Blog

"Cheese! Cheese! Cheese!" hundreds of people sang at the top of their lungs.An eight-pound wheel of Double Gloucester cheese flew down a hill. Seconds later, a waterfall of two dozen people fell behind it. The first person to reach the bottom of the hill, which is so steep that it's nearly impossible to stay upright while running down, wins.The cheese hunting competition, one of the most distinctive traditions in England, if not the world, dates back to at least the early 1800s, according to local lore. While it's unclear why the race began (some say it had to do with grazing rights on the land or a fertility ritual), today people come from all over the world to see or personally participate in the race. 'event.Thousands turned out at Cooper's Hill in southwest England ...

A two-hour drive from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, rows of solar panels stretch to the horizon like waves on an ocean. Despite having nearly limitless oil reserves, the kingdom is embracing solar and wind energy, partly in an effort to maintain a leadership position in the energy sector, which is vital to the country but rapidly evolving.Gazing at more than 3.3 million panels, covering 14 square miles of desert, Faisal Al Omari, CEO of a recently completed solar project called Sudair, said he would tell his children and grandchildren to contribute to Saudi's energy transition Saudi. “I'm really proud to be a part of it,” he said.While oil production remains a crucial role in the Saudi economy, the kingdom is turning to other forms of energy. Sudair, which can light 185,0...

Fluctuating disease rates, innovative treatments and talk of “moonshots” at the White House could make cancer seem like a modern plague. But a new discovery sheds light on how humans dealt with disease and sought cures as far back as ancient Egyptian times.Scientists led by Edgard Camarós, a paleopathologist at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, were studying an Egyptian skull about 4,600 years old when they found signs of brain cancer and its treatment.“There was an uncomfortable silence in the room, because we knew what we had just discovered,” Dr. Camarós said.Using a microscope, he and Tatiana Tondini of the University of Tübingen in Germany and Albert Isidro of the Sagrat Cor University Hospital in Spain, the study's other authors, found cut marks around the edges...

House Republicans on Tuesday accused officials at the National Institutes of Health of orchestrating “a conspiracy at the highest levels” of the agency to hide public documents related to the origins of the Covid pandemic. And lawmakers vowed to expand an investigation that uncovered emails in which top health officials spoke openly about trying to evade federal records laws.The latest allegations — which come just days before a House committee is expected to publicly question Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a former top NIH official — represent one front in a growing push by lawmakers to connect American research groups and the country's leading medical research agency with the onset of the Covid pandemic.So far this push has produced no evidence that American scientists or health officials ha...

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken plans to spend this week showing U.S. support for nations facing a hostile Russia during visits to Moldova and the Czech Republic, where he will participate in a meeting of NATO foreign ministers discussing on how to strengthen Ukraine.Mr. Blinken, who stopped in Kiev more than two weeks ago, is expected to fly to Chisinau, Moldova's capital, on Wednesday and meet with Maia Sandu, the nation's president, who is running for re-election. Ms. Sandu supported Moldova's membership of the European Union and scheduled a referendum vote on EU membership on the same day as October's general elections.He is expected to run against a pro-Russian candidate, and U.S. and European analysts say Moscow will likely try to interfere in the election, as i...

OpenAI said Tuesday that it has begun training a new flagship artificial intelligence model that will succeed the GPT-4 technology that drives its popular online chatbot, ChatGPT.The San Francisco start-up, one of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies, said in a blog post that it expects the new model to bring "the next level of capability" as it strives to build "artificial general intelligence" , or AGI. , a machine that can do everything the human brain can do. The new model would be an engine for artificial intelligence products including chatbots, digital assistants similar to Apple's Siri, search engines and image generators.OpenAI also said it is creating a new safety and security committee to explore how to manage the risks posed by the new model and futur...

Tor Wennesland, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, condemned the airstrikes and said he was "deeply troubled by the deaths of so many women and children in an area where people have sought refuge."Germany's public broadcaster reported that the country's vice-chancellor, Robert Habeck, said on Saturday that Israel's offensive in Rafah was "incompatible with international law." Senior German officials had previously warned Israel against attacking Rafah, but Habeck's comments appeared to represent a hardening of that tone in a country with a long-standing policy of support for Israel.“Israel must not carry out this attack, at least not in the way it did before in the Gaza Strip, bombing refugee camps and so on,” Habeck said.The Israeli ...

In more than a dozen states, doctors and nurses have resorted to paper, handwritten treatment orders to track patients' illnesses and monitor them, unable to access the detailed medical histories that have long been available only through computerized records.Patients have waited long periods in emergency rooms and their treatments have been delayed as lab results and readings from machines like MRIs are ferried through makeshift efforts lacking the speed of electronic uploads.For more than two weeks, thousands of medical staff have switched to manual methods after a cyber attack on Ascension, one of the nation's largest health systems with about 140 hospitals in 19 states and the District of Columbia.The large-scale attack on May 8 was eerily reminiscent of the hack of Change Heal...

Calls are growing among Western nations to allow attacks on Russian territory using weapons they have sent to the Ukrainian military, a measure that Ukraine says will allow it to better prevent Russian attacks.NATO's Parliamentary Assembly, made up of lawmakers from countries belonging to the military alliance, adopted a statement on Monday calling on NATO members to lift the ban on firing Western weapons at Russia. This came after similar calls from NATO's top official, Jens Stoltenberg, and ministers from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Sweden.Calls to allow Ukraine to expand its use of Western weapons are mostly directed at the United States, the largest arms supplier to the Ukrainian government. Washington has repeatedly asked Ukraine not to launch American-made weapons on Russ...