MultiVersus is nearing its release, and we can start looking forward to the Battlepasses that will be rewarding us for our fisticuffs. The premium Battlepass, however, may be gained for free – if you’re early enough, that is. MultiVersus premium Battlepass is free for a limited time MultiVersus have stated that “returning players” who log into the game before June 11 at 8PM PDT will receive access to the season 1 premium Battlepass completely for free. Considering that MultiVersus drops on the May 28, you’ve got exactly 2 weeks to hop into MultiVersus to claim the premium Battlepass when the game releases. Image: MultiVersus Only returning players can benefit from this, which is a term that only becomes vague when you start trying to be exact. I imagine returning players are those who will be playing on the same account used in the open beta, no matter how much was played. I took part of the open beta, but on a device that has since died....

With the hype surrounding Wuthering Waves, it only makes sense that players want to pre-download the game so they can jump right in when it launches. Unfortunately, you may have been hit with the download being stuck at 99%. Here is how you can fix this issue. Wuthering Waves: Stuck on 99% download fix There are a few steps one can take to fix Wuthering Waves stuck at 99% download. First, you can potentially fix the issue by excluding the Wuthering Waves root folder and then reinstalling the game through both the installer and launcher. Follow the steps below to complete this method. Exclude the Wuthering Waves root folder (the folder is found where you installed it in the installer). Reinstall the game through the installer. Reinstall the game through the launcher. Reddit users have mentioned that this is the best method to fix Wuthering Waves stuck at 99%. After completing the steps above, there is a chance that your download will still get stuck at 99%. That ...

If you’re having a strange frame rate drop issue while playing XDefiant, I know how you may be able to fix it. You’re not alone, as I too ran into this problem which made playing this online first-person shooter unplayable. XDefiant: How to fix frame rate drop issue While playing XDefiant, you may suddenly find that the main menu and even the game itself is incredibly laggy. This happened to me recently where every other second my game would freeze, and not even restarting my PC would fix it. Luckily, I figured out that you can fix the frame rate drop issue in XDefiant by updating your graphics driver. Although there may be other solutions to this problem, this is the one that worked for me. If you have a Nvidia GPU, you may require a graphics driver update. Through GeForce Experience, I discovered that on May 21 (the launch day for XDefiant) Nvidia released version 555.85. Once I could download and install the update, I ceased to have any stuttering or frame ra...

One of the great qualities of the West is its belief in the directionality of history. Many ancient cultures believed that history was circular: Native American cultures often believed that reality itself was circular; Hinduism thinks similarly. The Judeo-Christian West thought differently: that God exists outside of time, but that he guides mankind forward, step by stumbling step, toward an eschatological culmination. This means that the West has thought, more than any other culture, about progress. It also means that the West tends to mistake movement in time for progress, and way stations in history as endpoints. Thus, World War I was labeled “the war to end all wars” … until World War II. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama suggested the possibility of an “end of history” … until history reasserted itself along the lines of Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations. The West also tends to mistake institutional forms for underlying realities. Because the West, particularly in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, has thought so much about the varieties of human institutions and their purposes, we tend to believe too much in the power of human action. This means that we often reverse cause and effect: We tend to believe, for example, that democracy precedes rights, as opposed to rights preceding democracy. We also tend to believe that we are the creators of our own rights and responsibilities; we are, in essence, legal positivists who believe that law is created by us rather than preexisting us. For example, Woodrow Wilson posited after World War I that we ought to create a League of Nations, since “There is only one power to put behind the liberation of mankind, and that is the power of mankind.” As it turns out, that was a lot of rot. Both of these thought errors were evident in the creation of the United Nations, which has turned out to be the “Mos Eisley” of international politics: a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Fashioned in the aftermath of World War II, when it was assumed that we had reached the end of history as well as that we had total control of our institutions, the U.N. was a shameful and immediate failure.  So, it was no surprise that this week, members of the U.N. Security Council held a moment of silence for the death of Iranian butcher President Ebrahim Raisi. The U.N. Security Council held no moment of silence for the 1,200 Israelis killed by Iranian proxy Hamas, or the thousands of American troops dead in Iraq at the hands of Iranian Shiite militias. It was also no surprise this week that another ill-begotten international organization, the International Criminal Court, beclowned itself in truly epic fashion. The ICC was created in 1998 as yet another example of the West reaching beyond its grasp: mistaking the post-Cold War era as an era of consensus around peace and mistaking the institutions of international law for a consensus around human rights. There is no consensus for the ICC to embody—only the power interests of some of the world’s worst players. The ICC, to no one’s surprise, has been an enormous failure. Thanks to the possibility of its weaponization, countries including the United States, Russia, India, China and Israel have refused to join. And indeed, that weaponization was on full display this week when the ICC announced its intention to seek arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for their extraordinarily careful and defensive war against Hamas. Once again, the world has proved that there is no international “community” and no international “law.” There is only national self-interest. Pretending otherwise doesn’t forward the cause of decency or human rights. It impedes it and gives credibility to those who seek to turn the West’s hopeful vision against itself—and who succeed in doing so regularly. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation. The post There Is No ‘International Law’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Just How Bad Was Cohen's Performance -- And Merchan's?

Norway, Ireland, and Spain Recognize Palestinian State

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) are bright releases of energy caused by a supermassive black hole having a snack. The snack in question is usually a star that got so close it was ripped apart. Part of the snack is thrown out, but the rest of the stellar plasma forms a hot accretion disk around the black hole. This disk wobbles, and astronomers have now worked out how to use that wobble to measure the spin of black holes.The TDE in question is called AT2020ocn. Researchers realized that its X-ray emission seemed to have a peak of luminosity every 15 days, repeating multiple times. This is believed to be caused by the disk rotation interacting with the rotation of the black hole. The gravity of a supermassive black hole is such that it warps the surrounding space-time massively, and when spinning, it drags space-time with it.The phenomenon is known as the Lense-Thirring precession, although one cannot normally see it. Black holes do not emit light, so the precession remains invisible. That is, unless you suddenly have something that shines – like the debris of a recently deceased star. Armed with that theoretical backing and estimates for the mass of the supermassive black hole and star, they worked out that the spin of the black hole is less than one-quarter of the speed of light.         The X-ray flashes were seen for 130 days of the 200 that the object was observed. Afterward, the disk had petered out. The observations were conducted by the NICER telescope. The acronym stands for Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR, and it is an X-ray telescope attached to the International Space Station.“The key was to catch this early on because this precession, or wobble, should only be present early on. Any later, and the disk would not wobble anymore,” lead author  Dheeraj “DJ” Pasham, from the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, said in a statement.Schematic view showing a supermassive black hole processing producing flashes of light.Image courtesy of the researchersThe importance of understanding the spin of supermassive black holes is because it will provide insight into the growth of these objects. If supermassive black holes grow mostly by accretion, the spin will increase thanks to the small contribution of mass falling onto it. But collisions between black holes would reduce the spin as this would be the resulting product of the spin of two different black holes unlikely to be aligned.This first measurement demonstrated that it is possible to work out the spin of a black hole using a TDE, and current and upcoming telescopes can build up a population of objects. From these future observations, a general idea of the history and evolution of supermassive black holes might be glimpsed.  "Black holes are fascinating objects and the flows of material that we see falling onto them can generate some of the most luminous events in the universe,” added study co-author Chris Nixon, associate professor of theoretical physics at the University of Leeds in a statement sent to IFLScience. “While there is a lot we still don’t understand, there are amazing observational facilities that keep surprising us and generating new avenues to explore. This event is one of those surprises.” A paper describing the results is published in the journal Nature.

A distinctive pattern of brain activity that fires up when we let our minds wander has been identified in a new study. The researchers found that patterns called “sharp-wave ripples”, which originate in the brain’s memory centers, seem to happen more often when our brains are left to start making stuff up.The human brain is great at creating its own entertainment. According to some estimates, for up to 30 percent of the time, our brains are not concentrating on our environments at all, but rather taking off on their own imaginary flights of fancy. But scientists know comparatively little about what’s actually going on inside the brain during these “self-generated” states.One patient population is uniquely placed to help answer some of these questions. For some people with epilepsy, drug treatments are not effective at stopping their seizures, so a surgical option might need to be considered. Neurosurgeons can literally remove the part of the brain where the seizures start, which varies between people, but first they need to track brain activity carefully to ensure they’re taking out the right bit.Researchers in Japan recruited 10 patients who were waiting for this surgery to take part in their study. They all had electrodes implanted into their brains to track seizure activity, in the hippocampus or parahippocampal gyrus – two brain areas that are deeply associated with memory.For 10 days, the patients were monitored and completed hourly questionnaires about their thoughts and emotions. “We mainly wanted to see if we could identify any links between the recorded brain activity and how the patients were feeling and thinking at the time,” explained lead author Takamitsu Iwata in a statement.How the study data were collected.Image credit: MEDICAL FIGDetection of sharp-wave ripples happened more often “when participants’ ongoing thoughts were more vivid, less desirable, had more imaginable properties, and exhibited fewer correlations with an external task,” the authors write. The patterns were also initiated frequently at night, so presumably during sleep when the mind is necessarily not focused on a task.“Notably, although our study was conducted entirely on people with epilepsy, we did our best to remove epilepsy-related data so that the results are applicable to healthy populations,” said senior author Takufumi Yanagisawa. “The similarities between many of our results and those of previous studies, using other species or methods, indicate that our approach worked well.”The authors conclude that their data helps support the hypothesis that the medial temporal lobe of the brain – where the hippocampus and parahippocampus are – has an important role in self-generated states. This, they say, could have important implications in the study of a range of different conditions and aspects of the human experience, such as intelligence and happiness.More research building on these methods will hopefully allow us to unlock more of the secrets of what the human brain gets up to when it’s not directly focused on a task.You might even say, this study could have a ripple effect. I’ll see myself out.The study is published in Nature Communications.

Eel reproduction was a famous animal mystery that was solved back in 2022, but did you know that there are lots of animals that humans have never seen give birth? For some species like snow leopards, we’ve been able to witness births in captivity, but for other animals we don’t have the first clue where their babies come from.In the case of deep-sea species like Architeuthis dux, it’s hardly surprising – after all, who’s got time to travel down 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) to find out. But what about animals like the saola, better known to some as the “Asian unicorn”? From horned mammals to the biggest fish in the world, there are some animal birth mysteries that are more surprising than others.Great white shark, Carcharodon carchariasIn 2024, the world was treated to an incredibly rare piece of footage. A drone is believed to have captured a newborn great white shark on camera for the first time. As the largest surviving fish to feed on something bigger than krill, you might expect that finding out where these oceanic behemoths give birth wouldn’t be so hard, and yet this is the closest we’ve come to seeing where baby great whites come from.                               The great white caught on camera was just 1.5 meters (5 feet) long, the expected length for a newborn, and appeared to be shedding a white layer from its body as it swam. While they can’t rule out that it was a juvenile with some kind of skin condition, it’s possible the small great white was shedding intrauterine substances having just been born. The sighting of some large, possibly pregnant, sharks in the days before could support this idea, and would make it the first time a newborn great white has ever been seen alive.The waters off Santa Barbara, California to north Baja California in Mexico, have previously been suggested as a possible site where great whites give birth. At time of writing, however, the birth of a great white shark has never been observed by humans.Whale sharks, Rhincodon typusWhere does the biggest fish in the world give birth? Nobody knows.Image credit: Animalgraphy / Shutterstock.comThe title of largest fish in the world goes to the whale shark, a krill-eating giant that can grow to around 20 meters (66 feet) in length, and weigh 20 tonnes. According to the Galapagos Whale Shark Project, 21 whale shark neonates (newborn pups) have been seen in the wild, but nobody has ever seen a whale shark give birth.The first ever wild whale shark ultrasound was achieved in 2018 by a team of scientists wielding a handheld probe off the Galápagos Islands. They were drawn to scanning the whale sharks here because most of them were female with swollen abdomens, but all they were able to spot were ovaries and unfertilized eggs.The Ningaloo Reef in Australia has also been flagged as a possible breeding or birthing ground for whale sharks, as they congregate here in large numbers each year following coral spawning and plankton blooms. Finding definitive answers for these massive animals is made all the more tricky because they sometimes dive down beneath the reach of tracking devices (as far as 2,000 meters or 6,600 feet) – so are these crucial behaviors taking place beyond our technologies’ reach? For now, it remains a mystery.Blue whale, Balaenoptera musculusWe've not seen blue whale birth, but we have seem them battling it out for a mate.Image credit: Andrew Sutton / Shutterstock.comThe world’s biggest mammal, and possibly the largest animal to have ever existed, has also so far evaded our prying eyes when it comes to giving birth. We have, however, caught them performing the world’s largest mating dance on camera and hoo boy – was it quite the show.The “battle royale” involved a group of males pursuing a female as they used their bulk to try and knock out the competition. Known as a racing group, they’ve been spotted in other whale species a few times but the observation off the coast of South Australia was a world-first for blue whales.                                  Rare observations for blue whales have included a calf nursing, and we know that the newborns come out big – topping weights of around 2,200 to 2,700 kilograms (5,000 to 6,000 pounds) according to the Marine Mammal Center. Throughout their lives blue whales visit every ocean except the Arctic, and though we’ve never observed a birth, it’s thought they travel to the warm waters off Central America to have their babies.Saola, aka Asian unicorn, Pseudoryx nghetinhensisVery few people have seen a saola alive.Photo by Bill Robichaud, Global Wildlife Conservation via flickr, CC BY 2.0Big marine animals may be able to escape our watch in the deep and vast ocean, but mysteries exist in the terrestrial landscape too, including the curious case of the Asian unicorn. Also known as the saola, it’s one of the world’s rarest animals and sits within the bovids, which includes other hoofed mammals like cattle, yaks, and bison.Saola are found in Laos and Vietnam along the Annamite Mountains where they live deep inside the forest. We know of their existence from camera traps, remains in villages including their distinctive round horns, and information from local villages, but no biologist has ever been lucky enough to see one in the wild, and certainly, nobody has ever seen one give birth.Snow leopard, Panthera unciaScientists only recently discovered the dens in which female snow leopards have their cubs.Image credit: Holly S Cannon / Shutterstock.comThe snow leopard has been bred in zoos, giving scientists some insight into the actual birthing process, but finding their natal dens in the wild has proven to be almost impossible. These elusive wild cats live high in remote, mountainous terrain where they’re incredibly hard to spot thanks to their remarkable camouflage that blends into the rocky landscape. The Snow Leopard Trust and Panthera did manage to find two natal dens after tracking radio collared females, both of which were high up in rock canyons. One of them occupied a human-made shelter, while the other was tucked between a narrow rock crevice. You can see it on camera here.Javan rhino, Rhinoceros sondaicusWe've caught Javan rhino babies on camera.Image credit: Nishath Riswan / Shutterstock.comThe Javan rhino is one of the world’s rarest large animals. As one of the five remaining rhinoceros species currently on Earth, the species is known for the relatively short and stumpy horns found only on males. They’re currently listed as critically endangered with extinction by the IUCN Red List, but happy news arrived in the form of footage of wild newborns earlier this year.The entire wild population exists solely in the Ujung Kulon National Park in Java, so while nobody’s ever reported observing the spectacle first-hand, we know that this must be where Javan rhinos are giving birth. Giving wild animals space is crucial to their good health, and the rhino calves of Ujung Kulon are appreciated from a distance with the aid of camera traps. It’ll likely require a stroke of luck and some good camera placement before anybody can claim to have seen a baby Javan rhino come into the fold, and for now, we’ll always have that cursed scene from Ace Ventura to fill in the gaps.Beyond satisfying our curiosity, finding out when and where animals give birth is a crucial step in creating an informed conservation plan for endangered species. As science marches on and our technologies grow ever more sophisticated, who knows? Maybe one day we’ll understand the intricacies of reproduction in the wild with as much conviction as a human baby going to The Four Seasons, Orlando.

The president of the European Commission is openly advertising her commitment to censoring speech as part of her re-election campaign, touting a “European Democracy Shield.” The European Union (EU) has an anti-free speech record, and that’s a reality of which European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen seems to be very proud. In a new ad, von der Leyen brags about her dedication to censoring alleged “disinformation,” supposedly to safeguard “democracy.” Would-be censors often label any opinion with which they disagree as “disinformation.” Von der Leyen appears to be no different. She has vowed to work to “remove content” and “pre-bunk” online speech. Von der Leyen posted an anti-free speech adon X (formerly Twitter) May 20. “Europe must be able to defend itself - against all kinds of attacks. I will propose a European Democracy Shield,” the incumbent president and candidate posted. “To detect disinformation and malign interference To remove content, including AI deepfakes[.] To make our societies more resilient.” Von der Leyen’s censorship commitment was repeated in the ad as well. “The threat of disinformation and foreign interference is more serious than ever,” the ad begins. Von der Leyen was then shown saying, “The aim of all this is to divide our societies from within.” The ad continued, “The enemies of our democracies are manipulating information to sow division. So we must step up our action with a European Democracy Shield.” In the ad, Von der Leyen detailed what this new “Democracy Shield” will entail: “An ambitious European project that focuses on the biggest threats from foreign interference and manipulation.” But this apparently involves Big Tech-government coordination to target online speech. As explained in the ad, “This new structure will track down information manipulation and coordinate with national agencies. The shield will detect foreign interference, remove content, with a stronger approach to AI deepfakes, and finally pre-bunk and build resilience.” But we have seen such partnerships’ dystopian effects before. The content removal and “pre-bunking” are particularly concerning for free speech in light of previous EU policies such as the Digital Services Act (DSA), which undermines freedom of speech. Here in America, government agencies and private researchers coordinated with Big Tech to censor content before, during and after elections in the Election Integrity Partnership. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using MRC Free Speech America’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.