Thousands of people attended this year’s Driffield Show.
Visitors enjoyed livestock competitions, exhibitions and food and drink stalls at the annual event.
Other highlights included dog and pony shows, a junior showjumping competition, craft sessions and gardening classes, as well as displays of the latest farming technology and a motorbike stunt show.
Running on and off since 1854, the agricultural event takes place on the Driffield Showground just outside the East Yorkshire town.
Researchers have pulled the perfectly-preserved skull of an ice age horse from a mine in Yukon, Canada, new pictures show.
Based on the soil around the skull and the depth of sediments where it was found, experts estimate that the horse lived about 30,000 years ago — but more precise radiocarbon dating could narrow this down, a spokesperson for the Yukon Paleontology Program said.
Scientists have identified more than 50 ice age horse species to date, but it remains unclear which one the skull belongs to. Horses that lived in what is now Yukon during the last ice age (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) were relatively small, standing about 4 feet (1.2 meters) tall at the shoulders, Cameron Webber quoted experts as saying in an email to Live Science.
“While the physical characteristics of the skull and the size and shape of the teeth can provide clues to its evolutionary history, the specific species of this horse cannot be identified without more in-depth genetic information,” Webber said. “Ancient DNA analysis will be needed if an accurate species identification for this find is desired.”
Related: ‘I knew they were something special’: New York homeowner discovers mastodon jaw fossils in backyard
Researchers found the skull in a mine in the Klondike, a region in western Yukon. Only parts of the lower jaw and upper skull were initially visible above the mine’s frozen ground, so the team returned the next day with more tools and water to melt the skull out, representatives of the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Center, a museum in Whitehorse, Canada, wrote in a Facebook post.
Miners helped the researchers extract the “beautifully preserved” skull by directing their water hoses over the skull, the representatives wrote.
“What emerged was a complete horse skull,” they wrote. “The presence of canines tells us this horse was likely male, and because they were only partially erupted, we know he was likely a teenager when he died.”
It is unclear whether researchers will date the skull and analyze its DNA to determine the species.
Horses lived in North America between about 50 million and 11,000 years ago, when they went locally extinct. Europeans reintroduced horses following the 15th century, and the animals rapidly spread throughout the continent.
Core courses like Accounting, Modeling Managerial Decisions, and Workforce have also been helpful in navigating this new role. For instance, in Workforce, we talked a lot about how to design processes that support specific outputs. That background has allowed me to appreciate the way a company like Illumination, which requires incredible creative output, has organized itself to have an open and collaborative environment where new ideas can be tested out and iterated on.
The Yale SOM community has been central to my experience in Los Angeles. I organized an MBA meet-up for media and entertainment interns across different business school programs and over 100 people showed up, including four of my fellow SOM classmates interning in the city. I am also looking forward to an upcoming SOM summer social hosted by the Los Angeles alumni chapter, where I will get to meet with SOM graduates and continue building my network.
This internship has helped to reinforce my commitment to the idea that the boldest storytelling happens at the intersection of new technology and creativity, and has helped me clarify what contributions I can make to facilitate the next era of tech adoption in this exciting field. Additionally, as an incoming co-president of the Media, Entertainment and Sports Association (MESA), I am eager to share my learnings with the incoming class at SOM!
Twenty-five years ago, there was a hole in the Standard Model. And on July 21, 2000, an experiment called DONUT filled it.
That’s when a team of 54 physicists from the United States, Japan, South Korea and Greece announced the first-ever detection of the tau neutrino, one of the last unseen particles in the Standard Model of particle physics. They were part of the Direct Observation of the Nu Tau, or DONUT, collaboration based at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
“We knew there was a tau neutrino — there had to be,” said Regina Rameika, a member of DONUT at the time and now associate director for high-energy physics at the Department of Energy. “But the fact is, we never had observed the signature of the interaction.”
Neutrinos are incredibly lightweight subatomic particles that were first postulated by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930. In 1956, physicists saw the first neutrino at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina. They didn’t know about the neutrino’s different types, or flavors, at the time, but this first neutrino turned out to be an electron neutrino. In 1962, physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory detected the second type, the muon neutrino.
The idea of a third flavor of neutrino materialized after an experiment led by physicist Martin Perl at SLAC National Laboratory found a particle called the tau in 1975. The tau is the third generation of particles known as leptons. Since the other two leptons — electrons and muons — had corresponding neutrinos, it made sense that there must also be neutrinos corresponding to the tau. Sure enough, experiments found indirect evidence for the tau neutrino’s existence.
But direct observational evidence remained scarce. Until DONUT.
Making DONUT
In the early 1990s, Fermilab physicists were gearing up for the Neutrinos at the Main Injector project, or NuMI, to search for neutrino mass. As the story goes, Fermilab scientists Rameika and Byron Lundberg were discussing how excited they were for NuMI and realized it would be very useful to directly observe the tau neutrino first. The idea for the DONUT experiment was born.
Lundberg and Rameika reunited a group of scientists who had worked on Fermilab’s Experiment 653 in the mid-1980s. E653 incorporated emulsion plates developed by physicists at Nagoya University in Japan to look for charm particles. DONUT would use similar technology to search for evidence of tau neutrinos.
The DONUT collaboration submitted their proposal in 1994 and were taking data by 1997.
“By today’s standards, it was actually relatively simple,” said Rameika. “Combined, it was difficult.”
One challenge for DONUT was shoehorning it into the existing Fermilab program. The lab was uniquely equipped for this experiment because the Tevatron’s 800-GeV proton beam was essential for achieving the flux and energies they required to have even a chance of detecting tau neutrinos. But other experiments needed the beam, too. To make the effort as easy as possible for the lab, the collaboration repurposed existing equipment.
The experiment consisted of a 3-foot-long structure made of iron plates sandwiched with plates of emulsion. When Fermilab’s Tevatron accelerator shot a beam of particles at this target, the neutrinos interacted with the iron nuclei. The resulting particles shot through the emulsion plates, leaving tracks behind like animal footprints in the snow.
But if the experimenters weren’t careful, the emulsion plates could get polluted. The Tevatron beam produced an enormous amount of muons in addition to neutrinos, and these muons would overexpose the emulsion plates. Fortunately, since muons are charged particles, they can be steered with magnets, which don’t affect neutrinos.
Vittorio Paolone, who was co-spokesperson for DONUT with Lundberg at the time, compared the muon challenge to being between the jaws of a lion. “You have the jaws open, and then you have to stick the emulsion in between and hope it doesn’t clamp down at some point,” he said.
If the metaphorical jaws did clamp down, muons would flood the emulsion plates and DONUT would lose all their data. It would be akin to exposing a roll of film to the light before developing the photos. There were safeguards in place to protect the data: if the sweeping magnets failed, the beamline would automatically shut off. Fortunately for DONUT — and for every other Fermilab experiment using the beam at the same time — the magnet held steady.
With Fermilab’s high-energy proton beam, the nuclear emulsion technology pioneered by Nagoya University and the sweeping magnet system that shielded the detector, DONUT was the product of scientific serendipity. “The detection of tau-neutrino interactions using particle accelerators was only possible because three unique capabilities could be employed in a synergistic manner at the time DONUT was proposed,” said Lundberg.
After collecting data from 1997 to 1998, collaborators in Nagoya worked on digitizing and analyzing the emulsion plates. They then sent the data back to Fermilab for further analysis, which included early forms of machine learning and artificial intelligence. “We were one of the first experiments using neural networks,” said Rameika.
In total, DONUT collected 6.6 million particle interactions, which they narrowed down to about 1,000 candidate events.
If tau neutrinos acted as predicted, physicists expected to see their tell-tale signature in the emulsion plates: a short track with a kink in it, indicating a tau neutrino had hit an iron nucleus and produced a tau lepton, which traveled for about a millimeter before decaying.
“The signature is pretty obvious,” said Paolone, now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “Even though it looks exactly the way you expect it to look, when you start seeing three or four that look like a tau neutrino interaction … you start to get pretty excited.”
On July 21, 2000, Lundberg announced the detections of four tau neutrino interactions to a packed lecture hall at Fermilab. They had finally seen the penultimate piece of the Standard Model. (The observation of the final piece, the Higgs boson, would be announced 12 years later.) Ultimately, DONUT found a total of nine tau neutrino interactions.
“Personally, commissioning and running DONUT was challenging and exhausting,” said Lundberg. “I never worked as intensely after the experiment — I doubt that I even could have.”
The long legacy of a short interaction
The hard work of a small, international group of physicists had a profound impact on the field. In 2022, the American Physical Society recognized the achievements of DONUT by awarding the W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics to Lundberg, Rameika, Paolone and their Nagoya University collaborator Kimio Niwa “for the first direct observation of the tau neutrino through its charged-current interactions in an emulsion detector.”
The emulsion detection technology originated at DONUT has since been used in many more experiments, including ScanPyramids, an international project using noninvasive techniques to look for hidden chambers inside the pyramids in Egypt. CERN neutrino experiments like DsTau, FASERν and SND@LHC also utilize this tech. “The origin of the current nuclear emulsion technology is in the DONUT experiment,” said Mitsuhiro Nakamura, a DONUT collaborator from Nagoya University who recently retired from physics to become a rice farmer.
Nuclear emulsion plates were also used in the OPERA experiment at the Gran Sasso Laboratory of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics. Between 2010 and 2015, OPERA saw 10 beam-produced muon neutrinos oscillate into tau neutrinos, making it one of two experiments that has detected tau neutrinos since their first observation. The other is the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which announced seven tau neutrino candidates from cosmic sources in 2024 and a few more in following analyses. Collectively, physicists have seen, on average, one tau neutrino per year in the last quarter century.
“It’s impressive that we don’t have larger samples,” said Paolone. “It’s an amazingly difficult particle to detect.”
Many current and future experiments are focused on detecting — or have a chance of seeing — tau neutrinos. In addition to the CERN emulsion-based detectors that will look at energies similar to and higher than to DONUT, there are large-scale water- and ice-based detectors like KM3NeT, P-ONE and an expansion to IceCube that will probe high-energy neutrinos, and proposed tau-neutrino telescopes will explore ultra-high-energy ranges.
Physicists are also continuously brainstorming new ways to study tau neutrinos. “Ever since DONUT, we’ve had to learn how to find the tau neutrino signature without actually seeing the track,” said Rameika.
Some new-generation neutrino experiments, such as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment hosted by Fermilab, are focusing on the other two neutrino flavors that are relatively easier to detect.
Still, DONUT’s direct detection of the tau neutrino was a vital step in understanding the nature of the elusive particle.
“In order to understand neutrinos, you want to look at every channel that you possibly can,” said Rameika. “Knowing how to detect tau neutrinos, as we did with DONUT, is an important piece of information that we keep in the back of our heads for going forward and figuring out how to adapt it. In my mind, it was a critical historical experiment”
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.
CD PROJEKT RED today revealed the contents of a free update coming to Cyberpunk 2077 tomorrow alongside the release of Ultimate Edition on Mac. Update 2.3 introduces AutoDrive, the Delamain taxi service, new quests, vehicles, expanded Photo Mode features, and more!
Snapshot:.
Update 2.3 is the latest free update for Cyberpunk 2077, yet again the result of close collaboration between CD PROJEKT RED and Virtuos, and brings new ways to traverse the streets of Night City.
[Watch Update 2.3 REDstreams episode]
Players can now sit back and relax and let their vehicle do the work. While driving an owned vehicle, it is now possible to choose or create a map marker and enable AutoDrive to navigate to the destination completely hands-free. Night City’s premier driverless taxi service is fully operational now too thanks to the ability to summon a Delamain cab, choose a destination, and then let Delamain chauffeur players to their destination — for an appropriate eurodollar fee, of course. While using either means of transport, various cinematic camera angles can also be enjoyed, allowing passengers to take in Night City in a whole new light.
For those who prefer to take the wheel themselves, brand new vehicles have also been added with Update 2.3 in the form of a motorcycle and three new cars — including the brand-new Yaiba Semimaru from the Cyberpunk 2077: Kickdown comic! These vehicles can be unlocked by completing associated quests.
A plethora of new settings and customization options have also been added to Photo Mode. It is now possible to customize the weather and time of day to obtain the perfect shot, while also choosing from a greater selection of NPCs, outfits, and poses. New stickers and frames have also been added, and players now can now customize how NPCs look at the camera during shooting, with greater control over heads, eyes, and shoulders during any pose, bringing deeper command over every shot.
In addition, new technology features have been added with Update 2.3, including VRR support consoles, AMD FSR4 support, AMD FSR 3.1 Frame Generation, Intel XeSS 2.0, improved HDR settings, and more. All details of what’s included in this update can be found via the official patch notes here.
Update 2.3 arrives July 17 for Cyberpunk 2077 and Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2. It will also be available on Mac alongside the game’s launch on the same day.
More information can be found on the official game website, Facebook, and X.
It’s almost back to school season, and we’re starting to see some great laptop deals trickle in as a result. Walmart continues to sell the M1-powered MacBook Air for $599, but if you want more power and a sleeker design, the 13-inch M2-powered MacBook Air starts at just $699 ($100 off) from Best Buy. That’s its best price to date, and it’s available on the configuration that offers 256GB of storage and 16GB of RAM, double what’s in the base M1 model.
The M2-powered MacBook Air remains an excellent jack-of-all-trades, with more than enough power for work, casual gaming, and even a bit of light video editing. It also brings a few welcome upgrades over the M1 model, including faster performance and a much better 1080p webcam that’s noticeably sharper. Design-wise, it’s thinner and lighter, with slimmer bezels and a brighter, slightly bigger display. It also includes an improved keyboard and a MagSafe port for charging, while retaining features like a long battery life that should last a full work day.
That said, as an older laptop, you’ll miss out on newer features. Apple’s latest MacBook Air runs on a more powerful chip, for one thing, can connect to two external displays as opposed to just one, and offers an even more impressive 12-megapixel Center Stage webcam. But if all you care about is buying a fast, reliable laptop for everyday work and play, the M2-MacBook Air is a great investment to make at this price.
Researchers at The University of Osaka have developed a novel method for generating ultrahigh magnetic fields via laser-driven implosions of blade-structured microtubes. This method achieves field strengths approaching one megatesla—a breakthrough in compact, high-field plasma science.
Ultrastrong magnetic fields approaching the megatesla regime—comparable to those found near strongly magnetized neutron stars or astrophysical jets—have now been demonstrated in theory using a compact, laser-driven setup. A team led by Professor Masakatsu Murakami at The University of Osaka has proposed and simulated a unique scheme that uses micron-sized hollow cylinders with internal blades to achieve these field levels.
The technique—called bladed microtube implosion (BMI)—relies on directing ultra-intense, femtosecond laser pulses at a cylindrical target with sawtooth-like inner blades. These blades cause the imploding plasma to swirl asymmetrically, generating circulating currents near the center. The resulting loop current self-consistently produces an intense axial magnetic field exceeding 500 kilotesla, approaching the megatesla regime. No externally applied seed field is required.
This mechanism stands in stark contrast to traditional magnetic compression, which relies on amplifying an initial magnetic field. In BMI, the field is generated from scratch—driven purely by laser-plasma interactions. Moreover, as long as the target incorporates structures that break cylindrical symmetry, high magnetic fields can still be robustly generated. The process forms a feedback loop in which flows of charged particles—composed of ions and electrons—strengthen the magnetic field, which in turn confines those flows more tightly, further amplifying the field.
“This approach offers a powerful new way to create and study extreme magnetic fields in a compact format,” says Prof. Murakami. “It provides an experimental bridge between laboratory plasmas and the astrophysical universe.”
Potential applications include:
Simulations were conducted using the fully relativistic EPOCH code on the SQUID supercomputer at The University of Osaka. A supporting analytic model was also constructed to reveal the fundamental scaling laws and target optimization strategies.
Funding: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Kansai Electric Power Company (KEPCO)
Simulations: Performed using the SQUID supercomputer at The University of Osaka
Ryan Nembhard has averaged 11.3 points and 6.7 assists through 3 games at NBA Summer League in Las Vegas.
• Download the NBA App
• Summer League: Complete Coverage
Editor’s Note: Read more NBA coverage from The Athletic here. The views on this page do not necessarily reflect the views of the NBA or its teams.
* * *
The January 2021 meeting between Montverde Academy and IMG Academy was stuffed with star power.
Montverde had future NBA lottery pick Jalen Duren and eventual pros Dariq Whitehead and Caleb Houstan on its roster.
IMG, meanwhile, put two future NBA lottery picks, Jarace Walker and Jett Howard, on the floor, and started another soon-to-be pro, current Charlotte Hornets center Moussa Diabaté.
“Between us and IMG, we had like nine guys in the top 50,” said Kevin Boyle, who was Montverde’s boys basketball coach for 14 years. “I’m like, ‘The best guy in the gym is Ryan Nembhard. And he’s the only one not ranked.’”
In Boyle’s eyes, that meeting between the two Florida prep school powerhouses was more proof that Nembhard was not to be underestimated. The Aurora, Canada native was his usual rock-solid self, notching 10 points, five rebounds and four assists. Montverde hung on to beat IMG 55-51, part of its 24-1 season.
Nembhard played two years at Creighton and then two years at Gonzaga. As a senior in Spokane, Wash., he led the nation in assists. His 181 assists in West Coast Conference play were a conference record. He racked up nearly four assists for every one turnover.
Nembhard is allergic to making low-percentage plays, but his size prevented him from being a first-round pick. At the NBA Draft Combine, Nembhard was measured at 5-feet-11, sans shoes, while weighing 176 pounds.
In June, Nembhard agreed to sign a two-way contract with the Dallas Mavericks in undrafted free agency. Through three games at NBA Summer League, he has been a steadying presence, averaging 11.3 points (40.6 percent shooting) and 6.7 assists.
“I’ve been kind of dealing with it my whole life,” Nembhard said about being an undersized guard. “I am who I am. I’m not going to grow much more. I’m just looking to build on this opportunity I’m getting. At a certain point, the height won’t be talked about anymore. At the end of the day, you just have to roll the ball out and play hoops.”
Nembhard tries to emulate other diminutive guards such as Chris Paul, Kyle Lowry and Fred VanVleet. Defensively, Nembhard likes what he sees from New Orleans Pelicans pest Jose Alvarado, who picks up ballhandlers full court and stays attached to their chests once they cross the half-court line.
There’s one other player Nembhard models his game after, too.
“Obviously, my brother,” he said.
Andrew Nembhard is three years older than Ryan. The Indiana Pacers took him with the 31st pick in the 2022 NBA draft. A 6-foot-4 combo guard, Andrew has become an essential part of a Pacers team that advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals a year ago and were one win away from being crowned NBA champions in June.
Ryan attended Game 7 of the NBA Finals in Oklahoma City. As gut-wrenching as it was to watch Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton go down with an Achilles tear in the first quarter, Nembhard was still proud that his older brother’s team had the 68-win Thunder on the ropes before the injury.
“Everyone thought Indy was going to be out and it was going to be a quick series,” Nembhard said. “They showed their fight.”
Boyle coached both Nembhard brothers at Montverde. Before the 2022 NBA Draft, he warned teams not to discount how much Andrew could impact a game’s outcome. Before this year’s draft, he was spreading a similar message about Ryan.
“With Andrew, I was telling so many teams to draft him and take him,” Boyle said. “About three teams came to me and said, ‘We should have took him.’ Both brothers are elite at decision-making and knowing how to play.”
In the Mavericks’ first Summer League game against the Los Angeles Lakers, Nembhard showed his savviness. He played on and off the ball, with Dallas giving heavy point guard reps to No. 1 pick Cooper Flagg. Nembhard finished with 21 points on 8-of-14 shooting and five assists. While he had a bad game against the San Antonio Spurs two days later (scoring two points on 1-of-10 shooting), Nembhard rebounded Monday against the Charlotte Hornets, tallying 11 points and eight assists in Dallas’ loss.
“He has such a command of the game and command of the floor,” said Mavericks assistant Josh Broghamer, who’s coaching Dallas in Las Vegas. “He’s always going to have those guys set. Where he wants them to be. And he’s already reading that second, that third layer of the defense before he comes off (the screen).”
Nembhard faces an uphill battle in the NBA because of his size. But the Canadian pick-and-roll maestro has a chance to make an impact in the league because of his headiness.
Kyrie Irving is expected to be sidelined for most of the upcoming season while he recovers from a torn ACL. The Mavericks signed D’Angelo Russell — another former Montverde player — to fill in at starting point guard in Irving’s place. Behind Russell, the Mavericks have Dante Exum, Brandon Williams and potentially Nembhard, depending on how quickly he can adapt.
“They showed the most love (during the predraft process),” Nembhard said. “I think they really wanted me. They showed the most care for me. And I feel like I have a chance to come do something over here.”
***
Christian Clark is an NBA reporter for The Athletic who is based in Dallas. Previously, he covered the New Orleans Pelicans for NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Follow Christian on Twitter @cclark_13
Steam has added a new rule to its guidelines that has resulted in certain games getting banned, . The new clause states that “content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers” is not allowed and could result in removal from the platform.
In other words, if credit card companies get mad about something, they could actually have the power to ban a game. The clause that this will affect “certain kinds of adult-only content.”
This has likely already resulted in many games . The vast majority of these titles have obvious sexual themes and many have the word “incest” in the title. SteamDB doesn’t give a reason for these removals, but the timing does match up.
This move might sound unusual on its face, but payment processors have consistently fought against being used to purchase adult content. These battles are typically instigated on the notion that adults-only platforms don’t have enough safeguards in place against illegal content.
Mastercard and Visa blocked the in 2020. Mastercard went a step further in 2021, “Speciality Merchant Registration” requirements that announced “banks that connect merchants to our network will need to certify that the seller of adult content has effective controls in place to monitor, block and, where necessary, take down all illegal content.”
I doubt you’ll find too many people upset that games with titles like Sex Adventures – Incest Family were removed from the platform, but it could set a potentially troubling precedent. Some Steam users are upset with this rule change the “quiet normalization of financial censorship.”
In other words, if gigantic financial institutions get to decide what is appropriate and what is not, who is to say it won’t eventually impact regular games? One Steam user notes that “queer content gets flagged as ‘explicit’ even when it’s PG,” which is a . One user “looks innocuous at first glance but it’s a trojan horse.”
On the flipside, Steam has been home to some truly foul content over the years. We’ve reached out to Valve to ask for a comment on this news and will update this post when we hear back.