Güncel

Japan this week eliminated all regulations requiring the use of floppy disks for administrative purposes, making up for lost time 13 years after the country's manufacturers produced their last units.The floppy disk, invented in the 1970s, was once a ubiquitous part of computing. Since then, other forms of storage such as flash drives and Internet cloud storage have taken over. By the 1990s, it, along with the music cassette, was tossed into the dustbin of obsolete technology.But not in Japan. While famous for its consumer electronics giants, robots, and some of the world’s fastest broadband networks, the country has also been wedded to floppy disks and other old technologies like fax machines and cash.Japan began to abandon the 1900s storage devices, plastic-coated magnetic disks, only...

One promised to confront Iran's enemies, the other vowed to make peace with the world. One intends to double down on social restrictions, the other promises to loosen stifling rules for young people and women. One identifies as an Islamic ideologue, the other as a pragmatic reformist.The race to become Iran's next president has turned into a fierce contest in which, for the first time in more than a decade, the outcome is hard to predict. The winner will be decided in a runoff on Friday after a general election a week earlier failed to produce a candidate with the required 50 percent of the vote.The outcome could depend on how many Iranians who skipped voting in the general election decide to participate in the runoff. Voter turnout hit an all-time low of 40 percent last week, with...

It didn’t become part of vaccination programs in Africa until 2024.What if it had come faster?What if the shots had arrived9 years ago?143,000.That’s how many children’s deaths could have been averted.By Stephanie NolenStephanie Nolen interviewed more than 30 scientists, health officials and other key players in the development of the malaria vaccines to report this article.July 5, 2024Nurses in countries from Sierra Leone to Cameroon are packing a new vaccine into the coolers they tote to villages for immunization clinics: a shot to protect against malaria, one of the deadliest diseases for children.Babies and toddlers in eight countries in the region recently started to get the vaccine as part of their routine childhood shots. Seven other African countries are eagerly awaiting its arriva...

Nigel Farage, a supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, a driving force behind Brexit and Britain’s most notorious political agitator, has been elected to Parliament for the first time.The new insurgent party he leads, Reform UK, was predicted in outgoing national polls to win four seats, more than many analysts had predicted, in an electoral system that usually punishes small parties. His party was supported on an anti-immigration platform.Mr Farage won by a wide margin in Clacton, a declining seaside town, where pre-election opinion polls had suggested he had a strong chance of winning. He had tried and failed seven times before being elected to Parliament.“The establishment is terrified, the Tories are terrified,” Mr Farage gushed in a speech last month, referring to the ruling p...

Sitting near a window at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston, overlooking the duck pond in the city’s Public Garden, Ray Kurzweil held up a sheet of paper showing the steady growth in computing power a dollar could buy over the past 85 years.A neon green line rose steadily across the page, like fireworks in the night sky.That diagonal line, he said, shows why humanity is just 20 years away from the Singularity, a long-hyped moment when people will merge with artificial intelligence and equip themselves with millions of times more computing power than their biological brains currently provide.“If you create something that is thousands of times — or millions of times — more powerful than the brain, we can’t predict what it will do,” he said, wearing multicolored suspenders and a Mickey Mouse wa...

American and Israeli officials expressed renewed optimism Thursday about a ceasefire deal in the Gaza Strip, after Hamas reversed its position and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later told President Biden he would send a new negotiating delegation to the stalled talks.White House officials said they believed the new progress in the talks amounted to what has repeatedly been called a “breakthrough” in the months-long negotiations, though they said it would take time to work out the many steps involved in implementing the truce. Israeli and other officials involved in the talks agreed that there had been progress, but described it in more cautious terms.The discussions are based on a three-phase framework agreement made public by President Biden in late May and endorsed by the Uni...

Spring Fertility, a clinic in Midtown Manhattan, looks like the place where the main characters on “Broad City” would have wound up if the millennial sitcom had done an episode about egg freezing. The waiting room has books by America’s youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman and its Instagram poet laureate Rupi Kaur. The kitchen is stocked with Spindrift. A conference room also serves as a venue for “shots nights,” less raucous than they sound, where patients inject themselves with fertility drugs communally, with encouragement from staff.Spring’s medical director in New York, Catha Fischer, dressed in a loose blouse and a low ponytail, beamed as she showed me the phlebotomy stations and operating room, where patients are anesthetized so that a doctor can puncture their ovaries with a needle an...

Voters flocked to a polling station in Portsmouth, a city on England’s south coast known for its naval base and historic dockyard, on Thursday morning, to a warm welcome from poll workers.Elderly couples walked hand in hand toward the local church, which had been temporarily set up with ballot boxes, along with parents with children in strollers and young adults rushing to work.One by one, they cast their weight on the nation’s future in a vote that polls say could end 14 years of Conservative rule.“I just want to see change,” said Sam Argha, 36, who was outside the polling station Thursday morning. “I just want to see us do something different.”It also serves as a microcosm of the broader national challenge facing the ruling party: a long-standing Conservative electorate held by a popular...

Early last year, a hacker gained access to the internal messaging systems of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and stole details about the design of the company’s artificial intelligence technologies.The hacker stole details from discussions in an online forum where employees discussed OpenAI’s latest technologies, but was unable to break into the systems where the company hosts and develops its artificial intelligence, according to two people familiar with the incident.OpenAI executives disclosed the incident to employees at an all-hands meeting at the company’s San Francisco offices in April 2023, the people said, during which they discussed sensitive company information on condition of anonymity.But executives decided not to share the news publicly because no customer or partner information...

In the working-class neighborhood of Tehran surrounding Imam Hussein Square, side streets and alleys are lined with second-hand shops and small repair shops that refurbish all manner of household appliances. But with little to do, most shopkeepers idle outside their stores.A 60-year-old man named Abbas and his son Asgar, 32, sat on two of the second-hand faux-brocade chairs they sell. When asked about their business, Abbas, who did not want his last name used for fear of attracting government attention, seemed incredulous."Just look down the street," he said. "Business is bad. There are no customers, people are economically weak now, they have no money."After years of debilitating U.S. sanctions that have generated chronic inflation, compounded by Iran’s economic mismanagement and corrupti...