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Microsoft is to buy Nuance Communications for $19.7bn in a bid to bolster its healthcare product line with AI conversational smarts. The deal, which will see Microsoft purchase Nuance for $56 per share (a 23 per cent premium on Friday's closing price), includes Nuance's net debt. The move is not entirely surprising. The companies announced a partnership in the healthcare space in 2019 and Microsoft plans to plug Nuance's tech into the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare which, Microsoft reckons, will double its Total Addressable Market to almost $500bn. The acquisition, dwarfed only by the $26.2bn purchase of LinkedIn back in 2016, comes almost three decades after Nuance launched. Register readers might be more familiar with Nuance's Dragon line of speech recognition products, which were first acquired by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products and later folded into Nuance. Back in 2018, Nuance enraged Apple loyalists by dropping Mac support for Dragon Professional. Now built on Microsoft Azure, the company's products include the Dragon Ambient eXperience, Dragon Medical One, and PowerScribe One for radiology reporting. Nuance lays claim to usage by over 55 per cent of physicians in the US and 75 per cent of radiologists. Its software, the company said, can also be found in 77 per cent of US hospitals and makes use of the speech recognition for which it is famed as well as integration with Electronic Health Records (EHR) to ease the burden of clinical documentation. The company also deals in the dark art of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) as well as virtual assistants, which will doubtless find their way into Teams and Dynamics 365, but healthcare is very much the name of the game. Handy, because Microsoft is keen to sink its claws into the healthcare industry. It introduced Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare in 2020, and today's announcement is the latest expensive step in its industry-specific cloud strategy. "Nuance provides the AI layer at the healthcare point of delivery and is a pioneer in the real-world application of enterprise AI," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "AI is technology's most important priority, and healthcare is its most urgent application." As, to be fair, are revenues. Nuance reported a drop in revenue to $1.478bn from $1.521bn in fiscal 2020 ended 30 September 2020. The cloud component in healthcare grew annualised revenue run rate by 29 per cent to $386m. Once the deal is done this calendar year, Nuance's financials will turn up as part of Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud segment. Mark Benjamin will remain CEO of Nuance, reporting to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Cloud & AI at Microsoft.

❤️ كل عام والجميع بخير

Hello, According to our administrator, you were using many accounts and a VPN to change your identity. My vote will be #CONTRA. We want members who are interested in helping the forum, not in ranks. You only have 10 likes, and your account is still new. You have to wait enough time to request for the rank, do a good activity for a while and share your ideas in the proposals section if you are interested. It's too EARLY. Regards and hope to understand.

Name of the game: Human: Fall Flat Price: 5.99$ Link Store: Steam Offer ends up after X hours: 13 April Requirements: MINIMUM: OS: Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10 x86 and x64 Processor: Intel Core2 Duo E6750 (2 * 2660) or equivalent | AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000+ (2 * 3000) or equivalent Memory: 1024 MB RAM Graphics: GeForce GT 740 (2048 MB) or equivalent | Radeon HD 5770 (1024 MB) Storage: 500 MB available space RECOMMENDED: OS: Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10 x86 and x64 Processor: Intel Core2 Quad Q9300 (4 * 2500) or equivalent | AMD A10-5800K APU (4*3800) or equivalent Memory: 2048 MB RAM Graphics: GeForce GTX 460 (1024 MB) or equivalent | Radeon HD 7770 (1024 MB) Storage: 500 MB available space

Game Information: Initial release date: February 23, 2021. Software Developer: Massive Damage, Inc. Publisher: Orange One. Platform: PlayStation 4, Windows Microsoft. TAXI CHAOS! That could be the name of a game simulating the experience of loitering in a Newcastle taxi rank at 4AM drunkenly nursing a tray of cheesy chips, and if it was, we'd undoubtedly be more excited about it than we are about this game which is just a Crazy Taxi clone. If the game were good we'd perhaps be inclined to call Taxi Chaos a homage to Crazy Taxi but it's not, so we won't. We'll go with "shameless rip-off" instead. Taxi Chaos is to Crazy Taxi as Creed is to Pearl Jam, and if you're not old enough to understand that reference then you're probably not old enough to fit into the target demographic for this game. Here's the gist: if you loved Crazy Taxi on Dreamcast and you've ever thought, "Man, I wish somebody would just make this game again only without the soundtrack or the charm and without making any discernible improvements to the formula," then this game is going to be right up your alley. Honestly, we've got the Crazy Taxi nostalgia, and there were a couple of moments playing Taxi Chaos when our rose-tinted spectacles had us grinning. But then cooler heads prevailed. We take our reviewing seriously here at Push Square, and that's why we slapped those nostalgia goggles from our faces and gazed upon Taxi Chaos in the cold light of day with a critical eye and the verdict was clear: Taxi Chaos is a dated, boring, charmless fare-'em-up, with barely enough content to see you through a commercial break. You drive and pick up a fare. Then you drive and drop off the fare. For some reason your taxi can jump. The quicker you get your punter to their destination of choice the more points you get and then after 90 seconds the session ends. Then you do it all again and try to get a better score. There's different taxis to unlock and a couple of characters to play as and that's pretty much all there is to it. If all you want is a facsimile of Crazy Taxi that you can play without dusting off your old Dreamcast then Taxi Chaos just about fits the bill. But that's all it does. For anybody coming into this without the benefits of nostalgia or more money than sense, Taxi Chaos is just a dull arcade driver with precious little to offer other than the dubious pleasure of chasing a high score. Send this one to scrap yard. ONLY VIA PLAYSTATION.

Intel has started releasing a series of explainer videos as part of a new series called Architecture All Access, and it's actually a good way to learn more about your PC. In each video, senior Intel leaders will go deep on a particular facet of how computers work, starting with, unsurprisingly, the CPU. With the competition between AMD and Intel so fierce right now, it's a great time to learn about the brain of a modern PC. This week's two-part course is Modern CPU Architecture hosted by Boyd Phelps, the CVP of client engineering at Intel. Phelps has worked on Intel CPUs dating back to Nehalem in 2008, up through the recent Tiger Lake chips. PC Gamer is supported by its audience. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more Ever wonder exactly what your CPU is doing? Or what the first computer bug was? Give it a watch. Intel has started releasing a series of explainer videos as part of a new series called Architecture All Access, and it's actually a good way to learn more about your PC. In each video, senior Intel leaders will go deep on a particular facet of how computers work, starting with, unsurprisingly, the CPU. With the competition between AMD and Intel so fierce right now, it's a great time to learn about the brain of a modern PC. This week's two-part course is Modern CPU Architecture hosted by Boyd Phelps, the CVP of client engineering at Intel. Phelps has worked on Intel CPUs dating back to Nehalem in 2008, up through the recent Tiger Lake chips. There's a lot to take in from these videos, but if you have some time to kill this weekend, you can learn about the history of CPUs, and get to take some deep dives into the more advanced CPU architecture concepts. Part one covers the broad strokes of what CPUs are and what they do, and also has a great story about the first computer bug. (Spoilers: It was an actual bug.) Part two covers the key parts of a CPU in a "microarchitecture deep dive" and goes into the future of computing in the coming years. Phelps does a great job explaining complex topics like branch prediction and CPU microarchitecture in a digestible way. The series doesn't require a doctorate in computer engineering to understand, which is always a plus.

Earlier this month, a startup called Socket, Inc., launched Wormhole, a web app for encrypting files and making them available to those who receive the URL-embedded encryption key, without exposing the files to the cloud-based intermediary handling the transfer. That may sound a bit like what Mozilla tried to do with Firefox Send, launched in 2017 and shut down a year and a half later. And that's intentional. "Wormhole is a reboot of Firefox Send, but with many improvements," explained Feross Aboukhadijeh, a widely known open source developer and co-founder of Socket, in an email to The Register. "We loved Firefox Send and were so disappointed when it was shut down that we decided to rebuild it, but with additional enhancements." Wormhole offers the same sort of free service: You load the app in your browser and select up to 10GB of local files. The files get encrypted locally and uploaded to Socket's servers. You're then presented with a URL that looks something like this: https://wormhole.app/V0o7p#iyT9HT_3MXby3Y0VuurdLA The link can then be texted, emailed, or otherwise sent, allowing recipients to download the protected files for 24 hours in unencrypted form before the link expires. But Wormhole has some improvements over Firefox Send, notably its support for instant streaming, which allows file links to be shared even before the file is fully uploaded. "Wormhole uses super fast P2P transfer when possible, which comes in extra handy when both devices are on the same network (since data transferred over the local network is much faster than going out and back to the internet)," explained Aboukhadijeh. Wormhole is intended to provide a more secure alternative to cloud service providers where uploaded files are not encrypted end-to-end. But Aboukhadijeh said he and his co-founder, developer John Hiesey, believe speed needs to accompany security. "The sad truth is that for most people, an app with better security or privacy alone isn't enough to get them to switch from an insecure alternative," he said. "So we wanted to make Wormhole fundamentally better in other ways too. That's why we focused so much on making Wormhole faster than mainstream alternatives like Dropbox, Google Drive, and WeTransfer – all of which do not support end-to-end encryption and are slower than Wormhole." In that, Wormhole succeeds admirably: It loads quickly and scores well in Google's Page Speed Insights test, which can be partially explained by the absence of ads and "creepy tracking" scripts, as the app documentation put it. The app uses the same encryption scheme as Firefox Send – 128-bit AES-GCM encryption – to encrypt files before they leave the browser. Managing the Layer Eight problem The reason Mozilla cited for shutting down Firefox Send was abuse – Mozilla at the time said Send was used to distribute malware and conduct spear phishing attacks. Aboukhadijeh said he believes that will be manageable. "We think it's encouraging that other products that offer end-to-end encryption like Signal and WhatsApp have managed to handle abuse, malware, and other threats," he said. "We plan to follow the same approach with Wormhole." "If it comes to it, we may need to introduce client-side virus scanning to protect downloaders from malware, without sending files to our servers. There are many promising approaches we can explore if this becomes an issue." As for demonstrating to potential users that Wormhole's security claims can be trusted, Aboukhadijeh said Socket plans in the coming days to open source the app's cryptography code for analysis by the security community and to launch a bug bounty program with rewards of up to $1,000. Longer term, he said, the plan is to hire security auditors to produce a formal report. All that takes resources and perhaps unsurprisingly, there's hope for revenue from what's currently a free service. "We're planning to introduce a Pro plan which offers larger file limits, customizable link expiration times, and additional features," he said. "Eventually, we may introduce other privacy-focused products which we may charge for as well." An enterprise version of Wormhole, catering to industry-specific security requirements is also under consideration. Law firms, accountants, and medical professionals, Aboukhadijeh suggested, are ill-served by mainstream cloud storage services and current secure file transfer apps fall short of what they could be. Asked why Wormhole was built as a web app, Aboukhadijeh expressed enthusiasm for the web. "Brendan Eich likes to say 'Always bet on JavaScript,'" he said. "I'll add to that 'Always bet on the Web.' I think there's no better app runtime. The web is safe, accessible, easy to use. Web apps have wide reach and a low barrier-to-entry." In the past, he said, he's worked on innovative projects like WebTorrent that push browsers to their limits and he sees Wormhole in the same way. "We want to be an example of what a modern fast web app can do," he said.

Conservationists realized they needed more than a bucket and shovel to build a 400-ton sand castle large enough to be an attractive home for sand martins to roost in England. To help the tiny birds they needed big machines—and building a sandbank large enough for them to build their nests in required the help of a sand-sculpting firm. The sand martin The smallest English members of both the martin and the swallow family—the birds were finding fewer and fewer places perfect for boring their nests, as so much development had replaced their previous nesting habitats with infrastructure. The martins return annually from wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa. Burrowing into the side of high riverbanks means that sand martins are choosy homemakers—but the Surrey Wildlife Trust, acting as real estate developer, is building an enormous artificial sandbank for them in the Spynes Mere Nature Reserve. Enlisting the help of a specialist construction and landscaping firm named ‘Sand in Your Eye’, it took weeks of filling in a mold, getting the water content right, and packing down the sand before they were able to remove the wooden supports. James Herd, project manager at Surrey Wildlife Trust, said in a video about the project: “Sand martin numbers have plummeted twice in the last 50 years as a result of droughts in their wintering grounds in Africa. In the bank here we’re giving them a long-term sustainable home to nest in for the future.” “The design is similar to building a sandcastle on the beach, but rather than buckets and spades we were using nine-ton excavators and dumper trucks,” he added. The petite passerines, which arrive in England around mid-March and depart in September, use their claws to dig nesting holes up to a meter deep into the bank. At the end of the tunnel a small chamber is created where between four and eight eggs get laid in a nest of feathers and vegetation. © Copyright 1997–2020 GNN, LLC

Ferrari Formula One driver Charles Leclerc has a new car in his garage — the one he raced to victory from pole position in Belgium and Italy in 2019. The 23-year-old Monaco resident posted pictures on Instagram on Friday of the SF90 under a red Ferrari covering in the back of a transporter and then safely indoors. "Something special just arrived home," he said. Ferrari replied on Twitter by saying "we hope you enjoy it." The back-to-back 2019 race wins are the only ones Leclerc has chalked up so far in Formula One with the Italian team drawing a blank last season. The victory at Monza was Ferrari's first at their home circuit since 2010. Leclerc joined Ferrari in 2019, his second season, and swiftly out-performed four-times world champion team mate Sebastian Vettel. The German left at the end of 2020 and has been replaced by Spaniard Carlos Sainz. ©2021 Verizon Media. All rights reserved.

The public could still need to socially distance next winter with flu threatening to “return with a vengeance” and Covid still far from beaten, a Government scientific adviser warns. There will obviously be scope to relax restrictions over summer – and this will be good for our mental health and the economy – but people should exercise caution in the coming months if they want to avoid another winter lockdown and for the sake of the NHS, he argues. He also said that foreign travel for leisure should be “pretty well down the list of what we can do”. “We have to be very careful about the upcoming winter. Remember we’ve had no flu – or next to none – because of all the restrictions this year,” Professor Rowland Kao, of Edinburgh University, told i. “If we want to avoid lockdown next winter in the presence of the combination of Covid and flu, we do have to work very hard to get infections down as low as we can this summer and in particular give the NHS some breathing space to recover,” said Prof Kao, a a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M), which advises SAGE. “We have to be prepared to have some continued physical distancing measures over the winter to keep all respiratory infections down. And we have to be aware that the strain on the NHS could be severe if we are hit with both Covid and a bad flu year. So the more we can do to prepare, to give the NHS time to catch up on all the things that have been delayed, and to recover from all the work done the better prepared we’ll be,” he said. “Absolutely we want to have a reduction in restrictions this summer domestically – there are lots of reasons we need this. But international leisure travel should be pretty well down the list of what we can do, unless we are very confident indeed that we have good testing upon entry, good uptake of self-isolation and quarantine, and the ability to handle any outbreaks rapidly and effectively,” added Prof Kao, who is also a member of Defra’s science advisory council. Professor Karl Friston, a virus modeller at University College London, is also concerned that a resurgence of flu could put a huge amount of extra pressure on the health system next winter – although it’s still too early to predict whether flu’s return will strike this year or next. “Flu will come back with a vengeance, either this winter or next, because rates have been low this year and we have not had the opportunity to build up natural immunity to seasonal influenza variants. Flu has done very badly this year, not only because of lockdown, but simple things like mask wearing, hand washing and social distancing,” he said. “There will be a déjà vu this summer. As at the end of last summer, experts will be calling upon the Government to restructure and properly invest in a functional test and trace program – that addresses its current failure; namely, to do a proper backward contact tracing and support people in self-isolation. This is the most efficient and cost-effective way of suppressing prevalence – and will be a key factor in determining whether we have a winter surge or not,” Prof Friston said. All rights reserved. © 2021 Associated Newspapers Limited

Four dead gray whales have washed ashore San Francisco Bay Area beaches in the last nine days, with experts saying on Friday one had been struck by a ship. They were trying to determine how the other three had died. “It’s alarming to respond to four dead gray whales in just over a week because it really puts into perspective the current challenges faced by this species,” says Dr Padraig Duignan, the director of pathology at the Marine Mammal Center. The carcass of a 41ft (12.5meter) adult female gray whale landed at San Francisco’s Crissy Field on 31 March. A second adult female was found last Saturday in Moss Beach in San Mateo county. A third was found on Wednesday floating near the Berkeley Marina and the following day one washed up in Marin county’s Muir Beach. The whales migrate 10,000 miles (16,090km) to winter off Mexico’s waters, where they mate and birth calves near the coast of Baja California. They head back north and stay off the coast of California in spring and summer to feed on anchovies, sardines and krill before continuing on their northerly migration to cool, food-rich Arctic waters. In 2019, at least 13 dead whales washed ashore in the Bay Area and scientists said they feared it was because the animals were starving and couldn’t complete their annual migration from Mexico to Alaska. Biologists have observed gray whales in poor body condition during their annual migration since 2019, when an “unusual mortality event” was declared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Malnutrition, entanglement in fishing gear, and trauma from ship strikes have been the most common causes of death found by the center’s research team in recent years. A necropsy of the whale found at Muir Beach revealed significant bruising and hemorrhaging to muscle around the whale’s jaw and neck vertebrae consistent with blunt force trauma due to ship strike. But experts noted the whale was in good body condition based on the blubber layer and internal fat levels, the center said. Experts haven’t determined how the other three whales died or if starvation was behind their deaths. Nearly one in four gray whales migrating along the US west coast has died since the last recorded po[CENSORED]tion assessment in 2015 and 2016, according to NOAA. “This many dead whales in a week is shocking, especially because these animals are the tip of the iceberg,” said Kristen Monsell, the legal director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Oceans program. Experts estimate the washed-up whales represent just 10% of the total number of the dead, with the rest sinking into the sea unnoticed by humans. Monsell said California lawmakers needed to require fishing gear that doesn’t use rope, and federal regulators should set mandatory speed limits for ships. “Ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements kill many whales that we never see,” she said. Her organization was suing the federal government to get speed limits in shipping lanes off California, Monsell added. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. (modern)

Name of the game: Fable Anniversary Price: 8.74$ Link Store: Here Offer ends up after X hours: 12 April Requirements: MINIMUM: OS: Windows 7/8 Processor: Intel 2GHz Core2 Duo / AMD Athlon 64 x2 2.4GHz Memory: 3 GB RAM Graphics: Radeon X1800/ Nvidia GeForce 7600GT DirectX: Version 9.0 Storage: 10 GB available space RECOMMENDED: OS: Windows 7/8 64bit Processor: Intel Core2 Quad 2.33GHz Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 DirectX: Version 9.0 Storage: 10 GB available space

Game Information: Initial release date: 8 Sep, 2020. Software Developer: Massive Damage, Inc. Publisher: Raw Fury. Platform: PlayStation 5, Windows Microsoft. Star Renegades is another rogue-lite indie game, but it differentiates itself in some interesting ways. It's a turn-based RPG where you fight a threat that spans multiple alternate realities with a ragtag group. Sporting a lovely pseudo-3D pixel art style, it certainly looks the part, and its multifaceted gameplay is complex but engaging. However, it doesn't make a great first impression. Tutorials are walls of text, and the battle system has a fair amount to take in. It's information overload at the start, but once you're more familiar with everything, it works rather well. Combat takes place on a timeline, and through strategic use of your party's moves, you can delay or interrupt enemies. The presentation can be overly busy during fights, but again, it all starts to make sense as you play more, and it's good fun once you know what you're doing. Leveling up your party members leads to more moves and more options, and gear found in the overworld can power them up with all sorts of attributes. Speaking of, the overworld — which you've a limited time to explore — has various paths that lead to combat encounters and rewards like health, armour upgrades, and more. At the end of each day you move to a camping sequence, and the focus moves to relationships between characters. Playing cards to improve friendships can lead to more battlefield benefits. As you progress, you'll unlock more characters to use in a run, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses, of course. There's quite a bit to take in here, but the bottom line is Star Renegades is a solid rogue-lite adventure. It might struggle to concisely convey all its systems, but give it some time and there's a deep, challenging game to sink your teeth into. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: OS: Windows® 10 64-bit Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-6600K @ 3.5GHz / AMD Ryzen™ 3 2200G @ 3.5GHz Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 960(4GB VRAM) / AMD Radeon™ Pro 570 (4GB VRAM) DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 5 GB available space Sound Card: Yes

If all AMD's Zen 4 Ryzen CPUs include integrated graphics, Intel will be in serious trouble. This is the latest rumour seeping around the edges of the internet, with the suggestion that when AMD shifts away from the AM4 socket in the future it will kit out every one of its processors with Navi-based graphics silicon too. But doesn't AMD already ship processors with GPUs? The voices in my head ask. Yes, its APU strategy goes back well before the inception of the Zen architecture, but these are still specialist chips with very specific price points and usage models. The benefit of kitting out every one of its CPUs shipping with a graphics component means that it can nail its Intel rivals in the one place that it still holds sway: the raft of business or office-based machines that don't need or want power-hungry and expensive discrete graphics cards plugged into them. That might not be the most exciting segment of the industry to PC gamers, but it means a whole lot to Intel. While Intel might be on the ropes in terms of CPU mindshare, and in terms of actual high-end core counts and performance, its still making bank out of the sheer volume of processors it ships every day, month, and year. There are a lot of IT managers today who might want high performance CPUs, and have looked at dropping Ryzen 5000 chips into their many corporate boxes, but they don't want the extra expense of having to source a graphics card for each of them too. With a simple integrated GPU baked onto each processor, one that's capable of outputting video and little else, there will be almost no reason for IT professionals to side with Intel over AMD. But this is unlikely to happen for a while. We're still really in the nascent stages of AMD's Zen 3 generation, with a potential 6nm Zen 3+ design coming in between us and our future 5nm Zen 4 processors. Zen 4 is where we'll see AMD shift from the AM4 socket that's been with us since before the first Ryzen chips launched, and to both a new AM5 socket and, according to recent rumours, a 6nm I/O chip at their heart too. It does have to be emphasised, however, this potential GPU integration for AMD's future chips is a rumour, not fact. It certainly seems a plausible future for the company's processors, but it's also worth remembering that everyone is a dog on the internet.

Two years after Facebook settled five lawsuits claiming that its employment, housing, and credit ads illegally discriminate, researchers with the University of Southern California have found that the company still serves job ads unfairly, based on gender. In a paper titled "Auditing for Discrimination in Algorithms Delivering Job Ads," scheduled to appear at The Web Conference later this month, Basileal Imana, a doctoral student at USC, Aleksandra Korolova, USC assistant professor of computer science, and John Heidemann, USC research professor of computer science, explore bias in algorithmic job ad delivery at Facebook and LinkedIn. Korolova, in an email to The Register, explained that since US law allows for ad delivery to be differentiated on the basis of qualifications, she and her colleagues developed a way to test for bias while factoring out lawful qualification-based biasing. "Even when controlling for job qualifications, Facebook introduces a delivery skew by gender for job ads with balanced targeting," Korolova said, noting that this advances the argument that "Facebook's ad delivery algorithms are not merely biased but actually discriminatory." "Interestingly, we did not find such an effect when auditing LinkedIn's algorithms," she added. In 2019, Korolova was among a different set of academics who, shortly after Facebook settled the above mentioned civil rights lawsuits and announced changes to combat discriminatory advertising, found biased behavior in Facebook's ad delivery attributable to ad budgets and ad content. Time to check again This time, Korolova and her colleagues have looked at how Facebook and LinkedIn's algorithmic ad platforms skew job ads by delivering them to viewers identified as male and female – where that data is available – in a ratio that differs from the expected gender distribution for the job. They managed this by comparing the performance of two ads in three different job categories – delivery driver, software engineer, and sales associate – with known differences in gender distribution. They then weighed the expected ratio against the actual gender ratio among Facebook and LinkedIn ad recipients. One such ad pair consisted of an ad to be a delivery driver for Domino's Pizza (98 per cent male) and an ad to be a delivery driver shuttling groceries for Instacart (more than 50 per cent female).

DH1: DH2:

Welcome to the Team. Try to make activity in all our DH sections. Good Luck. T/C

"There are many hypotheses about why animals dig into the soil and live underground," said lead author Jin Meng, a curator in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Paleontology. "For protection against predators, to maintain a temperature that's relatively constant -- not too hot in the summer and not too cold in the winter -- or to find food sources like insects and plant roots. These two fossils are a very unusual, deep-time example of animals that are not closely related and yet both evolved the highly specialized characteristics of a digger." The fossil mammaliamorph species -- predecessors to mammals -- were discovered in the Jehol Biota, which represents the Early Cretaceous epoch, about 145 to 100 million years ago. One is a mammal-like reptile called a tritylodontid and is the first of its kind to be identified in this biota. About a foot in length, it was given the name Fossiomanus sinensis (Fossio, "digging" and manus "hand;" sinensis, "from China"). The other is named Jueconodon cheni (Jue, "digging" -- Chinese pinyin -- and conodon "cuspate tooth"; cheni for Y. Chen, who collected the fossil). It is a eutriconodontan, a distant cousin of modern placental mammals and marsupials, which were common in the habitat. It is about 7 inches long. Mammals that are adapted to burrowing have specialized traits for digging. The researchers found some of these hallmark features -- including shorter limbs, strong forelimbs with robust hands, and a short tail -- in both Fossiomanus and Jueconodon. In particular, these characteristics point to a type of digging behavior known as "scratch digging," accomplished mainly by the claws of the forelimbs. "This is the first convincing evidence for fossorial life in those two groups," Meng said. "It also is the first case of scratch diggers we know about in the Jehol Biota, which was home to a great diversity of life, from dinosaurs to insects to plants." The animals also share another unusual feature: an elongated vertebral column. Typically, mammals have 26 vertebrae from the neck to the hip. However, Fossiomanus had 38 vertebrae -- a staggering 12 more than the common state -- while Jueconodon had 28. To try to determine how these animals got their elongated trunks, the paleontologists turned to recent studies in developmental biology, finding that the variation could be attributed to gene mutations that determine the number and shape of the vertebrae in the beginning of the animals' embryotic development. Variation in vertebrae number can be found in modern mammals as well, including in elephants, manatees, and hyraxes.

The latest event to rejoin the schedule is another vintage classic: Greece’s Acropolis Rally, taking the place of Rally Chile (which has been canned due to potential pandemic disruption) in September. Like Kenya’s Safari Rally, the Acropolis was always a proper car-breaker, its stages littered with rocks the size of footballs and moon-like craters. However, unlike the Safari, which has been neutered (rally cars and roaming giraffes no longer mix in today’s polite society), the Acropolis will be just as long and tough as ever. Even Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has called his home WRC round “the Rally of the Gods: an epic annual contest that tested drivers like no other”. In early September, the usual furnace-like heat of the Acropolis is guaranteed; as typical of the rally as the sizzling plates of roast lamb served up every evening. With the most recent WRC round (February’s Arctic Rally Finland) held in temperatures that dipped to -20deg C, the series is now getting back to the eye-popping extremes that it stands for. Having attended the Acropolis many times and seen Colin McRae (the event’s most successful driver) win three times on the trot, I have some fantastic memories. It’s definitely a contender for my second-favourite WRC event of all time. But much sooner – this weekend, in fact – my personal favourite returns. Not exactly, but almost. The Sanremo Rally, Italy’s round of the series up to 2004, has a distinct WRC flavour to it once more, thanks to a new one-day event called the Sanremo WRC+ Rally. Hyundai’s full factory team will be out in force, running Ott Tänak and Thierry Neuville, and other international stars taking part will include Craig Breen and Oliver Solberg. For them, it represents valuable asphalt practice ahead of the inaugural WRC Rally Croatia in a couple of weeks’ time. For us, it will be an opportunity to see the fastest rally cars ever made back on some of the world’s most charismatic stages. We’re talking about mythical tests such as San Bartolomeo, Colle d’Oggia and Vignai, which blast spectacularly through villages precariously clinging to the sides of the Ligurian Alps. Sanremo is where Sébastien Loeb burst onto the scene in 2001 and where Michèle Mouton took her first WRC win 20 years earlier. A place that created legends, home to the best food and wine on the planet. Yet another rally of the Gods.

I was insecure about how I looked when I was younger. My hair was frizzy and embarrassingly enormous. My bum stuck out too much. My lips were too big. My thighs were too big. Everything about me – specifically my racialised features as a Black mixed woman – felt “too much”. I remember the distinct feeling of wanting to shrink myself, melt myself down into something neater, smaller, sleeker – which is how I saw my white friends, and the beautiful white people on TV. Then, in my early 20s, soon after moving to London from my home in Manchester, I began to notice a shift in how beauty was being represented. Suddenly, faces, hair and bodies that looked like mine were plastered on shop windows, grinning down from billboards, smizing (smiling with their eyes) from the pages of magazines. Every other TV ad featured mixed models or an interracial family. White influencers began plumping their lips, baking their skin, braiding their hair, even undergoing invasive surgical procedures to create curves where none existed. The things about myself I had wanted to disguise or alter in my youth were now in vogue – and I struggled to get my head around that. How did it become “trendy” to look like me? And should I feel pleased about it? This growth of racial ambiguity as an aesthetic trend was, at least in part, accelerated by celebrity culture and the likes of the Kardashians. The accusations of “Blackfishing” levelled against the family are well documented, with criticisms about their adoption of Black hairstyles, body types and facial features. The reality TV stars, along with thousands of imitators who came in their wake, have been cherrypicking the elements of Blackness that suit their brand without any of the uncomfortable or disadvantageous implications of actually living as Black. This “trend” had an impact on mixed women – at least those of us with Black and white heritage – as we found that our features became covetable and desirable, just as long as they were wrapped in the palatable package that comes with proximity to whiteness. And that is why it’s impossible to see the rise of mixed beauty ideals as a positive thing, because at its heart sits an unsettling insistence on white superiority. It’s often hard to articulate why something that sounds like a compliment can be so harmful. On the racism scale, being told that you’re beautiful is hardly the worst thing that can happen. But just because something presents as a positive on the surface, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t dig deeper into the wider implications of this phenomenon. In the research for my book, Mixed/Other, I interviewed more than 50 mixed Britons of all ages, with different ethnic makeups, from all over the country. They told me that being perceived in this way – this hyper-focus on how we look – makes them feel like a collection of commodified parts, rather than real people. Alexander, who has Sri Lankan and white British heritage, told me he was fetishised by men he dates. They called him exotic, and one guy even rejected him when he found out he wasn’t Māori – his favourite “type”. Becky, who has Black Caribbean and white British heritage, said she was frequently hypersexualised – that men reduced her to a litany of racialised parts and make assumptions about what she will be like in bed. People I spoke to who are not mixed with white – those with multiple minority heritage – say this narrative erases them from the conversation altogether. For people like Jeanette, with Cameroonian and Filipino heritage, these assumptions of “inherent mixed beauty” don’t apply. She doesn’t fit the blueprint. It is not “mixedness” that is being glorified, then, but simply the aesthetics of ambiguity and, crucially, being close enough to whiteness. We are right to be wary of compliments that are not compliments, to push back against this disproportionate interest in how we look. It wasn’t so long ago that the mixed po[CENSORED]tion was being scrutinised with a similar energy but with an entirely different outcome. In the 1930s and 1940s, there were groups warning about the dangers of “race crossing”; there were calls for mixed people to be sterilised; we were denigrated as deviant, stupid, contaminated, undesirable. Isn’t the contemporary idealisation of mixedness – the suggestion that we are more beautiful or have “the best of both” – simply the other side of the same coin? This trend continues. Hashtags such as #MixedBeauty and #MixedBabies have millions of posts on Instagram. Hit shows such as Bridgerton spotlight mixed stars at the expense of monoracial Black actors. This kind of fetishisation is pervasive and enduring, yet often goes unremarked because many think it is positive, or represents progress. But being a trend, or being commercially po[CENSORED]r because of your racialised appearance, is never going to be a good thing. Meghan Markle is the most recent example of this. Celebrated as a beautiful emblem of a progressive future in the lead-up to the royal wedding, the tide quickly turned on her when she was deemed not to be sticking to the script, and was instead proud and outspoken about her Black heritage. No matter how much mixed people may be celebrated or glorified for their appearance, her treatment shows that there is ultimately so little power in that, and that any privilege which comes with being perceived as beautiful is precarious. Celebrating mixed beauty risks doing little more than bolster a pre-existing racial hierarchy, ensuring that whiteness remains fixed at the top. It’s important to acknowledge the problematic and damaging nature of these attitudes – even when they sound complimentary.

Mike Pence has signed a two-book deal for his memoir that is reported to be worth millions of dollars, making him one of the first of former president Donald Trump’s inner circle to announce such a lucrative arrangement. Pence’s autobiography, currently untitled, is scheduled to come out in 2023. CNN reported that the former vice-president’s deal is worth seven figures, somewhere between $3m and $4m. “I am grateful to have the opportunity to tell the story of my life in public service to the American people, from serving in Congress, to the Indiana governor’s office and as vice-president of the United States,” Pence said in a statement. “I look forward to working with the outstanding team at Simon & Schuster to invite readers on a journey from a small town in Indiana to Washington, DC.” Simon & Schuster announced on Wednesday that it also signed Pence to a second book but did not immediately provide details. Pence is the first major Trump administration official to have an announced deal since the president left office in January, although the former White House adviser Kellyanne Conway and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo are among those reportedly working on books. A Pence memoir will probably be subject to tensions similar to those the former vice-president has faced since he refused Trump’s demands that he help overturn the election results. Among Democrats and others who opposed Trump, Pence is widely seen as Trump’s loyal and complicit ally. Meanwhile, Trump supporters, and Trump himself, denounced him for not intervening on 6 January in Congress’s formal certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory. The certification – that Pence had no power to change – was delayed for hours after hundreds of Trump supporters, some chanting “Hang Mike Pence”, stormed the US Capitol. Simon & Schuster’s vice-president, Dana Canedy, said that Pence’s book would be “revelatory”, without specifically saying whether he would address the events of 6 January. “Vice-President Pence’s life and work, his journey as a Christian, the challenges and triumphs he has faced, and the lessons he has learned, tells an American story of extraordinary public service during a time of unrivaled public interest in our government and politics,” Canedy said. “His revelatory autobiography will be the definitive book on one of the most consequential presidencies in American history.”

Name of the game: The Sims™ 4 Price: 4.79$ Link Store: Steam Offer ends up after X hours: 19 April Requirements: MINIMUM: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: 64 Bit Required. Windows 7 (SP1), Windows 8, Windows 8.1, or Windows 10 Processor: 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD Athlon 64 Dual-Core 4000+ or equivalent (For computers using built-in graphics chipsets, the game requires 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.0 GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-62 or equivalent) Memory: 4 GB RAM Graphics: 128 MB of Video RAM and support for Pixel Shader 3.0. Supported Video Cards: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 or better, ATI Radeon X1300 or better, Intel GMA X4500 or better DirectX: Version 9.0 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 17 GB available space RECOMMENDED: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: 64 Bit Windows 7 (SP1), 8, 8.1, or 10 Processor: Intel core i5 or faster, AMD Athlon X4 Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 650 or better DirectX: Version 9.0 Network: Broadband Internet connection Storage: 18 GB available space

Game Information: Initial release date: 1 Apr, 2021. Software Developer: People Can Fly. Publisher: Square Enix. Platform: PlayStation 5, Windows Microsoft. You know what? Outriders is pretty good. Torn apart during our first impressions piece based on the demo, the final version proves developer People Can Fly hadn't put its best foot forward during those opening hours. It's still that same style of game, but the Polish studio cunningly saved a few tricks up its sleeve for the full experience. And while it's not without blemishes — uninteresting characters and the requirement of a constant Internet connection prove especially troublesome — Outriders provides an impressively tempting alternative to the looter shooters some have come to know and love. At first glance, though, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's an otherworldly knock-off of The Division 2. Both are third-person, cover-based looter shooters. However, that cover isn’t for you. It's for the enemy. This fundamentally changes how Outriders plays, where cowering behind a piece of rubble is more likely to get you killed than anything else. The game thrives when you do the complete opposite and take the fight to the enemy with flamboyant abilities and feel-good gunplay — staying rooted to the spot is essentially a death wish. It's the power fantasy done right. In fact, People Can Fly's follow-up to Bulletstorm (and the Save the World campaign for Fortnite, but we’ll forget about that) really is all about the feel. Four different classes feel distinct, each equipped with their own skills and roles during combat. The Trickster is all about getting up close and personal with the inhabitants of Enoch thanks to abilities based on speed and quick-fire attacks, while the Pyromancer uses fire to their advantage and operates slightly further back on the battlefield. The Devastator then plays the role of the tank and the Technomancer is designed as more of a support class at long range. It's here where Outriders sets itself apart from other looter shooters, because Outriders is what Destiny 2 would feel like if you didn’t have to wait minutes for your super to charge. Oh, and you essentially have three of them equipped at once. With cooldowns in the mere seconds, all your abilities can be used liberally to take down enemies. It feels awesome, simply put. The Trickster class really puts that into perspective with a dash that teleports you behind an enemy, a time-limited bubble can then be activated to catch bullets, and an extremely stylish spin named Cyclone Slice that leaves weaker foes to waste. All of them can be activated within the space of a few seconds, and then you’ll have access to them all over again less than half a minute later. We return to the compliment once more: Outriders feels great to play. The same can be said for gunplay, which is the other half of the equation once your abilities have been set in motion. The typical machine guns, shotguns, and rifles litter the loot pool, but they all pack a punch no matter whether they're common or the best of the best. What keeps combat fresh is a good amount of enemy variety, with new takes introduced at a rapid pace. Humans will constantly try to flank and overwhelm you with their sheer numbers while other species make a beeline for your position in an attempt to deal as much damage as quickly as possible. You never encounter too much of one enemy type before another changes up the approach, forcing you to stay on your toes. Tying the two mechanics together is, perhaps surprisingly, your health meter. You'll never automatically regenerate HP during the 20 to 25-hour romp through the campaign, which in turn places a huge emphasis on each class' ability to get it back. You recover health by defeating enemies — the Trickster class does it by beating up foes at close range while the Pyromancer gets some back by killing those set on fire. It's why you're not going to get very far hiding behind cover. You need to be aggressive simply in order to stay alive, actively engaging the enemy at all times to get your health back. It sets up a bit of a give and take: you'll likely lose health by leaving cover, but the reward at the end of your risky venture trumps all. An intriguing mechanic that works well and further boosts Outriders' attempt to feel unique. The game starts to slip, however, when its story and cast of characters come to the forefront. The narrative set-up is actually quite interesting: with Earth deemed uninhabitable far in the future, the human race finds a new home on another planet named Enoch. Dubbed a haven for life, it turns out to be anything but upon arrival. Fast forward 31 years after the player-created protagonist is awoken from cryo statis and it quickly becomes your job to find a way for the human race to survive in this alien world. What follows is serviceable enough, but the characters fuelling the plot are awful. The protagonist is incredibly one-note and the supporting cast range from generic to putrid. Some pretty bad voice work probably doesn't help the matter, but then that can't even begin to accommodate for the wild mood swings of certain characters which don’t make a whole lot of sense. Other faces are all but forgotten about partway through the story while head honchos for the opposing forces aren't really built up at all. Its commitment to constantly introducing new and varied environments to explore is appreciated, but definitely don't play Outriders for its narrative. We would prefer to experience it instead of not playing the game at all, however. People Can Fly has shipped its latest project with the requirement of a consistent Internet connection, which has led to many server outages in the handful of days since launch. We expect it to become less of a problem as time passes, but we simply cannot ignore the amount of frustration the prerequisite introduced during our time with the game. There were stretches when we simply could not play for hours on end — even when the US was asleep. Losing progress and loot in the process, it creates a situation where we can't fully trust we'll be able to see a mission through to its conclusion even outside of peak hours. You can't even play offline by yourself with a closed lobby, calling into question why the requirement exists at all. Again, we expect this situation to improve, but there's always going to be that niggling worry in the back of our minds. The problem reared its ugly head far too many times for us to disregard it. But here's something you can ignore in a positive light: Outriders doesn't have microtransactions and it won't fall into the Games as a Service category according to People Can Fly. It's designed as a one and done experience that has an endgame for those who want more. You can play every single piece of content it has to offer on your own — matchmaking is never required to start a mission or harder activity. There is always the option of playing the entire game with up to two friends, however. It's honestly refreshing to play a game of this ilk in the knowledge that we won't have to commit the next five years of our life to it. Those endgame quests are dubbed Expeditions, and after spending a few hours getting to grips with them, they prove enjoyable. Essentially a Time Attack mode, completing the 14 missions will net you better rewards should you beat certain parameters. And that's where legendary weapons and armour come into play. The endgame offering isn't on the same level as a Destiny 2, but they'll definitely have hardcore players coming back for second helpings. It's at least a lot more comprehensive than anything ANTHEM had to offer post-campaign, for example. The visuals aren't really a big talking point for Outriders either — there are some nice skyboxes here and there but this isn't the next PlayStation 5 showpiece. The game doesn't take advantage of the DualSense controller whatsoever while bugs and glitches create further imperfections. Objectives don't always trigger correctly, meaning you'll have to quit out of the game and repeat combat sections. Quest markers then sometimes don't update or are unreliable while random crashes back to the PS5 home screen occurred when trying to team up with friends. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system. OS: Windows 10. Processor: Intel i7-7700K / AMD Ryzen 5 2600X. Memory: 16 GB RAM. Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070, 8 GB / Radeon RX Vega 56, 8 GB. DirectX: Version 12. Storage: 70 GB available space. Additional Notes: 1080p / 60fps.

Graphics cards are now so profitable criminal gangs are willing to risk running foul of the Hong Kong authorities simply to smuggle unlabelled GPUs. TVB News (via Tom's Hardware) has reported that 300 Nvidia graphics cards, specifically for GPU mining, have been seized during a 2am raid just outside of Hong Kong International Airport. I'll admit, the actual smuggling angle initially had me confused. However much we might rail against the use of GPUs in large-scale mining operations, it's not illegal for those outfits to buy up a block of 300 new graphics cards for the privilege. But it is now incredibly expensive. The Nvidia CMP 30HX cards, which these unmarked cards seem to be, don't have a listed retail price we can find, but there are reports of these GPUs hitting the market for over $720. With a nominal Ethereum hash rate of 26 MH/s that puts these cards at the same level as a GTX 1660 Super, once a $230 graphics card, making a hell of a markup. And another nightmarish sign of the GPU endtimes we're living through. With a street price of around $217,000 for the 300 CMP 30HX cards you can understand why some enterprising malfeasants would happily help you cut out the middle man for a more reasonable price, and why that might be attractive to some serious cryptocurrency miners looking to quickly turn a profit. The Hong Kong Customs and Excise Department, however, is not to be trifled with. The authorities reportedly found this fishing boat anchored just outside the airport to be mildly suspicious and subsequently discovered smugglers loading boxes of goodies into speedboats from the boat. On being discovered the smugglers fled in their speedboats and headed back to the mainland, evading the customs boys in blue and making a clean getaway, potentially with other fun stuff in tow. They might have already unloaded a whole bunch of GeForce RTX 3080s, who knows... The customs folk did detain the owner of the fishing boat, however, and that's when they discovered those 300 graphics card nestled in among smartphones, sea cucumbers, and shark fins. And system RAM too, because that's seemingly worth smuggling too.