Latest News

Last updated 29 Jan, 10:47 PM

BBC News

Agents in Minneapolis could be pulled back if local officials cooperate, border tsar says - Tom Homan said the immigration operation would be more "targeted", as the Trump administration works to calm frustrations both in the city and on Capitol Hill

Great Ormond Street doctor who botched surgery harmed nearly 100 children - Yaser Jabbar specialised in limb-lengthening and reconstruction for children with complex problems.

China to relax travel rules for British visitors, UK says - It comes as Sir Keir Starmer visits Beijing - the first UK prime minister to do so in eight years.

'He enjoyed hurting people': Teen attacked others before murdering schoolboy, 12 - Det Insp Joe Davenport says the killer attacked his victims in Birmingham for "violence sake".

Israeli hostage held for nearly 500 days in Gaza says he can 'breathe again' - In his first international interview, Sasha Troufanov tells the BBC how he thought he would die in captivity after he was taken hostage on 7 October 2023.

The Register

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year - To what end? Who knows? Tesla isn't even using them in its own factories yet Elon Musk's car company is getting ready to be Skynet. Tesla, facing an 11 percent decline in automotive revenue in Q4 2025, has committed to $20 billion in capex spending this year on manufacturing and compute infrastructure. The goal: build lots of humanoid robots.…

Google's Project Genie could put even more game developers out of work - A Labs prototype turns prompts into short, explorable 3D worlds Google has put the video gaming industry on notice with the rollout of Project Genie, an experimental AI world-model prototype that generates explorable 3D environments from text or image prompts.…

Agents gone wild! Companies give untrustworthy bots keys to the kingdom - 'We're letting thousands of interns run around in our production environment' Corporate use of AI agents in 2026 looks like the Wild West, with bots running amok and no one quite knowing what to do about it - especially when it comes to managing and securing their identities.…

Dow Chemical says AI is the element behind 4,500 job cuts - The 129 year old chemical company uses Palantir-rival C3's AI as its software of choice. ai-pocalypse The jury is still out when it comes to determining how much job loss AI is causing. However, we now have another case study. Dow Chemical blames AI automation for its plans to cut 4,500 jobs, about 12.5 percent of its work force.…

AI datacenter boom triples US gas power builds, filling the air with more CO2 - Reduce emissions? Screw that - we have money to lose and memes to generate Fossil fuel-fired power plant development is roaring back to life in the US thanks to the AI datacenter boom, with data from 2025 suggesting we're reaching the point where the renewable energy transition - and efforts to ease carbon emissions - may well be doomed.…

New Scientist - Home

Our lifespans may be half down to genes and half to the environment - A reanalysis of twin data from Denmark and Sweden suggests that how long we live now depends roughly equally on the genes we inherit, and on where we live and what we do

Polar bears are getting fatter in the fastest-warming place on Earth - Shrinking sea ice has made life harder for polar bears in many parts of the Arctic, but the population in Svalbard seems to be thriving

Faecal transplants could boost the effectiveness of cancer treatments - Adults with kidney cancer who received faecal microbiota transplants on top of their existing drugs did better than those who had placebo transplants as their add-on intervention

The universe may be hiding a fundamentally unknowable quantum secret - Even given a set of possible quantum states for our cosmos, it's impossible for us to determine which one of them is correct

This virus infects most of us – but why do only some get very ill? - The ubiquitous Epstein-Barr virus is increasingly being linked to conditions like multiple sclerosis and lupus. But why do only some people who catch it develop these complications? The answer may lie in our genetics

Hacker News

Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds - Comments

PlayStation 2 Recompilation Project Is Absolutely Incredible - Comments

Claude Code daily benchmarks for degradation tracking - Comments

Drug trio found to block tumour resistance in pancreatic cancer - Comments

Compressed Agents.md > Agent Skills - Comments

Slashdot

County Pays $600,000 To Pentesters It Arrested For Assessing Courthouse Security - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Dan Goodin: Two security professionals who were arrested in 2019 after performing an authorized security assessment of a county courthouse in Iowa will receive $600,000 to settle a lawsuit they brought alleging wrongful arrest and defamation. The case was brought by Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn, two penetration testers who at the time were employed by Colorado-based security firm Coalfire Labs. The men had written authorization from the Iowa Judicial Branch to conduct "red-team" exercises, meaning attempted security breaches that mimic techniques used by criminal hackers or burglars. The objective of such exercises is to test the resilience of existing defenses using the types of real-world attacks the defenses are designed to repel. The rules of engagement for this exercise explicitly permitted "physical attacks," including "lockpicking," against judicial branch buildings so long as they didn't cause significant damage. [...] DeMercurio and Wynn's engagement at the Dallas County Courthouse on September 11, 2019, had been routine. A little after midnight, after finding a side door to the courthouse unlocked, the men closed it and let it lock. They then slipped a makeshift tool through a crack in the door and tripped the locking mechanism. After gaining entry, the pentesters tripped an alarm alerting authorities. Within minutes, deputies arrived and confronted the two intruders. DeMercurio and Wynn produced an authorization letter -- known as a "get out of jail free card" in pen-testing circles. After a deputy called one or more of the state court officials listed in the letter and got confirmation it was legit, the deputies said they were satisfied the men were authorized to be in the building. DeMercurio and Wynn spent the next 10 or 20 minutes telling what their attorney in a court document called "war stories" to deputies who had asked about the type of work they do. When Sheriff Leonard arrived, the tone suddenly changed. He said the Dallas County Courthouse was under his jurisdiction and he hadn't authorized any such intrusion. Leonard had the men arrested, and in the days and weeks to come, he made numerous remarks alleging the men violated the law. A couple months after the incident, he told me that surveillance video from that night showed "they were crouched down like turkeys peeking over the balcony" when deputies were responding. I published a much more detailed account of the event here. Eventually, all charges were dismissed. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ArXiv Will Require English Submissions - and Says AI Translators Are Fair Game - The preprint repository arXiv will require all submissions to be written in English or accompanied by a full English translation starting February 11, a policy change that explicitly permits the use of AI translators even as research suggests large language models remain inconsistent at the task. Until now, authors only needed to submit an abstract in English. ArXiv hosts nearly 3 million preprints and receives more than 20,000 submissions monthly, though just 1% are in languages other than English. Ralph Wijers, chair of arXiv's editorial advisory council, advises authors to verify any AI-generated translations. "Our own experience is that AI translation is good but not good enough," he says. A 2025 study from ByteDance Seed and Peking University ranked 20 LLMs on translation quality between Chinese and English; GPT-5-high scored nearly 77, just below the human expert benchmark of 80, but most models including GPT-4o, Claude 4, and Deepseek-V3 scored under 60. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US Leads Record Global Surge in Gas-Fired Power Driven by AI Demands - An anonymous reader shares a report: The US is leading a huge global surge in new gas-fired power generation that will cause a major leap in planet-heating emissions, with this record boom driven by the expansion of energy-hungry datacenters to service AI, according to a new forecast. This year is set to shatter the annual record for new gas power additions around the world, with projects in development expected to grow existing global gas capacity by nearly 50%, a report by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) found. The US is at the forefront of a global push for gas that is set to escalate over the next five years, after tripling its planned gas-fired capacity in 2025. Much of this new capacity will be devoted to the vast electricity needs of AI, with a third of the 252 gigawatts of gas power in development set to be situated on site at datacenters. All of this new gas energy is set to come at a significant cost to the climate, amid ongoing warnings from scientists that fossil fuels must be rapidly phased out to avoid disastrous global heating. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US Life Expectancy Jumps To a Record 79 Years - An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. life expectancy rose to a record high of 79 years in 2024, an increase of six months from the previous year, reflecting a sharp decline in deaths from COVID-19 and drug overdoses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday. According to a report from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy improved for both men and women across races and among Hispanics, surpassing the previous peak set in 2014. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Admits Windows 11 Has a Trust Problem, Promises To Focus on Fixes in 2026 - Microsoft wants you to know that it knows that Windows 11, now used by a billion users, has been testing your patience and announced that its engineers are being redirected to urgently address the operating system's performance and reliability problems through an internal process the company calls "swarming." "The feedback we're receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people," Pavan Davuluri, president of Windows and devices, told The Verge. The company plans to spend the rest of 2026 focusing on pain points including system performance, reliability, and overall user experience. January has been particularly rough for Windows 11. Microsoft issued an emergency out-of-band update to fix shutdown issues on some machines, then released a second out-of-band fix a week later to address OneDrive and Dropbox crashes. Some business PCs are also failing to boot after the January update because they were left in an "improper state" after December's monthly update failed to install. Users have also grown frustrated by aggressive Edge and Bing prompts, constant OneDrive upselling nags, and Microsoft's push to require Microsoft accounts. The core members of the company's Windows Insider team recently moved to different roles. "Trust is earned over time and we are committed to building it back with the Windows community," Davuluri said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.