If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Facebook has acknowledged censoring an iconic image of former President Donald Trump, taken right after he narrowly-survived an assassination attempt. The photo, which quickly went viral, shows Trump with a raised fist and a bloodied face, moments after the incident at a campaign rally. Meta says the mass censorship of the image was an “error.” The image in question was taken by an Associated Press photographer during a harrowing scene on July 13 in Butler, PA, where Trump was addressing supporters. During the speech, Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire, mildly injuring Trump and fatally wounding Corey Comperatore, a bystander who was shielding his family. This stark, emotive image became a symbol of defiance as Trump, despite his injury, stood up and rallied his supporters with a call to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” However, the photo’s journey through social media over the last day was marred by censorship. An altered version of this photo had surfaced online, showing Secret Service agents supposedly smiling after the event, which led to its initial restriction by Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers, who cited concerns of manipulation. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, later extended this caution to the original, unaltered image, a move they now say they regret. Dani Lever, communications director for Facebook, stated, “This was an error. This fact check was initially applied to a doctored photo showing the Secret Service agents smiling, and in some cases, our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo. This has been fixed and we apologize for the mistake.” This incident highlights ongoing concerns regarding the oversight of digital speech as algorithmic changes can have major impacts on which messages get shared. The mass censorship of the images follows a major news outlet’s photo editor criticizing the use of the widely-circulated photo. The editor argued that the dramatic image, which portrays President Trump bloodied but defiant, could inadvertently serve as “free PR” for him, glorifying his image amid a critical incident. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Meta Says Mass Censorship of Iconic Trump Photo Was an “Error” appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Dogs are called 'Man's Best Friend' for a variety of reasons – and a mutually beneficial relationship is one of them. And for thousands of years, we, hoomans, have been breeding dogs to perform specific tasks and distinct traits.

Biden Calls Speaker Johnson "Dead on Arrival." Twice.

If you stumbled across this sight after staggering through the desert for days, you’d assume you were seeing a mirage or a vision of dehydrated delirium. Rest assured, this surreal spectacle is very much real (and not AI-generated either).The Guelta d'Archei is an ancient watering hole located in the depths of the Sahara in the Ennedi Region of northeastern Chad.It consists of a narrow valley filled with shallow freshwater, lined with towering rock walls. As one of the few pockets of water in the hyper-arid region, it serves as a much-needed haven for nomadic tribes to bring their camels to rehydrate.The camels can’t relax too much, though. The Guelta d'Archei is also home to a small population of Nile crocodiles that have managed to survive since the era of the “Green Sahara” between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago.“In this oasis exists a relict fauna and flora, concentrated for the most part in the gorges with water sources. One of the most iconic examples is the presence of crocodiles in the Guelta d’Archeï. These crocodiles have survived since the end of the river connections, thousands of years ago. They are the last survivors in the Sahara, other than populations in the Nile River Valley in Egypt and in Mauritania,” explained a brochure published by UNESCO in 2016.Another shot of the camel-filled Guelta d'Archei with blue skies above.Image credit: David Stanley via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)While humans are scarcely seen here today, prolific rock art in the region shows a faint glimmer of their presence from thousands upon thousands of years ago.The wider Ennedi region hosts thousands of rock engravings and paintings dating to between 5000 BCE and 1700 CE. The artworks depict wild animals, cattle, humans, and – of course – camels, illustrated in a variety of local styles. "These paintings help us to reconnect with our identity, our culture and where we come from. Ennedi is an open book to the history of our ancestors," Angèle Aloumbe, who works for African Parks based in the capital of Chad, N'Djamena, told BBC Travel."I'm always crying when I go to Ennedi. It's such a beautiful landscape with very untouched people. No one can go there without feeling a connection. It has something really special," explained Aloumbe.As tempting as it may be to shoot a travel vlog here, we wouldn’t recommend visiting the Guelta d'Archei. The US State Department suggests travelers “reconsider travel to Chad due to crime, terrorism, civil unrest, and kidnapping,” while the UK Foreign Office advises against all travel to the region. Even if the heated socio-political situation doesn’t put you off, the journey would deter even the most ardent traveler. According to the UNESCO brochure, it's a four-day journey across the desert via 4×4 to reach the vicinity of the Guelta d'Archei from N’Djamena.[H/T: Jacob Shell]

A 170-year-old shipwreck overflowing with Europe's finest champagne and mineral water has been found off the coast of Sweden.Around 100 bottles of the bubbling booty were discovered earlier this month by the Baltictech diving group just 37 kilometers (20 nautical miles) south of the Swedish island of Öland in the Baltic Sea. "The whole wreck is loaded to the brim with crates of champagne, mineral water, and porcelain," Tomasz Stachura, diver and leader of the Baltictech Team, said in a statement sent to IFLScience."I have been diving for 40 years, and it often happens that there is one bottle or two... but to discover a wreck with so much cargo, it's a first for me," said Stachura. While the champagne bottles might be the headline-snatcher, it’s the mineral water that holds the greatest historical significance. In the 19th century, mineral water was prized for its therapeutic benefits and became a fashionable drink for Europe’s rich and famous.It was stored in sealed clayed bottles, providing a vital clue about the vessel's history. The shape of the stamp indicates that the bottles were produced between 1850 to 1867 by the German company Selters, famed for its natural mineral water sourced from the Taunus mountains, north of Frankfurt. Divers recently explored the bottle-laden shipwreck near Sweden.Image courtesy of Tomasz Stachura/Baltictech"We managed to take pictures of the brand name stamped on a clay bottle, which turned out to be from the German company Selters, produced to this day. The logo had this precise shape during that period," explained Marek Cacaj, an underwater videographer at Baltictech.Additionally, the porcelain onboard the wreck was made by a ceramic factory that still exists, so the team has made contact with the company to unearth more information. The divers have notified Swedish regional authorities about the shipwreck and are working with marine archeologists at Södertörn University on a project to return to the site. However, they were keen to point out that recovering the alcoholic treasure will take time “due to administrative restrictions.”"It had been lying there for 170 years, so let it lie there for one more year, and we will have time to better prepare for the operation," explained Stachura.Another view of the shipwreck loaded with bottles from the 19th century.Image courtesy of Tomasz Stachura/BaltictechThough always intriguing, champagne bottles have been found among several sunken ships from the 19th and early 20th centuries. In 2010, a group of divers discovered a shipwreck containing 168 bottles of champagne near Finland's Åland archipelago. Researchers even tasted the 170-year-old beverage, describing it in terms of “animal notes,” “wet hair,” and “cheesy.” Fancy a tipple?There are even champagne bottles on the wreck of the Titanic. Despite the immense pressure found 3,800 meters (12,500 feet) below the sea surface, the bottles didn’t implode and remained intact. How so? You can find out right here.

Time travel into the future is not only possible, it is practically unstoppable. You may try traveling at close to the speed of light, or parking yourself near a giant gravitational well – but no matter what you try, your clock will keep ticking ever onward, no matter how slowly someone from the outside observes it.Time travel to the past is a whole different theoretical ballgame. Science fiction writers and scientists alike have attempted to come up with ways it could be possible within the laws of physics as we currently understand them. A few possibilities have been suggested based on Einstein's field equations describing the curvature of spacetime by mass and energy. One idea that comes out of Einstein's work is that "closed timelike curves" could be possible, where spacetime is so warped (deliberately or by nature) that an object or observer traversing it would be returned to their starting point.A natural timelike curve (if it existed) would be a wormhole. These are structures allowed for in the math of general relativity connecting two separate regions of space and/or time. Physicists have suggested that a black hole could be connected to a mirror white hole, with the wormhole forming a connection. However we have never observed a wormhole, and physicists have tied themselves in knots trying to figure out if they would be stable enough to be traversable. After all, if you say "I have found a time machine", people will expect a little more from a demonstration than you getting crushed into a fine pulp the second you step foot in it.Another idea for a time machine using closed timelike curves is a Tipler cylinder, or Tipler time machine. This was first suggested in 1923, but gained popularity following a 1974 paper by physicist Frank Tipler.        The basic idea of the Tipler cylinder is to take a cylinder and rotate it incredibly quickly. This doesn't sound too complicated, considering the result would be a functional time machine – but before you go hunting for a used toilet roll, there are a few caveats. The cylinder itself must be incredibly long and incredibly dense, likely requiring the matter of at least ten times our Sun's mass to work. Then you have to rotate it to absurd speeds, so that it is spinning a few billion times a second. On another practical level, you would then have to be able to approach the tube – with its incredible gravitational pull – and traverse it, while it hopefully is not blown apart by the force of its own rotation. But if you were able to overcome those problems, entering the cylinder and accelerating on the right path inside the cylinder-warped spacetime should (according to some highly speculative math) let you emerge thousands or billions of years away, and possibly several galaxies away from where you started."Your path, which normally inextricably moves you forward in time, changes, since moving around the cylinder in the direction of rotation will shift you back in time," math educator Steve Humble explains in The Conversation. "The machine makes the direction of time collapse into the past, so the longer you follow the machine’s spin, the further back in time you will go. To reset the movement to normal, simply move away from the cylinder, go back to Earth and you will be returned to the present – albeit a present in the past."As fun as that sounds as a project for a Type II / Type III civilization, we still would not get our hopes up. Like with wormholes, it is unclear if such a thing – with all its possible causality-breaking tag-ons – could exist outside of an interesting math paper. And if it could, it's possible that it would require negative mass, which we do not know exists, or a cylinder that is infinitely long. If we have mastered creating that, we will probably be in an interesting enough time that we might not want to go back to the past anyway.

Why do people cheat? Psychologists reckon they have a good handle on this question when it comes to men, but for women the picture is less clear. A new study surveyed people from 19 countries to explore this question, but there were no simple answers to be found.Being cheated on can be among the most traumatic and difficult life experiences. It’s risky for the cheater too, who will often lose not only their relationship but also the esteem of others in the community – albeit some research suggests cheaters feel less guilt than we might think.This explains science’s continued fascination with why people cheat, who is more likely to cheat, and factors that might help predict or prevent it. One question that has sparked vigorous debate in this field is whether there are gender differences at play.“While scholars largely agree men's infidelity evolved by increasing offspring quantity,” begins the new study, “the evolutionary drivers of women's infidelity remain debated.” As lead author and University of Melbourne PhD study Macken Murphy told PsyPost, “In a way, there are too many good explanations for it!”As Murphy and colleagues explain in their paper, psychologists believe that the drive to father more offspring by having more partners explains much of male infidelity even now, in the age of contraceptives.When it comes to women, however, this is a less compelling explanation – having multiple sexual partners doesn’t necessarily mean more kids. Many other theories have been proposed, including the idea that having multiple partners allows women to obtain more resources, or that women cheat to punish bad behavior in their primary partner or to drive them away and help them end the relationship. To try and sift through some of these theories, Murphy and colleagues surveyed 254 heterosexual, cisgender men and women using an online platform. The group had a mean age of 30.5 years, and all participants self-described themselves as having had sex outside of an otherwise exclusive relationship.All of the participants were English speakers, but they covered a wide range of countries across six continents, with the majority being spread between South Africa, the UK, and Mexico.The team used adapted versions of some well-established rating scales to assess the participants' physical, personal, and parental (that is, their perceived ability to be a good parent) attraction towards both their primary partner and the person they cheated with. They also asked them to describe in their own words why they had an affair. The women in the study generally found their affair partners more physically attractive, and their primary partners more parentally attractive. That provides some evidence for the “strategic dualism” theory, which suggests that conceiving a child with someone outside their relationship allows women to obtain “good genes” while remaining with a partner they perceive as a good father. Unexpectedly, the patterns emerging from the men surveyed in the study were very similar to those in the women.“Finding that men were strategically dualistic as well – prioritizing physical attraction in affair partners and parental ability in primary partners – was a surprise,” Murphy told PsyPost. When women were asked to describe in their own words why they had cheated, a number of different motives emerged – seeking novelty, feeling dissatisfied with their primary partner, and revenge being among them. The quantitative data provided little evidence that women were cheating to find a new long-term partner, but some did cite this as a reason in their free-text response.“Our qualitative data should be interpreted with caution,” write the authors. Not everyone will feel comfortable giving a true account of their motives for cheating. Another key limitation is that the authors did not collect data on whether or not people had children, which might have affected their decision-making.Ultimately, the authors concluded that “seeking a 'primary explanation' for infidelity, as we have in this study, is a low-resolution approach to the issue.” In other words, there are no simple answers here.“People cheat for a variety of reasons, consistent with a variety of evolutionary hypotheses.”The study is published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

They're the Stepford Party: Democrats Being Programmed to Say 'Weird' On Cue Is Just ... Weird

Tuesday Morning Minute

Republican Congressional candidate Abe Hamadeh told Newsmax on Monday that voters "truly do" recognize how Vice President Kamala Harris is such a radical liberal, especially when it comes to immigration.