>- Car hire companies are deploying new AI-powered scanning systems to detect even minor vehicle damage, sparking customer outrage over unexpected charges. >- Hertz, a prominent car rental firm, is using UVeye's automated technology at several US airports, which compares high-resolution images taken at pickup and return to identify new damage. >- Customers report receiving substantial bills for tiny imperfections, such as small dents or scuffs, often just minutes after returning their vehicles. >- Specific cases include Kelly Rogers being charged for a 'dent' she thought was a shadow, and another customer facing a $440 bill for a one-inch scuff. >- Despite customer complaints and plans to expand the system to over 100 US airports, Hertz maintains the technology ensures customers are not charged for pre-existing damage.

>As the Texas flooding death toll reached 95 on July 6—at least 27 of them children—and Tropical Storm Chantal prompted dozens of water rescues in North Carolina, some Floridians were reminded of the disastrous "rain bomb" in 2023 that hit faster and harder than any hurricane in living memory. > >Though no one died from the 2 feet of rain that deluged Fort Lauderdale in a single day in April two years ago, the relentless rain forced hundreds to flee to Red Cross shelters, covered airport runways, filled the tunnel that runs under the New River and turned downtown streets into raging rivers. > >And, despite the sheer speed with which these floods took people by surprise, they have another thing in common: Climate change made them even more catastrophic.

>As herbivores, these animals had large teeth for grinding their diet of plants. > >“These mammals can have enamel two to three millimeters thick. It was a lot of material to work with,” Dr. Green said. > >“What we found — peptide fragments, chains of amino acids, that together form proteins as old as 18 million years — was field-changing.” > >“Nobody’s ever found peptide fragments that are this old before.” > >Until now, the oldest published materials are about 3.5 million years old.

>Eight months after voters approved it, Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe signed the repeal of a law Thursday that had guaranteed paid sick leave to workers and inflationary adjustments to the minimum wage. > >The move marked a major victory for the state’s largest business group and a frustrating defeat for workers’ rights advocates, who had spent years — and millions of dollars — building support for the successful ballot measure. The repeal will take effect Aug. 28.

>A 57-year-old woman spent six days in the hospital for severe liver damage after taking daily megadoses of the popular herbal supplement, turmeric, which she had seen touted on social media, according to NBC News. > >The woman, Katie Mohan, told the outlet that she had seen a doctor on Instagram suggesting it was useful against inflammation and joint pain. So, she began taking turmeric capsules at a dose of 2,250 mg per day. According to the World Health Organization, an acceptable daily dose is up to 3 mg per kilogram of weight per day—for a 150-pound (68 kg) adult, that would be about 204 mg per day. Mohan was taking more than 10 times that amount.

>The construction of thousands of dams since 1835 has caused Earth's poles to wobble, new research suggests. > >Scientists found that large dams hold so much water they redistribute mass around the globe, shifting the position of Earth's crust relative to the mantle, the planet's middle layer. > >Earth's mantle is gooey, and the crust forms a solid shell that can slide around on top of it. Weight on the crust that causes it to shift relative to the mantle also shifts the location of Earth's poles, the researchers said.

>YouTube has an AI slop problem, with both the main site and the booming Shorts section filling up with low-effort crap shoveled in front of viewers by the millions. New policies are trying to demonetize, or sometimes even ban, accounts that take advantage of AI to mass produce garbage. But if Google is upset that it’s suddenly hosting the web’s video dross, it has only itself to blame. > >Starting on July 15th, and with less than a week of notice, YouTube will be taking a closer look at members of the YouTube Partner Program. This is the monetization side of YouTube videos that makes a career as an independent (or even corporate) YouTube video producer functional. Beginning next week, YouTubers who want to keep their advertising dollars will have to avoid “mass-produced and repetitious content,” as well as “inauthentic” videos.

>Scientists have hijacked the herpes virus and turned it into a cancer-busting ally. > >A decade after the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first virus-based cancer therapy, another potentially life-saving treatment is on the horizon. > >A genetically modified herpes simplex virus, called RP1, has now been shown to destroy advanced melanoma tumors, even when they exist deep in the body, according to a phase 1/2 clinical trial. > >The trial involved injecting RP1 into melanoma tumors on or just below the surface of the skin, or deeper in the body like in the lungs or liver. In patients who responded positively to the treatment, even tumors not directly injected with the medicine began to shrink.

>While individual trees can’t cross rivers and climb mountains, entire forests can. And climate change is making their journeys treacherous. > >“Trees have been migrating forever,” says Leslie Brandt, an ecologist formerly with the U.S. Forest Service in St. Paul, Minn. During the last ice age, when an ice sheet covered most of Canada and the northern United States, many tree species took refuge in warmer, southern climates. As northern habitats got colder, seeds thrived in the warmer south. More new trees grew on the southern edges of forests, while older trees up north died out. Slowly, forests migrated, moving around 100 to 500 meters a year, Brandt says. > >But now, human-caused climate change is altering habitats faster than forests can move. Rising oceans are threatening coastal mangrove forests worldwide. Higher temperatures in Canada are making it difficult for white spruce to grow. And drier conditions in the American Southwest are harming pinyon pines.

>A US racist and neo-fascist hate group that has become a public fixture in recent years has descended on central Texas in a stunt it claims is part of the “disaster relief” efforts under way after the devastating flash floods hit the region last week. > >Patriot Front, founded following the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where its leader, Thomas Rousseau, a Texan, was later charged for his participation, has claimed on its Telegram app channel that it has shown up in the areas near Camp Mystic, where 27 young campers lost their lives. > >“Patriot Front is here in central Texas,” Rousseau declares in a video statement, amid the backdrop of what sounds like buzzing chainsaws and a flood ravaged community, “responding to the flooding, which has destroyed communities and taken the lives of scores of Americans”. > >Rousseau goes on to claim that his so-called “activists” are distributing supplies to survivors, but clarifies that his group is prioritizing their “people” and “European peoples” in those operations.

>A university in France says nearly 300 American researchers have applied for a space in its "Safe Place for Science" program that was created to lure U.S. researchers seeking "scientific asylum" amid aggressive academic spending cuts and other actions against colleges by the Trump administration.

>Cheongha Kim, a legendary swordswoman from the Joseon era, awakens centuries later in the body of Dajin Park, a quiet high school student. Armed with deadly combat skills, Cheongha must face school bullies, navigate the chaos of modern-day life, and find her place in a world far different from her own. The halls of Juwon High are about to meet a warrior unlike any they’ve seen before.

Warning the series contains themes regarding bullying and violence that may be upsetting to some readers.

tags : Fantasy, Reincarnation, Action, School Life, Violence

Episode 34

>The Trump administration announced on Wednesday it was issuing sanctions against an independent official tasked with investigating human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories, the latest effort by the United States to punish critics of Israel’s 21-month war in Gaza. > >The state department’s decision to sanction Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, comes after a recent US pressure campaign to force the international body to remove her from her post failed. > >Albanese, a human rights lawyer, has been vocal in calling for an end to what she describes as the “genocide” that Israel is waging against Palestinians in Gaza. Both Israel and the US, which provides military support, have strongly denied that accusation. > >Israel has faced accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice and of war crimes at the ICC over its devastating military assault on Gaza. Albanese’s position has also been backed by leading genocide scholars and rights organisations.

>Perplexity has released its own web browser called Comet, and it's clearly aimed at Google. > >The AI search upstart has taken a page straight out of Google's playbook to try and supplant it: Comet comes with Perplexity AI search as the default search engine, a position The Chocolate Factory has fought to keep in various third-party browsers and platforms with a series of contracts, some of which a court has ruled to be anticompetitive. > >Perplexity says it built Comet "to amplify our intelligence." But that's arguably a very simplified version of its goals. Like Google, Perplexity sees value in employing user data to personalize the browsing experience - and, perhaps, sell ads. > >During an interview on the TBPN tech podcast in April, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas cited personalized advertising as one of the reasons to build a browser, noting that you need "memory" – the ability to retain the information provided in and produced by prompts to AI models – to make personalization work.

>Environment and Climate Change Canada’s forecast predicts a warmer-than-usual summer with uncertain precipitation levels. Bill Merryfield, a research scientist with the weather office, recently said human pollution has been a key influence on hotter summers. > >Tinder dry conditions have also created the fuel needed to start hundreds of wildfires across the country, forcing thousands in Manitoba and Saskatchewan to flee their communities earlier this spring. > >As of Friday, Manitoba has reported 60 active wildfires, with residents of Lynn Lake now being told they’ll have to evacuate for a second time. Saskatchewan has reported 65 active fires, with five communities under evacuation.

>- Remote sensing confirms a shift from long-term freshening to increasing surface salinity south of 50° S, beginning around 2015. >- Denser surface waters are enhancing vertical mixing, allowing warmer subsurface water to reach the surface, accelerating Antarctic ice loss. >- The shift in surface salinity and stratification could impact deep ocean water formation and disrupt components of the global thermohaline circulation, including the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

>Earlier this summer, archaeologists began hauling some of the giant granite blocks that once comprised one of the tallest buildings in the world out of the Alexandrian harbor after centuries underwater. Twenty-two blocks, to be precise, each one weighing between 80 and 90 tons with the operation requiring a boat, a platform, and a crane employing specific techniques to ensure the integrity of the blocks.

>Native to Indonesia, the corpse flower is known locally as bunga bangkai. It is endemic to the rainforests of western Sumatra. > >The flower, also known by its scientific name amorphophallus titanum or titan arum, is known for its distinctively pungent smell, which has been likened in the past to dead animals, rotten meat, eggs, sweaty socks, sewage and rubbish. > >Sharing the news on social media, the botanical garden, which is in the city's Golden Gate Park, encouraged people to come and see the phenomenon. > >The blooming process only lasts for a couple of days and will not occur again for another three to five years, according to the garden's website.

>Artificial intelligence and the hardware that powers it, is at the heart of a fallout in Pennsylvania, where electricity prices have risen dramatically for wholesalers and consumers due to surging demand. The governor is now threatening to abandon the state's grid energy provider, PJM Interconnection, via Reuters. He's demanding that PJM increase energy capacity through the acceleration of new energy plant construction and approval. > >Following the launch of ChatGPT in 2023 and the explosion of competitor tools and chatbots in the months that followed, the regional transmission organization, PJM, saw a surge in demand for power as major tech companies scoured the country looking for spare grid capacity to run AI and build new data centers to support them. AI can demand a lot of power, so much so that Elon Musk is shipping an entire power plant to the US. > >This couldn't have come at a worse time, as in 2022, PJM had paused new power plant connections after it faced a huge influx of applications for new renewable projects, which required more engineering oversight before they could be connected to the grid. Although PJM claims that this hasn't led to a shortfall in supply, it has meant the grid hasn't expanded like it was expected to. Local opposition to the construction of some of the plants that have been approved has further compounded the issue.