Philippines improves in Government AI Readiness IndexEx-PM Manmohan Singh behind economic reform in India diesANCHORAGE, Alaska -- The powerful earthquake that struck in Northern California on Thursday prompted a brief tsunami warning affecting about 5 million people along a stretch of the West Coast — from Northern California to Oregon — before being canceled. Here are some things to know about tsunamis: A tsunami, a word that comes from the Japanese characters for harbor and wave, is a series of extremely long waves caused by the sudden displacement of the ocean, according to the National Weather Service . “Most tsunamis, and the largest, result from earthquakes on reverse faults. These tsunami-generating earthquakes originate mainly in subduction zones, where tectonic plates collide and one is forced under the other,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. If this is large enough and closer to the ocean floor, the energy from the earthquake can cause the ocean floor to suddenly rise or fall. “This sudden vertical displacement of the ocean floor is what typically sets a tsunami in motion,” NOAA said. “Tsunamis radiate outward in all directions from the point of origin and can move across entire ocean basins,” the service says. When the waves reach land, they can cause coastal flooding, and the powerful currents can last several hours or days. The weather service calls a tsunami as “one of the most powerful and destructive natural forces.” Tsunamis that cause damage or death near earthquakes occur about two times a year, according to the Global Historical Tsunami Database. A tsunami racing across an ocean and causing damage or deaths more than 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) away happens about twice a decade. Tsunamis can occur in any ocean, sea or large body of water. But certain areas are prone to tsunamis because of their proximity to the source and other factors, such as depth and the shape of the ocean floor. The database says between 1900 and 2015, there were 754 confirmed events. Of those, 78% were in the Pacific Ocean. According to the database, Japan has had the most tsunamis since 1900, followed by Russia and Indonesia. A magnitude 9.2 temblor, the second most powerful earthquake ever recorded globally, caused widespread damage in the Anchorage area in 1964 and killed 131 people, including some in Oregon and California by the ensuing tsunami. In 2004, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake occurred off Sumatra, an Indonesian island in the Indian Ocean. It generated a tsunami that was as high as 167 feet (51 meters), causing an estimated 230,000 deaths. Another magnitude 9.1 earthquake struck in Japan in 2011, creating a tsunami with waves reaching 127 feet (39 meters). The tsunami caused about 18,000 deaths and prompted a nuclear power plant accident.
India is the first country to develop a long-range hypersonic missile that can travel more than eight times the speed of sound and is a game-changer in global defence technology, which no other country has, claimed Defence scientists. The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) recently test-fired the country’s first long-range hypersonic missile that can carry both conventional and nuclear warheads, to a distance exceeding 1,500 km, at a speed of nearly 3 km per second. Although in terms of technology, India is the fourth country to possess a hypersonic missile, it is the first country to have successfully tested a hypersonic missile that can travel twice the range of the missile that Russia has in its arsenal. “The hypersonic missile that India now possesses is unique in terms of speed, range, precision and detectability. It is a game-changer and going to play an important role providing an edge to our Armed Forces,” former DRDO Chairman G Satheesh Reddy told The New Indian Express. The superfast hypersonic missile is of two types – hypersonic glide vehicle (ballistic) and hypersonic cruise missile. The hypersonic ballistic missiles are usually launched with a rocket booster. After the booster gets separated at a certain altitude, it travels towards the target much faster. The hypersonic cruise missiles, on the other hand, use scramjet engines to maintain speed throughout their flight path and possess high maneuverability. “What India has developed is not exactly a hypersonic cruise missile, but is like a hypersonic cruise missile. It can maneuver in-flight to avoid being detected by enemy radar and shot down. This missile is a technological marvel and a great achievement in India’s missile technology,” said a Defence scientist. (The New Indian Express)2024 was the year when Neuralink, Elon Musk's brain chip company, finally moved from theory into reality, announcing its first successful medical implants in patients. This on its own is a remarkable achievement and not one to be taken lightly though, with Musk in his cheerleading role, the promises of what comes next may make a few of us non-augmented folk roll their eyes. The promise-happy billionaire has not only declared that Neuralink is going to be full steam ahead, but that patients will be outperforming pro gamers within two years : And that's not even his wildest claim. Musk reckons Neuralink is going to have to speed up human brains so that AI doesn't get "bored." Musk says our "low data rate" is too slow, you see, and this is a barrier to positive human-AI convergence. "Our slow output rate would diminish the link between humans and computers," says Musk, adding a helpful comparison to plants: "Let's say you look at this plant or whatever, and hey, I’d really like to make that plant happy, but it’s not saying a lot." To be clear: The human brain is a computer that no Silicon Valley firm is even close to outperforming. But that's not going to stop our boy, who reckons Neuralink can increase our brain's output rate (how fast our brain is sending signals to the chip) by "three, maybe six, maybe more orders of magnitude." Some of these scenarios sound like hell. "Let's say you can upload your memories, so you wouldn't lose memories," says Musk, adding that this would fundamentally change the experience of being human: "yeah we would be something different. Some sort of futuristic cyborg... it's not super far away, but 10-15 years, that kind of thing." The above was Musk in August this year, but it's a drum he keeps beating. A recent tweet by tech investor Apoorv Agrawal called Neuralink the "most important company of the decade", an assertion Musk leaped upon to make further claims: "Bit rate and patient number will increase hyperexponentially over the next 5+ years. My guess is combined I/O bit rate >1Mbs and augmented humans >1M by 2030." The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. So over a million augmented humans in five years' time. But even that prediction looks positively tame next to Musk's previous notion that hundreds of millions will have Neuralinks within "the next couple of decades." Add to which Musk’s comments about the Input/Output rate of over one million bits per second, basically the speed of thought, and we are leaving "normal" brain function far behind for something that we don't really have a name for yet. Master? I jest of course, and we'll get to why Neuralink is unquestionably A Good Thing and will almost certainly improve the quality of life for some individuals (it has already done this on a small scale). But there's a real distinction between the reality of Neuralink and the medical goals versus Musk's rhetoric, which essentially starts at predicting millions of people having the devices implanted and ends up with creating a race of supermen. Some would call this visionary, the very reason that much is such a heralded individual for some. Others might point out just how far this thing is from non-medical applications as it stands, and the speed of that five year timeframe for getting a million people chipped. To be clear: I'm not pretending to have any special knowledge of this. But what is abundantly clear is that, if Musk's wilder claims are even approximately close to reality, this would mark a social-technological revolution the likes of which we've never seen, and overnight create a two-tier species where a small percentage of the population is thinking six times faster than the rest. That seems a long way from a utopian prospect, and something that at the very least requires the kind of ethical and regulatory scrutiny that Musk recoils from (indeed, the SEC is sniffing around and not before time ). The thing is, of course, this feels unlikely to come to pass on Musk's timeframe. It is well to remember that, as well as the man's many outstanding achievements, there are a whole lot of unfulfilled promises, many of which are nowhere near as pie-in-the-sky as brain chips in hundreds of millions of people. Remember the network of one-car tubes? Musk has been promising that Tesla will have self-driving cars "next year" since 2014: Next year has yet to arrive. In 2019 he said there would be a million Tesla robo-taxis on the road by 2020: In 2024, they're still not here. As Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the WHO, Musk declared there was nothing to worry about and predicted no new cases in the US: Tens of thousands would die. There's the Tesla bots, which he reckons will soon be bigger business for the company than its cars, except... when they were rolled out to do some bartending, it turned out that us fleshbags were still in control . And then perhaps my favourite claim of all: Musk says we won't just get to Mars by 2050, but on that date there will be a million people on the red planet. Neuralink itself has been the subject of other claims. The first trial was supposed to start four years before it did, and some of Musk's wilder claims about the technology include that it will somehow be able to "cure" autism and schizophrenia, which are not diseases, as well as give you super-sharp "eagle eyes." In this context it's hard to parse the visionary, which Musk undoubtedly is in some ways, from the vaudeville hype-man. It is undeniable that advances are being made in brain-computer interfaces, and not just by Neuralink, that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago: And that we live in an age of breakneck technological progress such that no one has any real idea what things will look like in 2030, never mind 2050. What can and should be acknowledged is that Neuralink has successfully implanted devices in human patients, and those patients are able to interface with computers in a way that would have previously been impossible. Neuralink's first patient, Noland Arbaugh, likened the device to using the Force (as in Star Wars) and can now control a computer, play videogames, and talk to friends without any physical input. This is the tech story that has the biggest chance of either changing the world, or sputtering down all sorts of half-realised alleyways. Because it is a story about the human race, our capabilities and evolution and what might be next, as much as it is about silicon. If we live in a world with a million Neuralink-enabled humans, is that going to amplify the empathetic and social side of humans: Or one of the many others? Neuralink is one part of what could be the biggest shift in human society since the Industrial Revolution. "We're not just aiming to give people the communication data rate equivalent to normal humans," says Musk. "We're aiming to give people who [are] quadriplegic, or maybe have complete loss of the connection to the brain and body, a communication data rate that exceeds normal humans. While we're in there, why not? Let's give people superpowers." Elon Musk is a busy man. Aside from Neuralink there's the AI wars, in which he's currently embroiled in a huge legal spat with OpenAI, as well as SpaceX, Starlink, the Tesla bots and cabs, and of course his obsession with trolling on X. This is the technology that has the potential to truly reshape things. Whether it does remains to be seen: But I'm making a note to check back in five years, and see whether a million of us really are rocking brain chips.
JERUSALEM (AP) — A new round of Israeli airstrikes in Yemen on Thursday targeted the Houthi rebel-held capital of Sanaa and multiple ports, while the World Health Organization's director-general said the bombardment occurred nearby as he prepared to board a flight in Sanaa, with a crew member injured. “The air traffic control tower, the departure lounge — just a few meters from where we were — and the runway were damaged,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on the social media platform X. He added that he and U.N. colleagues were safe. “We will need to wait for the damage to the airport to be repaired before we can leave,” he said, without mentioning the source of the bombardment. The Israeli strikes followed several days of Houthi launches setting off sirens in Israel. The Israeli military said it attacked infrastructure used by the Houthis at the international airport in Sanaa and ports in the cities of Hodeida, Al-Salif and Ras Qantib, along with power stations, asserting they were used to smuggle in Iranian weapons and for the entry of senior Iranian officials. Israel's military didn't immediately respond to questions about Tedros' post but issued a statement saying it had "capabilities to strike very far from Israel’s territory — precisely, powerfully, and repetitively.” The strikes came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “the Houthis, too, will learn what Hamas and Hezbollah and Assad’s regime and others learned" as his military has battled those more powerful proxies of Iran. The Iran-backed Houthis' media outlet confirmed the strikes in a Telegram post but gave no immediate details. The U.S. military also has targeted the Houthis in Yemen in recent days. The United Nations has noted that the targeted ports are important entryways for humanitarian aid for Yemen, the poorest Arab nation that plunged into a civil war in 2014 . Over the weekend, 16 people were wounded when a Houthi missile hit a playground in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv . Last week, Israeli jets struck Sanaa and Hodeida, killing nine people, calling it a response to previous Houthi attacks. The Houthis also have been targeting shipping on the Red Sea corridor, calling it solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. The U.N. Security Council has scheduled an emergency meeting Monday in response to an Israeli request that the council condemn the Houthi attacks and Iran for supplying weapons to the rebels. Meanwhile, an Israeli strike killed five Palestinian journalists outside a hospital in the Gaza Strip overnight , the territory's Health Ministry said. The Israeli military said that all were militants posing as reporters. The strike hit a car outside Al-Awda Hospital in the built-up Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. The journalists were working for the local news outlet Al-Quds Today, a television channel affiliated with the Islamic Jihad militant group. Islamic Jihad is a smaller and more extreme ally of Hamas and took part in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack in southern Israel, which ignited the war. The Israeli military identified four of the men as combat propagandists and said that intelligence, including a list of Islamic Jihad operatives found by soldiers in Gaza, had confirmed that all five were affiliated with the group. Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian militant groups operate political, media and charitable operations in addition to their armed wings. Associated Press footage showed the incinerated shell of a van, with press markings visible on the back doors. Sobbing young men attended the funeral outside the hospital. The bodies were wrapped in shrouds, with blue press vests draped over them. The Committee to Protect Journalists says more than 130 Palestinian reporters have been killed since the start of the war. Israel hasn't allowed foreign reporters to enter Gaza except on military embeds. Israel has banned the pan-Arab Al Jazeera network and accused six of its Gaza reporters of being militants . The Qatar-based broadcaster denies the allegations and accuses Israel of trying to silence its war coverage, which has focused heavily on civilian casualties from Israeli military operations. Separately, Israel's military said that a 35-year-old reserve soldier was killed during fighting in central Gaza early Thursday. A total of 389 soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the start of the ground operation more than a year ago. The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed across the border in an attack on nearby army bases and farming communities. They killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250. About 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, at least a third believed to be dead. Israel's air and ground offensive has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry. It says more than half the fatalities have been women and children, but doesn't say how many of the dead were fighters. Israel says it has killed more than 17,000 militants, without providing evidence. The offensive has caused widespread destruction and driven around 90% of the population of 2.3 million from their homes. Hundreds of thousands are packed into squalid tent camps along the coast, with little protection from the cold, wet winter. Also Thursday, people mourned eight Palestinians killed by Israeli military operations in and around the city of Tulkarem in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. The Israeli military said that it opened fire after militants attacked soldiers, and it was aware of uninvolved civilians who were harmed in the raid. Shurafa reported from Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip. A previous version of this story was corrected to show that the name of the local news outlet is Al-Quds Today, not the Quds News Network. Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war