Latest News
Last updated 09 Jan, 04:23 PM
BBC News
Owner of Swiss ski bar held in custody after deadly New Year's Eve fire - Jacques Moretti is being held as a potential flight risk, Swiss media reports say.
Changes to Elon Musk's AI tool Grok 'insulting' to sexual violence victims, UK says - It comes after government urged Ofcom to use all its powers – up to and including an effective ban – against X.
Gabby Logan pays tribute to her 'warrior' dad Terry Yorath - The presenter describes her dad as a "generous man" who instilled a "lifelong love of sport" in her.
The continued mysteries surrounding the intelligence operation to capture Maduro - From intelligence sources to intricate mission plans, some details are becoming clearer - but many questions remain unanswered.
Trump's grand plan to reshape the world order leaves Europe with a difficult choice to make - The turbocharged events of the last week - and the new US National Security Strategy - raise pressing questions about the new world order, and what it means for Europe
The Register
Putinswap: France trades alleged ransomware crook for conflict researcher - Basketball player accused of aiding cybercrime gang extradition blocked in exchange for Swiss NGO consultant France has released an alleged ransomware crook wanted by the US in exchange for a conflict researcher imprisoned in Russia.…
QR codes a powerful new phishing weapon in hands of Pyongyang cyberspies - State-backed attackers are using QR codes to slip past enterprise security and help themselves to cloud logins, the FBI says North Korean government hackers are turning QR codes into credential-stealing weapons, the FBI has warned, as Pyongyang's spies find new ways to duck enterprise security and help themselves to cloud logins.…
Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info - No naming that tune and no album covers Microsoft is celebrating the resurgence of interest in physical media in the only way it knows how… by halting the Windows Media Player metadata service.…
NASA decides to bring Crew-11 home early after astronaut health scare - Medical issue forces mission curtailment and leaves station short-handed NASA is bringing the Crew-11 astronauts back to Earth early after one encountered a medical issue that could not be dealt with aboard the orbiting outpost.…
Copper supplies set to peak just as tech needs more - Analysts say production will top out this decade while global electrification keeps ramping Concerns are mounting over copper supplies, with a fresh study warning that demand will likely outstrip production within a decade, threatening to constrain global technological advancement.…
New Scientist - Home
Man whose gut made its own alcohol gets relief from faecal transplant - A man with auto-brewery syndrome, a rare condition in which gut microbes produce intoxicating levels of alcohol, has been successfully treated with faeces from a super donor
'Knitted' satellite launching to monitor Earth's surface with radar - A standard industrial knitting machine has been modified to produce fabrics from tungsten wire coated in gold, which are used to form the dish on the CarbSAR satellite
City-sized iceberg has turned into a giant swimming pool - Satellite photos show meltwater on the surface of iceberg A23a collecting in an unusual way, which may be a sign that the huge berg is about to break apart
These images explore a 'utopic' village built for teaching maths - The Nesin Mathematics Village in western Turkey was dreamed up by award-winning mathematician Ali Nesin to engage his students
Tree bark microbiome has important overlooked role in climate - Tree bark has a total surface area similar to all of the land area on Earth. It is home to a wide range of microbial species unknown to science, and they can either take up or emit gases that have a warming effect on the climate
Hacker News
London–Calcutta Bus Service - Comments
How Will the Miracle Happen Today? - Comments
"They Saw a Protest": Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction [pdf] - Comments
Mathematics for Computer Science (2018) [pdf] - Comments
When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe - Comments
Slashdot
Send To Kindle from Microsoft Word is Discontinued - Microsoft is discontinuing its Send to Kindle integration in Word, ending a feature that allowed Microsoft 365 subscribers to send documents directly to their Kindle e-readers and preserve complex formatting through fixed layouts. The company updated its documentation to announce that beginning February 9th, 2026, the Send to Kindle feature will no longer work across Web, Win32, and Mac platforms. Microsoft has not disclosed why it's killing the integration but recommends users switch to Amazon's official Send to Kindle app. The feature launched in 2023 and was particularly valued by Kindle Scribe owners who could annotate the transferred documents. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why Care About Debt-to-GDP? - Abstract of a paper on NBER: We construct an international panel data set comprising three distinct yet plausible measures of government indebtedness: the debt-to-GDP, the interest-to-GDP, and the debt-to-equity ratios. Our analysis reveals that these measures yield differing conclusions about recent trends in government indebtedness. While the debt-to-GDP ratio has reached historically high levels, the other two indicators show either no clear trend or a declining pattern over recent decades. We argue for the development of stronger theoretical foundations for the measures employed in the literature, suggesting that, without such grounding, assertions about debt (un)sustainability may be premature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Record Ocean Heat is Intensifying Climate Disasters, Data Shows - The world's oceans absorbed yet another record-breaking amount of heat in 2025, continuing an almost unbroken streak of annual records since the start of the millennium and fueling increasingly extreme weather events around the globe. More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity's carbon emissions ends up in the oceans, making ocean heat content one of the clearest indicators of the climate crisis's trajectory. The analysis, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, drew on temperature data collected across the oceans and collated by three independent research teams. The measurements cover the top 2,000 meters of ocean depth, where most heat absorption occurs. The amount of heat absorbed is equivalent to more than 200 times the total electricity used by humans worldwide. This extra thermal energy intensifies hurricanes and typhoons, produces heavier rainfall and greater flooding, and results in longer marine heatwaves that decimate ocean life. The oceans are likely at their hottest in at least 1,000 years and heating faster than at any point in the past 2,000 years. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fusion Physicists Found a Way Around a Long-Standing Density Limit - alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: At the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), physicists successfully exceeded what is known as the Greenwald limit, a practical density boundary beyond which plasmas tend to violently destabilize, often damaging reactor components. For a long time, the Greenwald limit was accepted as a given and incorporated into fusion reactor engineering. The new work shows that precise control over how the plasma is created and interacts with the reactor walls can push it beyond this limit into what physicists call a 'density-free' regime. [...] A team led by physicists Ping Zhu of Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Ning Yan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences designed an experiment to take this theory further, based on a simple premise: that the density limit is strongly influenced by the initial plasma-wall interactions as the reactor starts up. In their experiment, the researchers wanted to see if they could deliberately steer the outcome of this interaction. They carefully controlled the pressure of the fuel gas during tokamak startup and added a burst of heating called electron cyclotron resonance heating. These changes altered how the plasma interacts with the tokamak walls through a cooler plasma boundary, which dramatically reduced the degree to which wall impurities entered the plasma. Under this regime, the researchers were able to reach densities up to about 65 percent higher than the tokamak's Greenwald limit. This doesn't mean that magnetically confined plasmas can now operate with no density limits whatsoever. However, it does show that the Greenwald limit is not a fundamental barrier and that tweaking operational processes could lead to more effective fusion reactors. The findings have been published in Science Advances. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ultimate Camouflage Tech Mimics Octopus In Scientific First - Researchers at Stanford University have created a programmable synthetic "skin" that can independently change color and texture, "a feat previously only available within the animal kingdom," reports the Register. From the report: The technique employs electron beams to write patterns and add optical layers that create color effects. When exposed to water, the film swells to reveal texture and colors independently, depending on which side of the material is exposed, according to a paper published in the scientific journal Nature this week. In an accompanying article, University of Stuttgart's Benjamin Renz and Na Liu said the researchers' "most striking achievement was a photonic skin in which color and texture could be independently controlled, mirroring the separate regulation... in octopuses." The research team used the polymer PEDOT:PSS, which can swell in water, as the basis for their material. Its reaction to water can be controlled by irradiating it with electrons, creating textures and patterns in the film. By adding thin layers of gold, the researchers turned surface texture into tunable optical effects. A single layer could be used to scatter light, giving the shiny metal a matte, textured appearance. To control color, a polymer film was sandwiched between two layers of gold, forming an optical cavity, which selectively reflects light. Read more of this story at Slashdot.