Finland’s fertility rate has dropped below 1.3 children per woman, the lowest among Nordic countries and far beneath the 2.1 replacement level needed to maintain a steady population. The rate has declined by a third since 2010. Kela, Finland’s social insurance agency, started distributing 2025 “baby boxes” — filled with clothing and other infant supplies — in August instead of spring because so many 2024 boxes remained unclaimed.

More parents now choose cash payments over the traditional boxes filled with infant supplies. The decline puzzles researchers because Finland offers paid parental leave for both mothers and fathers, subsidized childcare and national healthcare. Anneli Miettinen, Kela’s research manager, said that good family policies no longer explain birth rates in Nordic countries. Immigration has offset some population loss, but officials worry about workforce shrinkage and pension system strain.

Anna Rotkirch, who authored a government-commissioned report, found that many 17-year-olds describe wanting a house, garden, spouse and three children. Her research suggests young people struggle to form relationships, focus on education and careers, and delay childbearing. Some researchers attribute relationship difficulties to technology reducing physical interactions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mexico City is one of the more unusual places that Formula 1 races, and it’s all thanks to altitude. The city sits at than 7,350 feet (2,240 m) above sea level, which makes the air noticeably thin compared to the average Grand Prix held at sea level. Like humans, F1 cars need air.

Oxygen is necessary if you want any internal combustion to happen inside the turbocharged 1.6 L V6 engine. A good flow of air across the various radiators and heat exchangers in the car is vital if you want to make it to the end of the race. And the downforce-generating wings and underbody only generate downforce by creating differences in air pressure above and below the car.

At over a mile above sea level, there’s about 20 percent less air, and therefore less power created by combustion, less efficient cooling of the cars, and less downforce able to be generated.

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Contacts with cat pupils or neon colors can be fun, but are you sure you want to put a piece of plastic from a costume store into your eye? Experts, like those at the American Academy of Ophthalmology, warn against it. These non-prescription contacts are technically illegal in the U.S. (even though plenty of companies sell them anyway). The CDC warns that the risks include “eye sores and vision loss.”

Why costume contacts often aren’t safe

Cheap Halloween contacts tend to be one-size-fits-all, but the AAO points out that contacts should never be one-size-fits-all. A contact that is too large or too small for your eye can cause corneal abrasions, corneal ulcers, and can result in infections like keratitis. Infections can, in severe cases, lead to blindness. A 2017 report from the FDA found bacterial contamination in 27% of costume contacts.

If you do wear contacts (Halloween or otherwise), the AAO recommends keeping an eye out for symptoms like redness, swelling, pain, or excessive discharge. Seek care as soon as you suspect an infection. Your eyes are more sensitive to infections than other parts of the body, so be cautious.

How to find safe costume contacts

Legally, contacts require a prescription, so if those colored contacts you’re eyeing can be bought without showing a doctor’s prescription, they’re not legit. The real thing can be expensive, though: I found prices ranging from $40 to $110 per pair from lens.com, Discount Contacts, and Wicked Eyez.

These websites all let you order online, but you’ll have to provide your prescription information before you can check out. Fortunately, the Federal Trade Commission has ruled that providers must give you your contact prescription after a fitting so that you can take the prescription elsewhere. And they cannot charge you extra for this.

Once you’ve got the lenses, you have to know how to take care of them. If you wear contacts every day, you already know the drill. But if you’re just picking up a pair to use with a costume, here are the basics:

• Wash your hands before handling the lenses.

• Store them in contact lens solution, and keep the lenses and their case clean.

• Don’t sleep or swim with them in.

• And for Pete’s sake, don’t share them with your friends!

After all, the bloodshot look stops being cool after you take your zombie costume off.

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The 2025 JBL Charge 6 is currently on sale for $139.99 on StackSocial, about $30 cheaper than Amazon’s $169.95 listing and at its lowest price ever, according to price trackers. It’s for an open-box model, which means the packaging may carry a few extra stickers or scuffs from store handling, but the unit itself is verified as new and comes with a one-year warranty. Free shipping is included, though only within the contiguous U.S.

The Charge 6 is a rugged, carry-friendly speaker designed to go anywhere—pool, beach, or backyard. JBL added a looped handle that makes it easier to haul around, and the build itself feels sturdy enough to take some knocks. It’s dust-tight and can be submerged in about five feet of water for up to half an hour thanks to its IP68 rating, so you don’t need to worry if it gets splashed or dropped poolside. Inside, a larger woofer and tweeter produce a combined 45 watts of power, with passive radiators on each end adding more thump. The result is a sound that feels loud and punchy for the size, even if the lowest bass notes don’t come through. This PCMag review notes that its clarity and volume stand out in the compact speaker category.

JBL also packed in some useful upgrades. The speaker now supports Auracast, letting you tap into compatible broadcasts, and it delivers lossless audio through the USB-C port if you’re willing to plug in. Bluetooth 5.4 maintains reliability, although codec support is limited to AAC and SBC, which is a disappointment for higher-quality wireless streaming. The JBL companion app also offers a seven-band EQ, several sound presets, and a Playtime Boost option that extends battery life by reducing bass levels. At this price, it’s worth considering if you’re looking for a speaker that’s portable, loud, and durable enough to withstand some rough treatment outdoors.

Australia’s competition regulator sued Microsoft today, accusing it of misleading millions of customers into paying higher prices for its Microsoft 365 software after bundling it with AI tool Copilot. From a report: The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission alleged that from October 2024, the technology giant misled about 2.7 million customers by suggesting they had to move to higher-priced Microsoft 365 personal and family plans that included Copilot.

After the integration of Copilot, the annual subscription price of the Microsoft 365 personal plan increased by 45% to A$159 ($103.32) and the price of the family plan increased by 29% to A$179, the ACCC said. The regulator said Microsoft failed to clearly tell users that a cheaper “classic” plan without Copilot was still available.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A zebra’s distinctive black-and-white stripes, or a leopard’s spots, are both examples of “Turing patterns,” after mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, who proposed an intriguing hypothetical mechanism for how such complex, irregular patterns might emerge in nature. But Turing’s original proposal proved too simplified to fully recreate those natural patterns. Scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB) have devised a new modeling approach that achieves much more accurate final patterns by introducing deliberate imperfections, according to a new paper published in the journal Matter.

Turing focused on chemicals known as morphogens in his seminal 1952 paper. He devised a mechanism involving the interaction between an activator chemical that expresses a unique characteristic (like a tiger’s stripe) and an inhibitor chemical that periodically kicks in to shut down the activator’s expression. Both activator and inhibitor diffuse throughout a system, much like gas atoms will do in an enclosed box. It’s a bit like injecting a drop of black ink into a beaker of water. Normally, this would stabilize a system, and the water would gradually turn a uniform gray. But if the inhibitor diffuses at a faster rate than the activator, the process is destabilized. That mechanism will produce spots or stripes.

Scientists have tried to apply this basic concept to many different kinds of systems. For instance, neurons in the brain could serve as activators and inhibitors, depending on whether they amplify or dampen the firing of other nearby neurons—possibly the reason why we see certain patterns when we hallucinate. There is evidence for Turing mechanisms at work in zebra-fish stripes, the spacing between hair follicles in mice, feather buds on a bird’s skin, the ridges on a mouse’s palate, and the digits on a mouse’s paw.

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It happened again. Peacock just raised subscription prices for its Premium and Premium Plus plans. This is the third price increase in as many years. If your bank account is feeling the pain, or if you’re just looking to streamline your entertainment options, you may decide it’s time to take a break from NBC’s flagship platform. Here’s everything you need to know about canceling your Peacock subscription.

How to cancel via web

The simplest way to end your Peacock Premium service is if you’re being billed directly by the company. You can follow the same steps in a web or mobile browser.

1. Log in to your Peacock Premium or Premium Plus account.

2. Click on the Profile icon.

3. Select Account or Plans & Payments.

4. Click on Cancel Plan.

5. Follow the prompts to confirm the cancellation.

That’s pretty simple, but things get a bit more complicated if you’re not in a direct-billing situation.

How to cancel via third-party provider

Like most modern streaming platforms, Peacock has partnerships with third-party providers like Apple and Amazon. This lets users sign up for the service through an entirely separate platform, like Prime Video. Cancelling has to also go through this third party. The general idea here is to sign into that account and find somewhere to manage billing and subscriptions, looking for Peacock. Here are specific steps for some of the more common providers.

Cancel via Apple

1. Go to the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad.

2. Tap on your name at the top of the screen and tap Subscriptions.

3. Select your Peacock subscription to manage and make changes.

Cancel via Amazon

1. Go to Amazon Memberships and Subscriptions using a web browser.

2. Sign in to your Amazon account.

3. Navigate to your Peacock subscription and select Cancel Subscription.

Cancel via Google Play

1. Go to the Google Play store using a web browser.

2. Confirm that you’re signed in to your Google account.

3. On the top right, click your Google account icon and select Payment & Subscriptions.

4. Click the Subscriptions tab and select your Peacock subscription.

5. Click Manage and select Cancel subscription.

Cancel via Roku

1. On your Roku TV, highlight Peacock.

2. Press the star (*) button.

3. Select Manage Subscriptions.

4. Look for Peacock and hit Cancel.

How to cancel a promotional subscription

Peacock is often given away by internet providers like Comcast and phone carriers, among others. These plans often start free, but that goes away after a year or so. Check the fine print to see when your gifted subscription will run out, as you’ll begin getting charged the usual rate. The best way to cancel these subscriptions is via the entity that offered it in the first place. This means you’ll have to call up Xfinity or Spectrum directly. A customer representative should be able to handle the cancellation.

Can I pause a Peacock subscription?

No, Peacock doesn’t currently offer the ability to pause a subscription. The best way to effectively “pause” a subscription is to cancel via one of the aforementioned methods and then resubscribe at a later date.

What happens after you cancel?

Cancelling a Peacock subscription doesn’t immediately end your service. There are no partial refunds given, so you’ll have full access to the account until the next payment date. At that point, the service will revert to the free tier. This means that if you change your mind before the next pay period, it’s really easy to get things going again. Just look for a Restart Subscription button somewhere on the Account page.

Like most modern tech services, cancelling doesn’t erase any of your data. The subscription reverts to the free tier and will live on. To permanently close an account, you have to manually fill out a request via the Privacy Web Form in the Account page. This will lead you to a website to close the account.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/how-to-cancel-your-peacock-subscription-160047090.html?src=rss

TikTok and the U.S.’ “will they, won’t they” saga may finally be coming to an end. After nine months of kicking the can down the road, the U.S. has reportedly reached a deal with China to allow TikTok to continue operating in the States, which should come as good news for the estimated one-third of Americans who use the app.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed the development in a Face the Nation appearance on Sunday. Bessent told Margaret Brennan that the U.S. “reached a final deal on TikTok. We reached one in Madrid, and I believe that as of today, all the details are ironed out, and that will be for the two leaders to consummate that transaction on Thursday in Korea.”

The secretary did not share any additional details of the deal, but we do know what the U.S. had in mind heading into the talks. Last month, President Trump signed an executive order outlining what TikTok’s future would look like in the U.S., assuming a deal with its parent company ByteDance and the Chinese government went through.

Per the law signed by President Biden last year, TikTok has to sell to an American company or face a ban in the U.S. According to Trump’s executive order, that represents a joint venture of different investors and American companies, namely Oracle, which will now have a majority stake in the company. ByteDance will continue to have a minority stake, controlling less than 20% of the company.

We also know from past reporting that it’s highly likely that users will need to download a new version of TikTok. This U.S. iteration of the app would look and feel the same, but would eventually ship with a new algorithm “retrained and monitored” by “trusted security partners” of the U.S. Your data would also no longer be collected and stored by companies based in China; rather, your TikTok info will be collected and stored in a cloud environment controlled by an American company.

We won’t know the specifics until the deal is public, but if the secretary is to be believed, the deal is at least official. Soon enough, TikTok will be allowed to operate in the U.S. with zero risk of being banned—though the privacy risks it poses may have just moved from one country to another.

Meta’s Threads is getting its own version of ephemeral posting with a new feature the company is calling “ghost posts.” The temporary posts will be published within Threads’ main feed like any other post, but will disappear after 24 hours. And while other users can interact with ghost posts, only the original poster will be able to view likes and replies. 

Instead of typical public-facing replies, replies to ghost posts will be routed directly to users’ inboxes, where they can opt to respond privately. In some cases, this could also mean that replies for ghost posts are more limited than replies to normal posts, as Meta’s default messaging settings limit DMs to followed accounts only (these settings can be tweaked in the Threads app).

In some ways, it’s not surprising Meta would add temporary posts to Threads as a way to encourage users there to share more. On Instagram, Stories are used far more than permanent grid posts. In a blog post, Meta describes the new feature as a way for people to “share unfiltered thoughts and fresh takes without the pressure of permanence or polish.”

But ephemeral formats haven’t always been successful on text-based platforms like Threads. Twitter briefly experimented with an ephemeral Stories like format it called “Fleets.” Then-CEO Jack Dorsey reportedly “grew to despise” the feature, and it was killed less than a year after it launched. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/threads-introduces-ghost-posts-that-disappear-after-24-hours-160000228.html?src=rss