Author: admin@primenews

On π-day, one mathematician explores our fascination with pi and asks why we obsessively compute its digits. Pi Day, the International Day of Mathematics, is celebrated on 14 March, due to the date’s American shorthand 3/14 – the first three digits of π. As a number, the number of digits after the decimal place extend off into the distance. Truncating pi’s decimal expansion after the second decimal place (3.14) is sufficient to specify the date. But the more digits you add, the more useful pi becomes. With only 11 digits of π we can calculate the circumference of the Earth from its…

Hundreds of people have been rescued from a scam centre in the Philippines that made them pose as lovers online. Police said they raided the centre on Thursday and rescued 383 Filipinos, 202 Chinese and 73 other foreign nationals. The centre, which is about 100km north of Manila, was masquerading as an online gambling firm, they said. South East Asia has become a hub for scam centres where the scammers themselves are often entrapped and forced into criminal activity. Young and tech-savvy victims are often lured into running these illegal operations, which ranges from money laundering and crypto fraud to…

Sam George, the driving force behind Ghana’s harsh anti-LGBTQ legislation, portrays himself as a guardian of gay Ghanaians. “I have put in legislation that protects the rights of gay people from being verbally and physically assaulted,” he said in an interview with CNN from Accra. But despite his claims, the bill, signed into law late last month by Ghana’s parliament, imposes severe penalties merely for identifying as LGBTQ, with fines or up to three years in prison. Someone convicted of “promoting” gay rights can get up to five years behind bars, according to the bill. “They should have a fair hearing before…

TikTok is now facing a ban in the United States, a fate that has already befallen a string of American social media giants that tried to make it in China. On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives passed a bill which could ban TikTok in the country if its Chinese owner ByteDance doesn’t sell the app to an entity that satisfies the US government. “The bill passed by the US House of Representatives puts the US on the opposite side of the principle of fair competition and international economic and trade rules,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a briefing Thursday.…

For decades, a diagnosis of glioblastoma – an aggressive, hard-to-treat cancer in the brain – has been a death sentence for patients. Only 3% to 5% of people who are diagnosed with this type of brain tumor will be alive three years later. On average, patients live about 14 months after diagnosis. Now, an experimental therapy that reprograms a person’s own immune cells to attack these tumors is showing some exciting promise. Three studies published within the past week have reported dramatic results with a therapy called CAR-T delivered directly to the brain. In some cases, tumors have seemingly melted away on…

A cyberattack caused intermittent “disruptions” for websites of multiple Alabama government agencies on Wednesday, in an incident that had state officials working throughout the day to defend their networks from hackers, a spokesperson for Alabama’s Office of Information Technology told CNN. “[W]e understand that the disruptions were initially widespread across state services, and those effects have diminished throughout the day as we have worked with our vendors to counter the denial-of-service attack,” said the spokesperson, Jeremy Ward. There was no breach of government networks or data stolen in the cyberattack, according to the office of Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, which…

John Lewis has reported a return to profit, but it will not pay its staff a bonus for the second year in a row. The retail partnership, which also owns Waitrose supermarkets, reported a pre-tax annual profit of £56m compared with a £234m loss the year before. However, it said it would not pay a bonus as it was increasing overall pay and investing in the business. In January, John Lewis said it was planning to cut the size of its workforce over the next five years. The partnership said that a million more customers shopped in its stores last…

US actress Olivia Munn has revealed she was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, and has had four operations in the past 10 months. Posting on Instagram, the 43-year-old Newsroom star said her surgeries had included a double mastectomy. Munn said the cancer was “aggressive” and “fast moving”, but was caught with “enough time that I had options”. She added that she had “wanted to get through the hardest parts before sharing” the news. Munn’s health update comes three days after she attended the Oscars with her partner, comedian John Mulaney. They share two-year-old son Malcolm. The actress, who has…

Ministers have unveiled a new extremism definition under which certain groups will be blocked from government funding and meeting officials. It will apply to, but not criminalise, groups that promote an ideology based on “violence, hatred or intolerance”. Communities Secretary Michael Gove said a surge in extremism since the Israel-Gaza war posed “a real risk” to the UK. Civil liberties advocates, community groups and MPs have criticised recent government rhetoric on extremism. Zara Mohammed, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, told BBC Newsnight the definition would lead to the “unfair targeting of Muslim communities”. The government’s independent reviewer of…

The maker of Marlboro cigarettes, Altria Group, says it will sell more than $2.2bn (£1.7bn) of shares in AB InBev, the owner of the Bud Light and Stella Artois beer brands. The move will see Altria offloading 35 million AB InBev shares. The tobacco giant currently owns a stake of around 10% in the world’s biggest brewer, worth about $12.7bn. Bud Light sales have been hit after a US boycott over its work with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. The sale is “an opportunistic transaction that realises a portion of the substantial return on our long-term investment,” Altria’s chief executive, Billy Gifford, said…