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Seven elderly women were shocked to see a profane label on their receipt.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Filmmaker Peter Jackson owns one of the largest private collections of bones of an extinct New Zealand bird called the moa. His fascination with the flightless ostrich-like bird has led to an unusual partnership with a biotech company known for its grand and controversial plans to bring back lost species. On Tuesday, Colossal Biosciences announced an effort to genetically engineer living birds to resemble the extinct South Island giant moa -- which once stood 12 feet (3.6 meters) tall -- with $15 million in funding from Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh. The collaboration also includes the New Zealand-based Ngai Tahu Research Centre. "The movies are my day job, and the moa are my fun thing I do," said Jackson. "Every New Zealand schoolchild has a fascination with the moa." The moa had roamed New Zealand for 4,000 years until they became extinct around 600 years ago, mainly because of overhunting. A large skeleton brought to England in the 19th century, now on display at the Yorkshire Museum, prompted international interest in the long-necked bird. Unlike Colossal's work with dire wolves, the moa project is in very early stages. It started with a phone call about two years ago after Jackson heard about the company's efforts to "de-extinct" -- or create genetically similar animals to -- species like the woolly mammoth and the dire wolf. Then Jackson put Colossal in touch with experts he'd met through his own moa bone-collecting. At that point, he'd amassed between 300 and 400 bones, he said. In New Zealand, it's legal to buy and sell moa bones found on private lands, but not on public conservation areas -- nor to export them. The first stage of the moa project will be to identify well-preserved bones from which it may be possible to extract DNA, said Colossal's chief scientist Beth Shapiro. Those DNA sequences will be compared to genomes of living bird species, including the ground-dwelling tinamou and emu, "to figure out what it is that made the moa unique compared to other birds," she said. [...] The direction of the project will be shaped by Mori scholars at the University of Canterbury's Ngi Tahu Research Centre. Ngi Tahu archaeologist Kyle Davis, an expert in moa bones, said the work has "really reinvigorated the interest in examining our own traditions and mythology."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

He boasted, 'I can be the best spy you have ever seen.' But Russia 's Wagner group soon discovered that Dylan Earl was no James Bond.

Inquiry chairman Sir Adrian Fulford cited Rudakubana's ability to access violent material and buy knives online, as well as his capacity to leave home unsupervised to commit the masscre.

'Selfish' Megan Reynolds, 28, racked up thousands on dozens of lavish gifts using company cards before attempting to conceal them through fake invoices.

Envisions info from your watch informing treatment. What could possibly go wrong?

Samsung has acquired US company Xealth to combine data drawn from its wearable devices and hospital records.…

July 9 could be the shortest day of your life as the Earth's accelerating rotation is expected to make today fly by quicker than ever before.

It has multiple pockets and even unzips to lay completely flat

The bra tycoon and Tory peer had recommended PPE Medpro, which went on to provide 25 million 'faulty' surgical gowns during the coronavirus pandemic.

Emergency services rushed to the horror crash in Catherington, near Waterlooville, Hampshire, at around 9pm on Monday.

In an historic address to Westminster politicians the French president said that illegal immigration was a 'burden' on both countries.

Shannon Wolleter (pictured) had been used as a 'honeytrap' to lure in Anthony Cooper. The charity worker was then kidnapped and beaten by a gang over alleged debt - and his new partner.

The Texas flash floods have consumed the lives of at least 111 people, with authorities warning the death toll is almost certainly going to continue to rise.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Researchers at Princeton University, Boston University and other institutes used machine learning to predict the strategic decisions of humans in various games. Their paper, published in Nature Human Behavior, shows that a deep neural network trained on human decisions could predict the strategic choices of players with high levels of accuracy. [...] Essentially, the team suggests that people behave more rationally while playing games that they perceive as easier. In contrast, when they are playing more complex games, people's choices could be influenced by various other factors, thus the "noise" affecting their behavior would increase. As part of their future studies, the researchers would also like to shed more light on what makes a game "complex" or "easy." This could be achieved using the context-dependent noise parameter that they integrated into their model as a signature of "perceived difficulty." "Our analysis provides a robust model comparison across a wide range of candidate models of decision-making," said [Jian-Qiao Zhu, first author of the paper]. "We now have strong evidence that introducing context-dependence into the quantal response model significantly improves its ability to capture human strategic behavior. More specifically, we identified key factors in the game matrix that shape game complexity: considerations of efficiency, the arithmetic difficulty of computing payoff differences, and the depth of reasoning required to arrive at a rational solution." The findings gathered as part of this recent study also highlight the "lightness" with which many people approach strategic decisions, which could make them vulnerable to parties looking to sway them towards making irrational decisions. Once they gather more insight into what factors make games and decision-making scenarios more challenging for people, Zhu and his colleagues hope to start devising new behavioral science interventions aimed at prompting people to make more rational decisions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

He's known for making some of the most popular tunes of the 2000s including Shape Of You and Galway Girl, but Ed's now ditching the microphone for a surprising new career.

The adored Scotsman, 28, made his return to music almost two weeks ago with an epic and emotional performance at Glastonbury.

Detectives investigating the fatal crash involving the Liverpool forward's green sports car in northern Spain last week believe it was travelling at more than the 120kmh (74mph) limit.

It was a striking look for the Streatham-born supermodel, 55, adding extra inches to her 5ft 10in and lending a retro feel to her Chanel tweed jacket and boot-cut trousers.

This is the story of how he made it back to Lord's, to the scene of those 2019 glory days - including a gruelling sprinter's training regime, seven injury lay-offs and what he's really been like off the field.

'I have received lots of compliments when wearing it'