Day: May 4, 2026

A large fire has broken out at the key Emirati oil port of Fujairah, which lies beyond the largely-blocked Strait of Hormuz. ...

School phone bans get devices out of students’ hands, but led to no improvement in discipline or test scores, a large-scale study found. Thousands of US schools require students to put phones in locked pouches; the researchers observed the impact over three years, compared to schools that did not introduce ...

AI is not — yet — reducing artists’ employment, but it is changing how they work, research found. Analysis of Gallup polling data established which artistic occupations are most exposed to AI: Outputs from many composers or art directors, for instance, could plausibly be done by AI, while dancers would ...

Chinese humanoid robot maker Linkerbot is seeking investment at a $6 billion valuation, double the level it raised money at only last week, highlighting investor appetite to enter the fast-growing industry. Beijing has made dominating the humanoid robot sector a national priority, committing almost $140 billion in state venture capital ...

Venezuela’s oil exports reached their highest level since 2018, a surge that could have major downstream geopolitical consequences. Crude production in Venezuela — which holds the world’s largest oil reserves — has surged since the US captured former President Nicolás Maduro and replaced him with a leader who agreed to ...

Children living in specially designed two-story homes in Tanzania had lower rates of malaria, diarrhea, and acute respiratory infections compared with those in traditional mud-and-thatch houses, a three-year trial found. The children in the homes were also taller for their age than those in traditional houses, the study published in ...

Nature has retracted a paper that claimed AI had a positive impact on student learning.  The original paper, titled “The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking: insights from a meta-analysis,” was originally published in May of last year by Jin Wang and Wenxiang Fan ...

A new, bipartisan bill introduced by Democratic Senator of California Adam Schiff and endorsed by the biggest AI developers in the world—including OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft—would change the K-12 curriculum to shoehorn in “AI literacy,” something that young people and teachers alike already hate in schools. The Literacy in Future ...

This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation.  Less than 72 hours before Weber State University in Utah was scheduled to host a conference on censorship, presenters were told not to discuss identity politics, or be removed from the official program agenda. In an email to presenters selected ...

Mayor Burkhard Jung said a suspect was detained and the motive was unclear. ...