite,” has died while being investigated for illegal drug use, police confirmed Wednesday. He was 48. Police in the capital Seoul said in a statement they had received a missing person report from Lee’s manager on their hotline. Lee was found in his car on Wednesday morning. The cause of death is “presumed to be suicide,” police said. Photos from the scene…

The International Space Station is pictured from the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour during a fly around of the orbiting lab that took place following its undocking from the Harmony module’s space-facing port on November 8, 2021. Credit: NASA<span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>NASA</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the…

Are we in the midst of a wellbeing pandemic? The question may seem curious, even contradictory. But look around, the concept is everywhere and spreading: in the media, in government institutions and transnational organizations, in schools, in workplaces, and in the marketplace.To be clear, it's not just wellbeing's infectiousness in public discourse that makes it pandemic-like. It's also the genuine malaise that can be caused by the term's misuse and exploitation.Do you sense, for example, that your wellbeing is…

Mike Neustedter and his family were a thousand miles away from their Superior home on Dec. 30, 2021, as a windswept wildfire tore toward their Original Town neighborhood. Their 11-year-old cat Coby was inside the home, trapped. The animal was one of the nearly 1,200 pets that didn’t survive the Marshall fire. “If someone had known pets were in these houses, it could have been a different story. But nobody knew,” said Neustedter, whose dog was spared by accompanying the family on the road trip to Illinois. “We had a cat…

A ring of superconducting qubits can host “bound states” of microwave photons, where the photons tend to clump on neighboring qubit sites. Credit: Google Quantum AIUsing a quantum processor, researchers made microwave photons uncharacteristically sticky. After coaxing them to clump together into bound states, they discovered that these photon clusters survived in a regime where they were expected to dissolve into their usual, solitary states. As the finding was first made on a quantum processor, it marks the growing role…

We’re now officially at the end of Phase Four, a chunk of the MCU‘s never-ending lifespan that has delivered a fair few shocks for fans everywhere. Excepting, that is, the real-life time traveler who happened to predict the past two years of the franchise with eerie accuracy back before WandaVision had even aired in early 2020. Perhaps employing similar means to Doctor Strange when he used his Time Stone to view 14 billion futures in Avengers: Infinity War, it turns out one Redditor shared their own thoughts on where…

The Bureau of Meteorology is forecasting extreme heatwave conditions to persist through the weekend across parts of Western Australia, Northern Territory and Queensland. Credit: Bureau of Meteorology After a wet and unusually cool spring for much of Australia, the start of meteorological summer is bringing a heatwave to the north of the continent. Even in our La Niña summer we can expect spells of heat, and it's important to…