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Scientists have created a wearable sensor that attaches to your underwear and tracks your gut bacteria in real time by measuring the hydrogen gas in your flatulence. And no, that’s not a setup for a joke.

Researchers at the University of Maryland developed the device to solve a problem that has plagued microbiome research for years: how to actually monitor what gut bacteria are doing hour by hour, not just which species are living in there. The answer, it turns out, involves a tiny sensor clipped near your bottom that passively records data while you go about your day.

"I typed in YamzWorld into the Amazon app and lo and behold there were all my products there with my pictures from my website as well," Montes-Tarazas said.

While he receives payment for sales, Montes-Tarazas said the arrangement strips away his ability to build direct customer relationships.

"I do get the sale and I do get the money, but customers never get to interact with my website, they have no ability to sign up for my mailing list. They have no idea who I am as an artist or what I stand for," Montes-Tarazas said.

“When I worked for her, our poor scheduler was getting calls at two o’clock in the morning to come bring her bottles of tequila,” a former staffer told the magazine.

She was “very adamant” that the staffer upvote posts about her attractiveness, according to a former staffer.

They said she would also make her aides clean her properties that she rented out on Airbnb—including a $3.9 million home in Isle of Palms, South Carolina, and her Washington townhouse—instead of hiring a maid.

Musk has suggested he could buy the budget airline and called O'Leary "insufferable" and "an idiot", after O'Leary rejected the idea of using Musk's Starlink technology to provide wifi on flights.

O'Leary said at the press conference that his team is going to X's office in Dublin to give Musk a free Ryanair ticket to thank him for the "wonderful boost" in publicity he's had.

"If he wants to call me an idiot, he wouldn't be the first, and he certainly won't be the last ... But if it helps to boost Ryanair sales, you could insult me all day, every day."

On the prospect of Musk buying the Irish airline, O'Leary said: "We're a publicly owned company. He's free to [buy shares] at any time, but non-European citizens cannot own a majority of European airlines."

The nation’s largest organization for medical examiners has issued a warning about a controversial, centuries-old forensic test that has contributed to cases in which pregnant women have been charged with murder.

The premise behind the lung float test is simple: If a baby was born alive and then died, air from its first breaths would cause its lungs to float in a jar with water. If the baby was stillborn, the lack of air in the lungs would cause them to sink.

But the many critics of the test have long labeled it junk science and drawn parallels between the test and witch trials, where women were deemed witches based on whether they floated or sank.

A Virginia Beach nurse claims a controversial artificial intelligence upstart manipulated her 11-year-old son into having virtual sex with chatbot “characters” posing as iconic vocalist Whitney Houston and screen legend Marilyn Monroe, after which she discovered X-rated exchanges on the boy’s phone that left her “horrified,” according to a federal lawsuit reviewed by The Independent.

Throughout one “incredibly long and graphic chat” on the Character.AI platform, which has been accused of driving numerous young people to suicide, the chatbot portraying Houston took things to such an extreme that portions of “her” messages were automatically filtered out for not complying with the site’s terms of service and community guidelines, the complaint states.

During the conversation – a screenshot of which is included in the complaint – the system cuts “Whitney” off as an extremely graphic passage becomes even raunchier.

But it turns out the drama had barely begun: just days after Fátima Bosch was crowned Miss Universe in Thailand, the co-owners of the organisation are both facing arrest warrants.

On Wednesday Mexican media revealed that Raúl Rocha Cantú, the Mexican businessman who owns half of the Miss Universe Organisation, was under investigation for drug, gun and fuel trafficking between Guatemala and Mexico.

Rocha, whose conglomerate spans industry, casinos and the beauty pageant, has denied wrongdoing. When asked about the case by El País, he said: “It is completely false that I have an arrest warrant.”

The other half of the Miss Universe Organisation is owned by the Thai media mogul Jakkaphong Jakrajutatip, for whom an arrest warrant was also this week issued by a Thai court.

At the start of November Bosch – then Miss Mexico – went viral when she staged a walkout after being berated as “dumb” by the pageant’s director, who singled her out for failing to post promotional content.

Bosch beat the crowd favourite, Miss Thailand, to win the crown – only for allegations of vote rigging to cast a shadow on her triumph.

PeakMetrics grabbed a sample of 52,000 posts made on X within the first 24 hours of Cracker Barrel’s announcement that it would be modernizing its logo to an admittedly very plain and generic design. In that timeframe, it found that 44.5% of all mentions of Cracker Barrel were flagged as likely or higher bot activity. Those numbers climb even higher when a boycott is mentioned. About 1,000 posts in that first 24-hour period called on people to stop eating at Cracker Barrel, and 49% of those posts got flagged as likely coming from bots. In its report, PeakMetrics states that the boycott was unlikely to be an organic grassroots response but a “bot-assisted amplification seeded by meme/activist accounts.”

Students at West Florence High School, around 80 miles east of the state capital, Columbia, had been complaining about a bizarre odor since August 25, with many reporting that it was making them feel unwell.

The school launched an urgent investigation into the smell, spending $55,000 on inspections and air conditioning repairs. Even the high school's gas lines, propane systems, and air quality had been inspected.

However, the source of the odor remained a mystery.

Eventually, students began experiencing nausea, dizziness, and migraines with some seeking medical attention for respiratory issues connected to the smell.

The makers of ChatGPT are changing the way it responds to users who show mental and emotional distress after legal action from the family of 16-year-old Adam Raine, who killed himself after months of conversations with the chatbot.

Open AI admitted its systems could “fall short” and said it would install “stronger guardrails around sensitive content and risky behaviors” for users under 18.

The $500bn (£372bn) San Francisco AI company said it would also introduce parental controls to allow parents “options to gain more insight into, and shape, how their teens use ChatGPT”, but has yet to provide details about how these would work.

Adam, from California, killed himself in April after what his family’s lawyer called “months of encouragement from ChatGPT”. The teenager’s family is suing Open AI and its chief executive and co-founder, Sam Altman, alleging that the version of ChatGPT at that time, known as 4o, was “rushed to market … despite clear safety issues”.

Forget chatbots. Zuckerberg’s vision is much grander. He is betting that within a few years, AI will not just be answering your questions or writing your emails. It will be managing your schedule, anticipating your needs, running your home, helping you make decisions, and maybe even guiding your career. Call it Life-as-a-Service, powered by Meta.

The move is seen as a direct challenge to competitors. “The launch of Meta Superintelligence labs isn’t just an announcement; it’s a statement: Meta won’t settle for second place in AI,” commented Alon Yamin, cofounder and CEO of the AI detection platform Copyleaks. He added, “Meta and Mark clearly see this as a make or break moment for AI leadership.”

But Huffman said Reddit was now battling to ensure its users stay at the center of the social network. “Where the rest of the internet seems to be powered by or written by or summarized by AI, Reddit is distinctly human,” he said. “It’s the place you go when you want to hear from people, their lived experiences, their perspectives, their recommendations. Reddit is communities and human curation and conversation and authenticity.”

As Reddit becomes an increasingly important source for LLMs, advertisers are responding with what one agency chief described as a “massive migration” to the platform.

Multiple advertising and agency executives speaking during this month’s Cannes advertising festival told the FT that brands were increasingly exploring hosting a business account and posting content on Reddit to boost the likelihood of their ads appearing in the responses of generative AI chatbots.