📌 Toxic Smog, Sharing Top Secrets, More

Pakistan, India and other countries in South Asia are shrouded in a layer of smog so thick that it's visible from space.

Satellite imagery from NASA Worldview shows most of northern and eastern Pakistan and parts of western India in smog that has caused air quality to deteriorate to toxic levels in Lahore, Multan, Delhi, and Chandigarh. Authorities have shut down schools, parks, and public places to limit exposure.

Sources say over 40,000 people have been treated for respiratory ailments, and hospitals in the region have reported a sharp spike in patients with labored breathing, coughing fits and reddened eyes.

India’s capital, Delhi, had the worst air quality on Tuesday, with an air quality index of over 1,100, said global air quality tracker Swiss group IQAir. For context, American cities inundated with wildfire smoke in recent years saw air quality indices of 500. Readings above 300 are considered hazardous.

Lahore, the capital of Pakistan's Punjab province and home to 14 million, had an air quality index of over 700 on Tuesday. On Monday, Lahore's air quality was well above 1,200. Last week, areas of the city hit an unprecedented reading of 1,900, over 120 times safety levels.

An Air National Guard member who stole classified military secrets and showed them on Discord has been sentenced to 15 years.

Jack Teixeira, 22, joined the service in September 2019. Until his arrest last year, he served with the 102nd Intelligence Wing as a cyber defense operations journeyman at Otis Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts.

After settling into his role, he began to look at material above his intelligence classification grade and shared it via the chat app. Discord. The material included US and NATO plans for supporting Ukraine, information on UK and US personnel helping out the Ukrainians, and details of a Chinese drone program.

Teixeira was a keen gamer and ran his own Discord server with around 25 members. The group discussed mass murders, conducting assassinations, and “culling the weak-minded,” the courts were told. Teixeira posted snippets of classified government information as a way of bragging.

As the media seized upon the leaks, Teixeira requested members to delete material they had, shut down the server and left Discord. He smashed his hard drives and other computer equipment, some found in a garbage bin behind his house. His arrest came in April 2023 after Discord handed over his address.

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said he will resign after a review into a serial abuser associated with the Church of England.

The independent Makin Review concluded barrister John Smyth might have been brought to justice had the archbishop alerted authorities in 2013. Welby had apologised but stated he would not resign, following the review’s publication last week.

Over five decades between the 1970s and his death, Smyth is said to have subjected as many as 130 boys and young men in the UK and Africa to traumatic physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual attacks, permanently marking their lives.

A lay reader who led Christian summer camps, Smyth died aged 75 in Cape Town in 2018 while under investigation by Hampshire Police and was “never brought to justice for the abuse.” the review said.

Welby knew Smyth because he attended Iwerne Christian camps in the 1970s, but the review said there was no evidence he had “maintained any significant contact” with the barrister in later years.

The report said Smyth “could and should have been formally reported to the police in the UK, and to authorities in South Africa (church authorities and potentially the police) by church officers, including a diocesan bishop and Justin Welby in 2013.”

Researchers have developed an AI tool that identifies where people have been based on microorganisms.

The AI can accurately trace a sample by analyzing a person's microbiome. It was trained on vast microbiome datasets, including urban settings, soil, and marine ecosystems.

The bacterial tool identified the city source of samples 92% of the time and differentiated locations in two Hong Kong subway stations just 172 meters apart. The tool was less accurate in London, but researchers say that will be resolved with more data.

The tool could help to identify how disease spreads, identify infection sources and locate antibiotic-resistance hotspots.

A study from Hungary categorizes dog owners into three distinct types based on their relationship with their pets.

“Friendly colleagues” (31.1%) see their dogs as co-workers and security guards but also have a strong emotional bond, often owning breeds like border collies and German shepherds.

“Dog parents” (49.5%) have a close, human-like bond with their dogs and do not see them for practical functions. They typically own breeds like vizslas and dachshunds.

“Companions” (19.4%) keep dogs mainly for the company but maintain an emotional distance, usually owning breeds like mudis and Labrador retrievers.

The study surveyed 800 dog owners and shows dogs play diverse social and practical roles in their owners’ lives, reflecting the complexity of the dog-human relationship.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will offer free computing power to researchers who want to use its custom AI chips.

AWS said it will provide credits to use its cloud data centers that it values at $110 million to researchers who want to tap Trainium, its chip for developing AI models that competes with chips from Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Alphabet's cloud division.

AWS said researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley, are participating in the program. The company plans to make 40,000 first-generation Trainium chips available for the program.

Most AI developers use Cuda, Nvidia's flagship software, to program Nvidia's chips rather than programming the chip directly. AWS plans to publish documentation about the most fundamental part of its chip — the instruction set architecture — and let customers program the chip directly.

The approach aims to lure large customers who want to make small tweaks that could add up to big gains when using tens of thousands of chips at a time.

An abandoned emu is thriving in a British aviary after being raised by an unlikely foster mom one-tenth her size.

The emu was rejected by her parents. The lifeless one-pound body of an emu chick covered in mud and flies, pulled from the nest by crows, was named Shrub.

A bantam hen who lived at Birdworld in Surrey, England, was given the job of raising her. The diminutive hen taught Shrub skills such as eating and walking.

“Shrub quickly learned to pick up food and drink and coordinate her gangly legs,” said Polly Bramham, a Birdworld employee. She said it wasn’t long before the difference in size meant that the moment had come to reconnect Shrub with her parents.

“It was particularly important to do this while Shrub was still a juvenile so that her parents, Forest and Mathilda, would not see her as a threat,” said Polly. “We found Shrub to be a very happy-go-lucky emu, frequently misjudging social etiquette and getting disciplined as a result.”

Emus are large birds with strong kicking legs, so Shrub would continue to be separated from the adults at night for the next couple of months as she learned the rules of emu life that the hen had been unable to teach by example.