As the International Olympic Committee (IOC) moves towards new rules on who can compete in women’s categories — covering testosterone levels, genetic tests and bans — a quiet truth emerges: these policies impact all women, not just trans women. They force all women to defend their bodies and prove what’s inside, deepening divides instead of bridging them. Under the guise of protecting women, these laws revive the age-old question: who counts as a woman and who decides?

The proposed rules will issue a ban on all women who have undergone male puberty and will cover athletes with Differences of Sex Development (DSD). Individuals with DSD are raised as girls from birth but possess male chromosomes and male levels of testosterone. If these bans apply to “male levels of testosterone,” we have to ask: who defines that? And what happens when millions of cis women fall outside that definition?

According to Island Beach State Park officials, the ship’s sudden reappearance is the result of a routine seasonal cycle. Winter storms remove sand from the shoreline, narrowing beaches. Most of that sand returns during calmer summer months. Occasionally, though, erosion peels back the coast just enough to reveal what’s been hiding underneath for more than a century. Most of the time, it’s nothing. But sometimes, it’s a shipwreck from 1883 that once carried a bunch of Puerto Rican oranges.

No paywall - https://archive.is/20260202161910/https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/astronomers-triumph-over-telescope-threatening-energy-project-in-chile/

The decision comes after a year of backlash from astronomers who have been relying on the telescopes under Chile’s world-class skies. They feared that light pollution from the project would ruin their celestial views. An ESO study had predicted that the project, called INNA (Integrated Energy Infrastructure Project for the Generation of Hydrogen and Green Ammonia), would increase light pollution by at least 35 percent for Paranal’s Very Large Telescope, a set of four interlinked 8.2-meter observatories at the forefront of astronomical research. The study also found that INNA’s operations would increase atmospheric turbulence, muddying what would otherwise be sharp images of the heavens from nearby telescopes.

For decades, migration in India has largely followed a one-way path, from villages to cities, from farms to factories, from uncertainty to opportunity. Yet recent years have disrupted this familiar pattern.

But climate stress, rising urban costs, and fragile informal employment are pushing millions back to rural India, challenging long-held assumptions about where economic security truly lies.

In early January, widespread demonstrations driven by economic hardship, political discontent and sustained foreign pressure posed one of the most serious domestic challenges Iran's leadership has faced in years.

The unrest soon gave way to a sharpening regional standoff, as President Donald Trump ordered large US military deployments to the Middle East and issued warnings demanding that Iran curb its nuclear program and ballistic missile development.

During the protests, China reportedly assisted Iranian authorities in implementing a nationwide communications blackout.

From my favorite website for women's resources.

It's a video, but they have time stamps for the major sections.

Erin Matson is a Our Bodies Ourselves content expert on abortion and contraception. She is co-founder, president, and CEO of Reproaction. She also serves as chair of the board of Catholics for Choice and sits on the steering committee of the American Society for Emergency Contraception. Previously, Erin served as editor at large for Rewire News Group as well as action vice president of the National Organization for Women.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh and Helmholtz-Zentrum in Germany have developed DinoTracker, a free app that uses artificial intelligence to analyze dinosaur footprints without assuming which species made them. Older AI systems were trained on tracks that humans had already labeled, which may be wrong, since dinosaurs rarely leave their signatures and two forms of identification next to their footprints.

GDC surveyed 2,300 “game industry professionals” to get these results, and the demographics are primarily male (64 percent), white (67 percent), and based in the United States (54 percent). The organizers admit that this makeup is “far from truly representative of the global community, and we know more work is needed.”

https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2Fpolicy%2F867410%2Fminneapolis-ice-protest-alex-pretti-killing

There were protesters at multiple intersections. People had blocked off the streets with trash cans and dumpsters, and there were mattresses on the ground. Protesters were heckling officers, but there were no physical altercations. Eventually law enforcement retreated by a block and started throwing tear gas. They drove their trucks over the mattresses as they left.

Mexico's pivotal role in sending oil to Cuba has also put the U.S.' southern neighbor in Washington's crosshairs. President Donald Trump has stressed Cuba is "ready to fall" and said in a January 11 Truth Social post: "THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA - ZERO!"

Publicly, Sheinbaum has said Mexico will continue oil shipments to Cuba, saying they are based on longterm contracts and considered international aid. But the senior Mexican government sources said the policy is under internal review as anxiety grows within Sheinbaum's cabinet that the shipments could antagonize Trump.

Across cultures and centuries, from Japanese Geisha to European aristocracy, pale skin meant beauty and status. A tanned skin and freckled face meant that someone was a laborer, working outdoors and therefore socially inferior. Men and women raced to achieve that pale skin at any cost, using pastes and powders to erase any hint of color. The main ingredient in all those lotions, at a time, was lead.

It might come as a surprise to learn that the brain responds to training in much the same way as our muscles, even though most of us never think about it that way. Clear thinking, focus, creativity and good judgment are built through challenge, when the brain is asked to stretch beyond routine rather than run on autopilot. That slight mental discomfort is often the sign that the brain is actually being trained, a lot like that good workout burn in your muscles.

“Over the past few days, LinkedIn users have been targeted with bot-like activity from several LinkedIn-themed profiles commenting on their posts,” writes Bleeping Computer in a story from January 13, 2026.

“These posts falsely claim that the user has ‘engaged in activities that are not in compliance’ with the platform and that their account has been ‘temporarily restricted’ until they visit the specified link in the comment.

Infantile amnesia is the name for the near-universal pattern where early life experiences don’t become lasting episodic memories.

Humans can often learn skills and emotional associations early on, but struggle to recall specific events later.

Scientists have long debated whether the brain fails to form those memories properly, erases them, or stores them in ways that make them difficult to access.

Microglia are a natural candidate to investigate because they are not just “defense” cells. In the developing brain, microglia help sculpt neural circuits by pruning synapses and influencing how networks mature.

In practical terms, smartphones generate at least three kinds of digital exposure.

The first is identification risk, including through facial recognition technology. When you post footage, you may be sharing identifiable faces, tattoos, voices, license plates, school logos or even a distinctive jacket. That can enable law enforcement to identify people in your recordings through investigative tools, and online crowds to identify people and dox or harass them, or both.

That risk grows when agencies deploy facial recognition in the field. For example, ICE is using a facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify.

Facial recognition accuracy also isn’t neutral. National Institute of Standards and Technology testing has documented that the technology does not perform equally across different demographic groups, meaning the risk of misidentification is not evenly distributed across groups. For example, studies have shown lower recognition accuracy for people with darker skin color.

Second is the risk of revealing your location. Footage isn’t just images. Photos and video files often contain metadata such as timestamps and locations, and platforms also maintain additional logs. Even if you never post, your phone still emits a steady stream of location signals.

This matters because agencies can obtain location through multiple channels, often with different levels of oversight.

Agencies can request location or other data from companies through warrants or court orders, including geofence warrants that sweep up data about every device in a place during a set time window.

Agencies can also buy location data from brokers. The Federal Trade Commission has penalized firms for unlawfully selling sensitive location information.

Israeli fire killed 11 Palestinians including two boys and three journalists in separate incidents in Gaza on Wednesday, local medics said, in the latest violence to undermine a three-month-old ceasefire in the war-shattered enclave.

Palestinian health officials said an Israeli airstrike killed three Palestinian journalists travelling in a car on assignment to film a displaced persons camp in central Gaza.

THE DOG’S BOLLOCKS

When your sentence says, “I’m about to say something,” and then you say that thing, we have a way of separating the two halves of the sentence: a colon. We also have an alternative way of separating the two—a dash. In previous times, people would sometimes combine the two :— they’d use a colon and a dash together.

The continued downturn comes despite numerous measures introduced by the Chinese government to encourage child-rearing a decade on from the end of its notorious, long-time one-child policy.

But incentives including better financial support for parents — the government announced cash subsidies of 3,600 yuan ($500) per child to families in July 2025 and tax breaks for kindergartens, daycares and matchmaking services — have failed to have the desired effect.

Nor has a 13% tax increase on condoms and other contraceptives, with the fertility rate estimated to have flatlined at 1 child per woman in her lifetime, far below the 2.1 rate that would maintain the size of China's population.

The memo describes how DISA’s Command, Control, Communications, and Computers Enterprise Directorate, known as J6, was hobbled by DOGE cuts to such an extent that it was unable to obtain necessary software. This unit is responsible for maintaining secure channels that keep the Pentagon connected to military assets around the world, including nuclear capabilities.

The research confirms that taking paracetamol – also known as acetaminophen, or by brand names such as Panadol and Tylenol – does not increase a baby's risk of autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability when used in pregnancy.

Paracetamol remains a safe and effective way to treat fever and pain at any stage of pregnancy.

All the countries, already subject to tariffs of 10% and 15%, have sent small numbers of military personnel to Greenland.

Cyprus, holder of the rotating six-month EU presidency, summoned ambassadors to an emergency meeting in Brussels on Sunday, which EU diplomats said was due to start at 5 p.m. (1600 GMT).

In a study published in PLOS Biology, scientists observed how bacteriophages, aka viruses that infect bacteria, interacted with E. coli aboard the ISS. They compared these space-grown microbes to identical populations kept on Earth.

If you’re given the option of selecting a verification method and are deciding which to use, we recommend considering the following questions for each process allowed by each vendor:

• Data: What info does each method require?
• Access: Who can see the data during the course of the verification process?
• Retention: Who will hold onto that data after the verification process, and for how long?
• Audits: How sure are we that the stated claims will happen in practice? For example, are there external audits confirming that data is not accidentally leaked to another site along the way? Ideally these will be in-depth, security-focused audits by specialized auditors like NCC Group or Trail of Bits, instead of audits that merely certify adherence to standards.
• Visibility: Who will be aware that you’re attempting to verify your age, and will they know which platform you’re trying to verify for?

You have something you don’t want to become public—like, say, the details of your campaign’s relationship with Russian operatives or your own personal history of engaging with the leadership of the Russian Federation. And there are these witnesses who know things inconvenient to that objective and who are in trouble with the law. So you send them messages to stay loyal, reassuring them that they’ll be taken care of. You pardon the ones who do so. You threaten the ones who don’t.

And it works. There’s a damaging report, but that’s all.

And so the gangster tactics migrate to the conduct of governance itself. And you find that these tactics work in other situations too—like international diplomacy, for example. A new president in an emerging democracy shows up wanting military aid to deal with an ongoing foreign war by an invading power. You want him to announce he’s investigating your political opponent. So you tell him the two are linked. He knows he’s being shaken down, but what’s he going to do about it?

The novelist and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah said the move to bar her was "a blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship".

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Tuesday announced a national day of mourning would be held on January 22 to remember the 15 people killed in last month's shooting at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach.

Police say the alleged gunmen were inspired by the Islamic State militant group, and the incident sparked nationwide calls to tackle antisemitism, and prompted state and federal government moves to tighten hate speech laws.

The Adelaide Festival board said on Tuesday its decision last week to disinvite Abdel-Fattah, on the grounds it would not be culturally sensitive for her to appear at the literary event "so soon after Bondi", was made "out of respect for a community experiencing the pain from a devastating event".