Media
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OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate project eyes potential UK expansion — FT
Stargate, a $500 billion U.S.-based data center initiative backed by SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle, is considering expanding to the UK as it looks to scale AI infrastructure globally, the17 April 2025Read More... -
Google hit with £5 billion lawsuit in UK over search engine monopoly claims
Google, the tech giant owned by Alphabet, is facing a massive lawsuit in the United Kingdom that could see it paying up to £5 billion (roughly $6.64 billion). The legal action accuses the16 April 2025Read More... -
Prince Harry appeals court decision over security while in the UK
Prince Harry has returned to court in London to appeal a previous ruling regarding his personal security while visiting the UK. The case is being heard at the Royal Courts of Justice.08 April 2025Read More... -
Eric Schmidt buys £42mn mansion in London’s Holland Park
Former Google executive joins wave of wealthy American buyers in UK capital08 April 2025Read More... -
Britain may need new form of conscription to counter Putin, warns former MI6 chief
The former head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, has warned that Britain may need to introduce a new type of conscription in response to growing global threats, particularly from Russia.07 April 2025Read More...
Culture
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Harrogate’s cherry blossoms rival Japan’s sakura season
While Japan’s iconic cherry blossom season draws millions each year, a town in North Yorkshire is proving you don’t need to fly 6,000 miles to experience the magic.Read More... -
British Library set for £1.1 billion expansion
The British Library, the largest in the UK, is set for a major transformation with a £1.1 billion expansion project now approved.Read More... -
Export bars placed on two 18th century Agostino Brunias paintings
Two paintings by the 18th-century Italian artist Agostino Brunias, both depicting scenes from the Caribbean island of St Vincent, have been placed under temporary export bars to give UKRead More... -
Pope recognizes Antoni Gaudí's "heroic virtues," puts him on path to sainthood
The Vatican has taken a significant step toward making renowned Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí a saint, officially recognizing his "heroic virtues." Often referred to as "God's architect,"Read More... -
Britain’s oldest Indian restaurant faces closure amid Central London lease dispute
Veeraswamy, the UK's oldest Indian restaurant, is facing the threat of closure just before reaching its centenary, due to a lease disagreement with the Crown Estate.Read More... -
Communities invited to nominate beloved UK traditions for National Heritage List
This summer, communities across the UK will be able to nominate their favourite traditions—from iconic celebrations like Notting Hill Carnival and Hogmanay to time-honoured crafts likeRead More... -
£20m museum renewal fund opens for England’s civic museums
Civic museums across England can now apply for a share of the new £20 million Museum Renewal Fund, aimed at boosting access to collections, enhancing educational programmes, andRead More... -
The underrated UK city that was England’s first capital — 1,000 years before London
Tucked away in Essex lies a city that predates London as England's capital by over a millennium. Rich in Roman and medieval history, Colchester only officially became a city in 2022 as part ofRead More... -
Universal Studios to open first UK theme park in Bedford by 2031, creating 28,000 jobs
The UK is officially getting its first Universal Studios theme park, with a grand opening set for 2031. The landmark project, backed by the UK government, is expected to bring in a staggeringRead More... -
MI5 lifts the veil on 115 years of secrets in new exhibition
For the first time in its 115-year history, MI5 is pulling back the curtain on its shadowy past. A new exhibition at the National Archives in London, MI5: Official Secrets, offers the public anRead More... -
Tourist tax could help revive London’s arts and culture scene
A growing number of voices are calling on the government to allow London to introduce a tourist tax, similar to those already in place in many popular European cities. The Centre for LondonRead More... -
£1bn Chinese ceramics gift to British Museum approved
The Charity Commission has officially approved the largest donation in the British Museum’s history—a collection of Chinese ceramics valued at around £1 billion.Read More... -
UK to return Nazi-looted painting to Jewish family
A 17th-century painting stolen by the Nazis in 1940 from a Jewish art collector in Belgium is set to be returned to the collector’s descendants, the British government announced on Saturday,Read More...
British Queen celebrates
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Education
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Brazil's education minister has been ridiculed on social media for making a spelling mistake on Twitter.
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Education is becoming an increasingly crucial component of contemporary European life. New skills and higher qualifications become necessary elements of the
Q: We met at the European Conference of Iranian Studies in Berlin, a reputable and high-profile event. Please tell us about your Center for European Democracy
The European Medicines Agency, which is moving from Britain to Amsterdam because of Brexit, on Wednesday lost a court battle to cancel the lease on its London
Charles Darwin, Mr. Evolution himself, didn't know what to make of the fossils he saw in Patagonia so he sent them to his friend, the renowned paleontologist Richard Owen.
Owen was stumped too. Little wonder.
"The bones looked different from anything he knew," said Michael Hofreiter, senior author of a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications that finally situates in the tree of life what Darwin called the "strangest animal ever discovered".
"Imagine a camel without a hump, with feet like a slender rhino, and a head shaped like a saiga antelope," Hofreiter, a professor at the University of Potsdam, told AFP.
Macrauchenia patachonica -- literally, "long-necked llama" -- also had a long rubbery snout and with its nostrils high on the skull just above its eyes.
Analysis of a bear bone found in an Irish cave has provided evidence of human existence in Ireland 2,500 years earlier than previously thought, academics announced Sunday.
For decades, the earliest evidence of human life in Ireland dated from 8,000 BC.
But radiocarbon dating of a bear's knee bone indicated it had been butchered by a human in about 10,500 BC -- some 12,500 years ago and far earlier than the previous date.
"This find adds a new chapter to the human history of Ireland," said Marion Dowd, an archaeologist at the Institute of Technology Sligo who made the discovery along with Ruth Carden, a research associate with the National Museum of Ireland.
The knee bone, which is marked by cuts from a sharp tool, was one of thousands of bones first found in 1903 in a cave in County Clare on the west coast of Ireland.
It was stored in the National Museum of Ireland since the 1920s, until Carden and Dowd re-examined it and applied for funding to have it radiocarbon dated -- a technique developed in the 1940s -- by Queen's University Belfast.
The team sent a second sample to the University of Oxford to double-check the result. Both tests indicated the bear had been cut up by a human about 12,500 years ago.
The new date means there was human activity in Ireland in the Stone Age or Palaeolithic period, whereas previously, scientists only had evidence of humans in Ireland in the later Mesolithic period.
"Archaeologists have been searching for the Irish Palaeolithic since the 19th century, and now, finally, the first piece of the jigsaw has been revealed," Dowd said.
Three experts further confirmed that the cut marks on the bone had been made when the bone was fresh, confirming they dated from the same time as the bone.
The results were revealed in a paper published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
As well as pushing back the date of human history in Ireland, the find may have important implications for zoology, as scientists have not previously considered that humans could have influenced extinctions of species in Ireland so long ago.
"From a zoological point of view, this is very exciting," Carden said. "This paper should generate a lot of discussion within the zoological research world and it's time to start thinking outside the box? or even dismantling it entirely!"
The National Museum of Ireland noted that approximately two million more specimens are held in its collections and could reveal more secrets.
In a milestone for artificial intelligence, a computer has beaten a human champion at a strategy game that requires "intuition" rather than brute processing power to prevail, its makers said Wednesday.
Dubbed AlphaGo, the system honed its own skills through a process of trial and error, playing millions of games against itself until it was battle-ready, and surprised even its creators with its prowess.
"AlphaGo won five-nil, and it was stronger than perhaps we were expecting," said Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind, a British artificial intelligence (AI) company.
A computer defeating a professional human player at the 3,000-year-old Chinese board game known as Go, was thought to be about a decade off.
The clean-sweep victory over three-time European Go champion Fan Hui "signifies a major step forward in one of the great challenges in the development of artificial intelligence -- that of game-playing," the British Go Association said in a statement.
The two-player game is described as perhaps the most complex ever designed, with more configurations possible than there are atoms in the Universe, Hassabis says.
Players take turns placing stones on a board, trying to surround and capture the opponent's stones, with the aim of controlling more than 50 percent of the board.
There are hundreds of places where a player can place the first stone, black or white, with hundreds of ways in which the opponent can respond to each of these moves and hundreds of possible responses to each of those in turn.
"But as simple as the rules are, Go is a game of profound complexity. There are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible positions," Hassabis explained in a blog.
Such a search base is "too enormous and too vast for brute force approaches to have any chance," added his colleague David Silver, who co-authored the paper in the science journal Nature.