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When President Vladimir V. Putin travels abroad — as he did this week to North Korea and Vietnam to strengthen alliances and cultivate security ties amid Russia's war in Ukraine — he usually flies on Ilyushin-series jets Il-96 dated to Soviet design.With his latest trip coming shortly after plane crashes that killed two other world leaders, President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran and Vice President Saulos Chilima of Malawi, a Kremlin spokesperson found it necessary recently to reassure the Russian public that Putin's planes were “very reliable. "Although Russian airlines have abandoned Ilyushin models in favor of new Western models – neither of the country's two major airlines, Aeroflot and Rossiya, currently list any Ilyushin planes in their commercial passenger fleet – Putin appears...

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's co-founder and chief scientist who joined other board members in November to oust Sam Altman, the company's high-profile CEO, has helped found a new artificial intelligence company.The new start-up is called Safe Superintelligence. The aim is to produce superintelligence – a machine smarter than humans – safely, according to company spokeswoman Lulu Cheng Meservey. Dr. Sutskever, who said he regretted moving against Mr. Altman, declined to comment. The news was previously reported by Bloomberg. Dr Sutskever, 38, left OpenAI last month and announced at the time that he would start a new project but gave no details. Ms. Meservey declined to name who is funding the company or how much she has raised. She said that while it builds safe superintelligence, th...

The extreme anarchy that has gripped the Gaza Strip is making it too dangerous and difficult to distribute desperately needed aid in the south, aid groups and others say, despite a daily lull in fighting that Israel is seeing along a key road in that area .Days after the pause began, more than 1,000 trucks loaded with supplies remained stranded in Gaza near the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel, with thousands of tons of food, medicine and other goods just miles away from Palestinians who had need, aid groups and Israeli officials say. .The threat of looting and attacks by armed gangs have forced humanitarian groups to stop providing assistance in southern Gaza. Trucks traveling on supply routes were riddled with bullet holes. Businessmen sending commercial goods to the territory...

In July 2016, a heat wave hit Boston, with daytime temperatures averaging 92 degrees for five consecutive days. Some local college students staying in town for the summer got lucky and lived in dorms with central air conditioning. Other students not so much: They were stuck in older dorms without air conditioningJose Guillermo Cedeño Laurent, a Harvard researcher at the time, decided to take advantage of this natural experiment to see how heat, and especially night heat, affected the cognitive performance of young adults. He asked 44 students to take math and self-monitoring tests five days before the temperature rose, every day during the heat wave and two days after.“Many of us think we are immune to heat,” said Dr. Cedeño, now an assistant professor of environmental and occupational ...

Dozens of people have died amid scorching temperatures during the annual hajj pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, official Middle Eastern and African media reported.With temperatures forecast to reach 113 degrees Fahrenheit, or 45 degrees Celsius, on Tuesday, Saudi officials issued warnings to pilgrims urging them to stay hydrated, minimize outdoor activities and carry umbrellas to block direct sunlight.While Saudi Arabia reported no deaths, reports from a number of countries whose worshipers went to the hajj suggest the heat proved deadly.On Sunday, Jordan's official news agency said 14 pilgrims had died due to exposure to extreme sun and heat. The agency said on Wednesday that burial permits had been issued for 41 Jordanian pilgrims in Mecca, but provided no detail...

When five men died on June 18, 2023, in the implosion of the submarine Titan during a dive to the Titanic's resting place, Paul-Henri Nargeolet's knowledge was also lost. It was the Nargeolet's 38th dive on the sunken liner. Known as Mr. Titanic, he helped recover thousands of artifacts that have been displayed in museums and at events around the world.A year later, the company he worked for as director of underwater research is preparing a July expedition that will employ a pair of robots instead of people aboard submersibles to search for more treasure to recover in the future.Jessica Sanders, president of the RMS Titanic which is organizing the expedition, said: "There is an art to artefact recovery and a human element that technology can never replace - and it shouldn'...

As the war raged in Gaza, another battle unfolded in parallel along Israel's northern border with Lebanon – a risky game of tit-for-tat that has intensified in recent weeks, with a much stronger enemy.Sensing the danger of a full-scale war breaking out, President Biden sent one of his most senior aides, Amos Hochstein, to Israel on Monday and Lebanon on Tuesday to push for a diplomatic solution.Unlike Hamas, the Palestinian militia fighting Israel in Gaza, Hezbollah has troops who are battle-hardened fighters and has long-range, precision-guided missiles that can hit targets inside Israel.Despite clear efforts on both sides to prevent the cycle of attacks and counterattacks from escalating into a full-blown war beyond the one raging in Gaza, civilians in Israel and Lebanon have been ki...

As far as public health authorities know, the avian flu outbreak in dairy cattle has so far spread to just three farm workers in the United States. All had mostly mild symptoms.But that doesn't guarantee that the virus, called H5N1, will remain benign if it begins to spread between people. Accumulated evidence from the animal world and data from other parts of the globe, in fact, suggest the opposite.Some dairy cows never recovered from the H5N1 virus and died or were slaughtered from it. The infected terns appeared disoriented and unable to fly. The baby elephant seals had difficulty breathing and developed tremors after contracting the virus. Infected cats went blind and walked in circles; two-thirds of them died.“I definitely don't think there's room for complacency he...

Rep. Tom Cole, a veteran Oklahoma Republican and chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, fended off a primary challenge from a well-financed right-wing businessman on Tuesday, putting him on track to win a 12th term.Mr. Cole, first elected to Congress in 2002, has long been a fixture of Oklahoma politics and an influential legislative voice behind the scenes in Congress. The Associated Press called the race less than an hour after the polls closed, with Cole leading by an overwhelming margin.Mr. Cole rose to the helm of the influential Appropriations Committee in April, taking a coveted position on Capitol Hill that put him in charge of allocating federal spending. The committee's top members can direct federal dollars not only within the government, but also into their ow...

Move over, Microsoft and Apple. The stock market has a new king.On Tuesday, Nvidia leapfrogged two of the tech industry's most storied names to become the world's most valuable public company, according to data from S&P Global. Its rise has been fueled by the boom in generative artificial intelligence and growing demand for the company's chips – known as graphics processing units, or GPUs – that have made it possible to create artificial intelligence systems.Nvidia's rise is among the fastest in the history of the market. Just two years ago, the company's market valuation was just over $400 billion. Now, in the span of a year, it has gone from $1 trillion to more than $3 trillion.Nvidia's stock price rose 3.6% on Tuesday, bringing its value to $3.34 trillion. B...