The social network formerly known as Twitter has fully migrated over to X.com, owner Elon Musk said Friday.

The billionaire head of Tesla, SpaceX and other companies bought Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022 and announced the rebrand to X last July.

Although the logo and branding were changed to “X,” the domain name remained Twitter.com until Friday.

“All core systems are now on X.com,” Musk wrote on X, posting an image of a logo of a white X on a blue circle.

Queries to Twitter.com redirected users to X.com on Friday morning, though the original domain name still appeared on some browsers.

Musk has repeatedly used the letter X in the branding of his companies, starting in 1999 with his attempt to set up an online financial superstore called X.com.

When he bought Twitter, he set up a company called X Corp to close the deal.

Musk has said he wants “X” to become a super-app along the lines of China’s WeChat.

The Chinese app is much bigger than X and weaves together messaging, voice and video calling, social media, mobile payment, games, news, online booking and other services.

He has also bolted onto X an AI chatbot called “Grok,” which was launched in Europe this week.

Musk’s leadership of X has proved controversial.

He has fired thousands of staff, overseen major technical problems and reinstated accounts of right-wing conspiracy theorists, as well as former President Donald Trump.

European regulators have also begun probes into X and other social media platforms over fears of misinformation.

The EU demanded earlier this month that X explain its decision to cut content moderation staff, giving the company a deadline of Friday.

AFP has contacted X for its response. 

Scientists have discovered a long-buried branch of the Nile river that once flowed alongside more than 30 pyramids in Egypt, potentially solving the mystery of how ancient Egyptians transported the massive stone blocks to build the famous monuments.

The 40-mile-long river branch, which ran by the iconic Giza pyramid complex among other wonders, was hidden under desert and farmland for millennia, according to a study revealing the find on Thursday.

The existence of the river would explain why the 31 pyramids were built in a chain along a now inhospitable desert strip in the Nile Valley between 4,700 and 3,700 years ago.

The strip near the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis includes the Great Pyramid of Giza — the only surviving structure of the seven wonders of the ancient world — as well as the Khafre, Cheops and Mykerinos pyramids.

Archaeologists had long thought that ancient Egyptians must have used a nearby waterway to move the giant materials used to build the pyramids.

“But nobody was certain of the location, the shape, the size or proximity of this mega waterway to the actual pyramids site,” lead study author Eman Ghoneim of the University of North Carolina Wilmington in the United States told AFP.

The international team of researchers used radar satellite imagery to map the river branch, which they called Ahramat — “pyramids” in Arabic.

Radar gave them the “unique ability to penetrate the sand surface and produce images of hidden features including buried rivers and ancient structures,” Ghoneim said.

Surveys in the field and cores of sediment from the site confirmed the presence of the river, according to the study in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

The once mighty river was increasingly covered in sand, potentially starting during a major drought around 4,200 years ago, the scientists suggested.

“Easier to float down the river”

The Giza pyramids stood on a plateau roughly a kilometer from the banks of the river.

Many of the pyramids had a “ceremonial raised walkway” which ran alongside the river before ending at the Valley Temples which served as harbors, Ghoneim said.

This indicates that the river played “a key role in the transportation of the enormous building materials and workmen needed for the pyramid’s construction,” she added.

Exactly how ancient Egyptians managed to build such huge and long-standing structures has been one of history’s great mysteries.  

These heavy materials, most of which were from the south, “would have been much easier to float down the river” than transport over land, study co-author Suzanne Onstine of the University of Memphis told AFP.

The banks of the rivers could have been where the funeral entourages of pharaohs were received before their bodies were moved to their “final burial place within the pyramid,” she suggested.

The river may also indicate why the pyramids were built in different spots.

“The water’s course and its volume changed over time, so fourth dynasty kings had to make different choices than 12th dynasty kings,” she said.

“The discovery reminded me about the intimate connection between geography, climate, environment and human behavior.”

The study comes on the heels of recent research projects focusing on the iconic pyramids.

Earlier this year, archaeologists launched a massive project to restore the smallest of Giza’s three famous pyramids to what they believe it looked like when it was built more than 4,000 years ago. An Egyptian-Japanese archaeological mission announced the project to put back in place hundreds of granite blocks that used to form the outer casing of the pyramid of King Menkaure.

Some archeologists, however, including a former head of Egypt’s antiquities ministry, aren’t on board with the project, and expressed concern as the digging got underway. Dr. Mohamed Abd El-Maqsoud, former Director of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector and a former senior official in Egypt’s antiquities ministry, told CBS News that before the granite blocks are moved, they should first be studied extensively to verify that they were all even part of the structure to begin with.

Last year, a team of archaeologists and other scientists in Egypt used cutting-edge technology that relies on rays of radiation from space to get a clear picture of a 30-foot-long corridor inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, which remains hidden behind a main entrance to the ancient structure. 

Ahmed Shawkat contributed to this report.