Vijay's film 'Jan Nayagan' suspended in Karnataka due to Cauvery water sharing dispute

In the 19th century, photography began to become financially accessible, but it was still a relatively new technology, making the idea of permanently recording someone's image seem unusual. The first documented photograph appeared in 1826, but it was in 1839 that Louis Daguerre introduced the daguerreotype, the first commercially successful photographic method, which recorded images on small metal plates.

With the rapid improvement of the process, photography gained popularity, and a habit established itself in many British families: taking pictures of deceased relatives as an eternal memory. Although documenting the dead was not unprecedented, before the 19th century, this was restricted to the wealthy, who hired artists to paint portraits. Photography, being much more economical, allowed families of lower income to also have access to this memory, especially from the 1850s.

The high mortality rate in Europe, which hovered around 40 years due to childhood vulnerability in an era without antibiotics, generated a large demand. During mourning, families sought out photographers to create a record, an act known as 'memento mori,' which means 'remember that you will die' in Latin.

Although these images were known as 'Victorian death photos' in English, the practice expanded throughout Europe, as well as to other places such as the United States and Australia. Historian Stanley Burns calculated that about 30 million daguerreotypes of deceased people were produced in the US between 1841 and 1860.

These photographs required careful posing: mothers holding children, couples embracing, or babies sleeping. Frequently, the models were placed in coffins or beds. Unlike portraits of living people, which were taken in studios, photos of the dead were generally taken in domestic settings. Families cared for the loved one, dressing them in nice clothes and arranging special hairstyles. Some photographers had the technique of opening the eyes of the corpses or even painting the eyes in the photos to simulate them being open.

Many Victorian photographers were skilled at posing deceased babies to look like they were sleeping, applying even a slight pink tone to the cheeks to suggest vitality. The setting was also planned, decorated with flowers and items reminiscent of time, such as clocks and hourglasses, indicating that it was a post-mortem image. There were also photos where the living posed next to the deceased. In these cases, a notable effect occurred: the dead appeared sharper in the final image because they remained still during the capture (which lasted a few minutes), while the living appeared slightly blurred. Some children were photographed with their deceased dogs.

Later examples show the deceased inside a coffin, accompanied by a large group of people at the funeral. This type of record was more popular in Europe than in the US.

There were practical challenges in dealing with a body. In a 1873 edition of the magazine Philadelphia Photographer, photographer Albert Southworth reported: 'If a person has died and friends fear there will be liquid expulsion from the mouth, it is possible to turn them carefully, as if under the effect of an emetic. This can be done in less than a minute; all contents will be expelled, and then it is possible to clean the mouth, wash the face, and handle the body as well as if the person were alive.'

However, the general rule was to treat the deceased with the utmost respect. Post-mortem photos were not a pastime but a sincere attempt to keep the relative alive in memory. The poses were designed to convey solemnity, and the bodies were not subjected to disrespectful manipulations. Claims that corpses were hung or supported upright to look alive lack historical basis.

These photographs were preserved as memories, displayed in homes, sent to family and friends, or kept in lockets and pockets. The practice of post-mortem photos declined in the early 20th century due to medical advancements, the reduction in infant mortality, and the implementation of stricter sanitary standards in body treatment. Additionally, progress in photographic technology and the emergence of home cameras allowed people to maintain extensive records of their loved ones while alive, making post-mortem photography unnecessary.

Claro is implementing a gradual change to its Claro TV+ Box, which involves disabling the integration with the Alexa assistant developed by Amazon. Marcio Carvalho, Claro's Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), informed Tecnoblog in an interview that this decision originated from Amazon itself, which opted to end the program to introduce third-party hardware across Latin America.

Since its launch in 2022, the Claro receiver had the functionality to activate Alexa. Users could issue commands near the remote control to perform common tasks, such as checking the calendar, knowing the temperature, or checking weather forecasts.

The transition began on May 12, when the latest devices provided by Claro stopped having access to Alexa. Although older customers still have the feature, it will be completely removed on October 5. According to Carvalho, the use of this functionality did not reach the expected level among the operator's customer base, as 'we expected it to be used more'.

Even without Alexa, the receivers continue to accept voice commands through the button present on the remote control. The company clarified that these commands can be used to change channels (by name or number), search for content by title, genre, or cast, open applications, and execute commands within those applications.

Is a new assistant coming?

Claro's CMO also communicated that the partnership with Amazon remains relevant in other areas, such as cloud computing services and content provision via Prime Video. The executive expressed respect for Amazon's decision.

Regarding interaction with the content receiver, Claro employees are already developing a project to integrate a new artificial intelligence assistant. This new system aims to help consumers navigate the pay TV catalog, being capable of controlling the television, but focusing primarily on searching and suggesting movies, series, and programs.

Claro TV+'s future functionality will depend on an orchestration system capable of triggering different AI models according to user needs. This technical approach has been adopted by several technology companies, allowing them not to be dependent on a single provider and to switch providers if costs increase excessively. Claro receivers are equipped with microphones and use four horizontally arranged RGB LEDs, a visually similar arrangement to that found in products using Google Assistant.

Evolutionary psychologist Adriano Lameira conducted a study to test two hypotheses regarding the volume of the vocal repertoire in primates. The analysis revealed that the number of animals in a group does not influence the richness of their vocal repertoire.

The analysis covered the vocal repertoires of 77 primate species and showed that their vocal stock depends on several factors: where the species lives predominantly (on land or in trees), its body mass, and the interaction of these two characteristics.

It was established that in arboreal primates, the volume of the vocal repertoire increased proportionally with an increase in their body size. For other species, there was no dependence on body size, but the habitat became the determining factor: a terrestrial lifestyle was associated with a smaller repertoire than expected, while a mixed lifestyle was associated with a larger one.

Previously, according to the social brain hypothesis, it was believed that a species' brain size correlates with its social complexity, i.e., group size. This link has been observed in primates, some cetaceans, birds, and carnivorous mammals. In 2005, scientists demonstrated that in 42 primate species, group size was related to vocal repertoire: the larger the group, the more diverse the sounds the species made. This was explained by the need for more precise communication to maintain complex social bonds, which in turn resembled the process of human speech emergence.

However, modern revisions of many primate species' dictionaries show that the direct link with group size is not always obvious. Furthermore, there are other potential factors influencing the size of the vocal repertoire, such as the animal's physique and its habitat.

Adriano Lameira from Warwick University analyzed the vocal repertoires of 77 primate species, including humans, studying their relationship with group size, brain size, body mass, and type of lifestyle (arboreal, terrestrial, or mixed), taking into account phylogenetic relationships between species.

The study found that neither group size nor brain size was a predictor of vocal repertoire size (p > 0.05). Instead, the habitat played a decisive role. In arboreal species, the habitat interacted with body size: every doubling of body mass increased the repertoire by approximately 28 percent (p = 0.027), whereas this dependence was not observed in terrestrial and mixed species.

Habitat also had an independent effect: the repertoires of species with a mixed lifestyle were 17 percent higher than predicted by a model based only on group size, brain size, and body size. Arboreal species' repertoires exceeded the prediction by 8 percent, while terrestrial ones lagged by 6 percent.

According to Lameira, the data refute the idea that primate vocal diversity is due to social complexity. The main factors appear to be physical parameters—body size and environment. The researcher hypothesized that the emergence of language in humans might have been a consequence of our ancestors' arboreal lifestyle, rather than a result of social structure.

Anthropologists previously noted that chimpanzees in the Issa Valley, living in a mosaic environment where dense forests neighbor open areas, more often move on two limbs, but do so along branches rather than on the ground. This observation led scientists to suggest that the development of bipedalism in the ancestors of modern humans was not directly linked to the transition to a terrestrial lifestyle.