Neolithic people, not glaciers, moved the Altar Stone -- the six-ton central sandstone megalith at Stonehenge -- from northeast Scotland to Salisbury Plain, according to a new study led by archaeologists from Curtin University and Sheffield Hallam University.
The post Neolithic People May Have Hauled Stonehenge’s Giant Altar Stone across Britain appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Krotite is a cosmic relic, one of the oldest minerals in the Solar System.
SoftBank Group’s mobile payment subsidiary PayPay inked a deal to acquire a 70% stake in T&D Financial Life Insurance Company for JPY134 billion ($840 million), part of an aim to broaden its range of financial services.
When launched in 2018 PayPay focused on providing contactless mobile payments but has since widened this to include credit cards and other banking services. It had a base of more than 74 million users as of May 2026.
Announcing the deal, PayPay said the move to buy the life insurance company from T&D Holdings was part of an ambition to “provide comprehensive financial services tailored to each stage of users’ lives”.
The company intends to grow T&D Financial Life’s business through use of its existing platforms and by creating “new customer experiences in the digital life insurance domain”.
In a linked deal, asset management company One Investment Management intends to buy a stake of almost 15% in the insurance company from T&D Holdings. The current owner will retain the other 15%, though a call option on this is being inserted into the acquisition agreement.
The deal is subject to regulatory approval.
Alongside the proposed acquisition, PayPay agreed a “comprehensive business alliance” agreement 3with T&D Holdings, largely concerning the latter’s insurance brand Taiyo Life.
The pair will “explore the development and provision of services designed to enhance customer convenience and help address social issues, while also drawing on AI, digital technologies, and other capabilities of SoftBank Corp”.
The pact is set to include: offering T&D Holdings’ Taiyo Life insurance products on the PayPay app; exploring call centre enhancement and operational efficiency for Taiyo Life; and jointly exploring a “smart senior city concept”.
The post SoftBank’s PayPay set for life insurance buy appeared first on Mobile World Live.
Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Emergency Situations has confirmed it will purchase additional Tesla Cybertrucks after the electric pickup proved effective in rescue operations in Almaty, the country’s largest city.
The Central Asian country has become the latest small international market to adopt the Cybertruck, as Tesla continues to struggle with collapsing domestic demand for the electric pickup.
A major Reuters investigation published today reveals that Tesla’s widely touted “Full Self-Driving” safety statistics are built on deeply flawed methodology — and that the company’s own data labelers, the workers who train the AI system, don’t trust the technology to drive them.
The report, based on interviews with nine former Tesla data labelers, a former self-driving engineer, and 11 traffic-safety researchers, paints a damning picture of the gap between Tesla’s safety marketing and the reality of its autonomous driving program.
more…
While searching for new Higgs bosons the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may have just found a surprise. They have observed an excess of events that look to be a new particle, and are reporting high statistical evidence for their claim. The only question is what exactly is this new particle?
The search was initially designed to look for new, heavier, versions of the Higgs boson decaying to a top quark and an anti-top quark. Its well known that the Higgs boson of the Standard Model, discovered jointly by ATLAS and CMS in 2012, underlies the mechanism which gives all fundamental particles their masses. The Higgs boson itself interacts with particles in proportion to their mass, preferring heavier particles over lighter ones. It therefore interacts the most strongly with the heaviest known fundamental particle, the top quark, which has a mass of ~173 GeV. The Higgs boson itself only has a bass of 125 GeV, meaning conservation of energy dictates it can’t decay into a top quark-antiquark pair.
However many theories of physics beyond the the Standard Model predict additional Higgs bosons, heavier cousins of the current one. If these new heavy Higgs bosons had a mass larger than 350 GeV, they would likely decay to a top quark-antiquark pair quite often. CMS therefore was analyzed its data searching for this signature, hoping to find signs of a new Higgs boson. To do so, they had scrutinize very carefully the known production of top quark-antiquark pairs, which are produced copiously at the LHC from other processes. If a new particle was being produced and decaying to top quarks, the mass of the new particle would give the top quarks a characteristic energy. One key sign of a new particle would therefore be an excess of top quark-antiquark events at a particular energy, corresponding to the mass of the new particle.
When CMS scrutinized their data looking for such an excess they found one. But curiously right ~350 GeV, the minimum energy required to produce the top quark-antiquark pair. It would be quite the coincidence for a new particle to show up right at this minimum threshold, which made CMS consider alternative possibilities.
One unorthodox explanation that seems to fit the bill is ‘toponium’, a short lived bound state of the top quark-antiquark pair is being formed. Toponium would be the heaviest version of ‘quarkonia’ we have seen, bound states of quark antiquark pairs that form bound states similar to atoms. We have observed and measured quarkonia states of the other quarks for decades, however it was long thought that the top quark, whose large mass causes it to decay in just 10^(-25) seconds, would decay too quickly to create observable bound state effects at a hadron collider. Toponium production would happen most often if the top quarks were produced just at the energy threshold, such that they don’t any extra energy. These low energy top quarks would spend more time close to each other than normal, rather than immediately flying away, so they could have time to briefly form a toponium state before decaying. However, once small hints of intriguing excesses started appearing in LHC analyses, updated calculations in the last few years suggested that perhaps such an effect could be observable.
These calculations are approximate, and more work is still being done to refine them. But the preliminary predictions they give for the properties of toponium seem to match well with what CMS is seeing, both in terms of the rate of toponium production and the quantum properties of the toponium state (spin and parity).
Still CMS is being cautious before claiming a discovery of toponium. They claim observation of an ‘excess at the top quark pair production threshold’ which is consistent with toponium. However given the limited present data and incomplete theoretical models of toponium, they cannot rule out that the excess they are seeing is coming from a new Higgs-like particle.
Further work will be needed to develop improved theoretical models of toponium, and detailed studies from CMS assessing the properties of their observed excess. The excess will also need confirmation from CMS’s rival LHC experiment, ATLAS, to ensure it has not merely made a mistake in its analysis.
However, the smart money would say this very likely looks like toponium. Which, while not signaling the long sought overthrow of the standard model, would be an unexpected and cool surprise from the LHC. Understanding the properties of this previously-thought-impossible quasiparticle will spawn much fruitful research in the years to come. Physicists love a surprise!
“Observation of a pseudoscalar excess at the top quark pair production threshold” https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22382
Additional CMS Paper considering Heavy-Higgs interpretation “Search for heavy pseudoscalar and scalar bosons decaying to top quark pairs in proton-proton collisions”
Discloure: The author is a member of the CMS collaboration but did not directly work on this analysis
Erratum 4/15/2025 : The article was updated to clarify that in the theory literature prior to the LHC toponium was thought possible to form, just that it was thought to be too small an effect to be observable. The article previously incorrectly stated it had been previously thought impossible to form
An airtight medieval latrine preserved a pocket-sized wax ledger, complete with an unpleasant odor.
Os planos da empresa de Elon Musk, incluindo o valor que pretende angariar, ainda podem mudar à medida que decorrem as reuniões com investidores. Espera-se que a entrada em bolsa da SpaceX, prevista para 12 de junho, dê início a uma nova onda de mega-IPOs.
The post SpaceX quer entrar em bolsa com ações a 135 dólares e levantar 75 mil milhões appeared first on Tek Notícias.
Microsoft's Build developer conference kicked off today, and as with almost everything the company has done in the last few years, Microsoft's opening keynote focused overwhelmingly on AI and other closely related technologies. There's Microsoft Scout, an OpenClaw-based "Autopilot" agent that can hook into Microsoft 365 data to perform tasks for users; several new AI models; an expanded preview of "Codename MDASH," which is a "multi-model agentic scanning system" meant to detect and fix software vulnerabilities.
A few of those announcements stood out to us as particularly interesting, either for esoteric technical reasons or because they seem like they may have some utility for those who aren't spending their every waking moment using generative AI tools. (Microsoft's recent efforts to make its flagship operating system faster, more reliable, more useful, and less annoying didn't really come up, but there have been plenty of other announcements on that front lately.)
On the hardware front, we didn't get any updates for existing Surface devices (not counting yesterday's Surface Laptop Ultra announcement), but we did get something new: the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is "a compact developer PC" built around Nvidia's new RTX Spark chip with up to 128GB of built-in memory.
© Microsoft
O Windows 11 tem ferramentas nativas para fazer cópias de segurança automáticas dos seus ficheiros, e pode configurá-las demora menos de cinco minutos. Mostramos como fazê-lo passo a passo, com e sem disco externo.
The post Como ativar o backup automático no Windows 11 e nunca mais perder um ficheiro importante appeared first on Tek Notícias.
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