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New Delta strain believed to have emerged among 53,000 revellers at Boardmasters festival

Almost 5,000 infections have been linked to the Boardmasters festival in Cornwall, and with half a million music lovers at even larger events over the Bank Holiday, officials fear revellers are being hit by a new strain of the Delta variant
Source: inews.co.uk

Extinction Rebellion protesters block London's Tower Bridge

Demonstrators from the Extinction Rebellion group, which is demanding urgent action by governments and business to limit climate change and biodiversity loss, staged a sit-down protest that stopped traffic from using Tower Bridge in London on Monday.
Source: reuters.com

OpenAI's Codex Translates Everyday Language Into Computer Code

The company believes its Codex machine learning algorithm is the next step in programming—a sidekick for coders to speed up the work and ease the drudgery.
Source: singularityhub.com

New WHO toolkit promotes inclusion of people with dementia in society

“Towards a dementia-inclusive society: WHO toolkit for dementia-friendly initiatives”, launched today, is WHO’s latest response for establishing and scaling-up dementia-friendly initiatives globally. The toolkit helps countries raise public awareness and understanding of dementia to support people...
Source: who.int

Canada blocks proposed Rocky Mountain coal mine on environmental grounds

Canada on Friday formally blocked a proposal to build a steelmaking coal mine in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, citing what it said would be the significant environmental damage.
Source: reuters.com

Investors overseeing $14 trln call for vote on company climate plans

Investors managing $14 trillion in assets on Friday said they wanted all companies to set a climate transition plan and allow them to vote on it, ahead of next year's season for annual general meetings.
Source: reuters.com

Gout and 'Podagra' in medieval Cambridge, England - PubMed International journal of paleopathology.

"The high prevalence rate of gout in the friary is at least partly explained by the consumption of alcohol and purine-rich diets by the friars and the wealthy townsfolk. Medieval medical texts from Cambridge show that gout (known as podagra) was sometimes treated with medications made from the root of...
Source: nih.gov

England's 'freedom day' marred by soaring cases and isolation chaos

Prime Minister Boris Johnson's 'freedom day' ending over a year of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in England was marred on Monday by surging infections, warnings of supermarket shortages and his own forced self-isolation.
Source: reuters.com

Clubhouse And Education

"New App Has Exciting Potential For Today’s Educators | Emerging Education Technologies" I've used Clubhouse for a couple of months and it certainly provides the opportunity for communities to come together and invite expert speakers. It is refreshing in that it doesn't have screen time and you can...
Source: emergingedtech.com

'Laws of Nature Turned up to 11': Astronomers Spot Two Neutron Stars Being Swallowed by Black Holes

In two separate observations, just ten days apart, astronomers discover a neutron star circling a black hole before being gobbled up.
Source: singularityhub.com

Outgoing U.N. aid chief slams G7 for failing on vaccine plan

Outgoing U.N. aid chief Mark Lowcock slammed the Group of Seven wealthy nations on Monday for failing to come up with a plan to vaccinate the world against COVID-19, describing the G7 pledge to provide 1 billion doses over the next year as a "small step."
Source: reuters.com

Reuters, New York Times win Pulitzers for coverage of racial injustice, COVID-19

Reuters and the Minneapolis Star Tribune each won a Pulitzer Prize on Friday for journalism about racial inequities in U.S. policing, while the New York Times and the Atlantic were honored for chronicling the COVID-19 pandemic, the two topics that dominated last year's headlines.
Source: reuters.com

Bill Gates' next generation nuclear reactor to be built in Wyoming

Billionaire Bill Gates' advanced nuclear reactor company TerraPower LLC and PacifiCorp (PPWLO.PK) have selected Wyomingto launch the first Natrium reactor project on the site of a retiring coal plant, the state's governor said on Wednesday.
Source: reuters.com

Covid-19 news: England sees rise in cases for first time in 5 weeks

The latest coronavirus news updated every day including coronavirus cases, the latest news, features and interviews from New Scientist and essential information about the covid-19 pandemic
Source: newscientist.com

Germany declares U.K. a virus variant region

Germany's public health institute on Friday declared Britain and Northern Ireland a virus variant region, requiring anyone entering the country from the United Kingdom to quarantine for two weeks on arrival.
Source: reuters.com

Facebook faces prospect of 'devastating' data transfer ban after Irish ruling

Ireland's data regulator can resume a probe that may trigger a ban on Facebook's transatlantic data transfers, the High Court ruled on Friday, raising the prospect of a stoppage that the company warns would have a devastating impact on its business.
Source: reuters.com

IEA issues 'dire warning' on CO2 emissions as it predicts 5% rise

Global CO2 emissions from energy are seen rising nearly 5% this year, suggesting the economic rebound from COVID-19 could be "anything but sustainable" for the climate, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday.
Source: reuters.com

Left-wing party wins Greenland election, opposes big mining project

Greenland's left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit party pledged its opposition to a large rare earth mining project on Wednesday after winning a parliamentary election with more than a third of the votes.
Source: reuters.com

Major employers scrap plans to cut back on offices - KPMG

Most major global companies no longer plan to reduce their use of office space after the coronavirus pandemic, though few expect business to return to normal this year, a survey by accountants KPMG showed on Tuesday.
Source: reuters.com

Using GPT-2 to generate Tweets

blog post image Last summer I blogged about using a Deep Neural Network to generate tweets but only used 3200 of my tweets. Since then I've used Twitter's archive mechanism to retrieve ALL my tweets (just over 30,000) to train a network. Not any old network - the GPT-2 model from OpenAI. This 'finetuning' of an existing...