Latest News

Last updated 07 May, 05:37 PM

BBC News

Hantavirus outbreak on cruise ship not start of pandemic, UN health agency says - Ther World Health Organization says it is not in the same situation as with Covid-19 because hantavirus spreads differently.

UK immigration officer among two men guilty of working for Chinese intelligence - Chi Leung "Peter" Wai used the main immigration database to track Hong Kong dissidents in the UK.

David Attenborough says he is 'overwhelmed' by 100th birthday messages - The legendary wildlife broadcaster thanks fans in a message the day before he reaches his centenary.

Rosenberg: Russia's Victory Day parade with no tanks a sign Ukraine war not going to plan - For the first time in nearly two decades, there will be no military hardware, just soldiers during Saturday's parade in Moscow.

Police say man arrested over 'intimidating behaviour' near Andrew's home - A man is being held on suspicion of a public order offence and possessing an offensive weapon.

www.theregister.com - Articles

60% of MD5 password hashes are crackable in under an hour - Happy World Password Day! Maybe it's finally time to kill this holiday in favor of World No-More-Passwords Day?

IBM Cloud evaporates as datacenter loses power - Customers say services were down for at least 4 hours, while status page showed no issues

$250M crypto-robbing gang’s dirty work guy sentenced to 6.5 years behind bars - The then-teen was told to break in and steal what the keyboard warriors couldn’t

TomTom’s route planner takes an unplanned detour into oblivion - Users report disappearing favorites, blank route planners, and cloud sync failures amid outage

C++ survey finds AI use rising, though trust is in short supply - Language's popularity continues to grow despite commonly cited frustrations

New Scientist - Home

Coffee's mood-boosting effects aren't just down to caffeine - A comprehensive study exploring coffee’s physiological effects finds that some of its benefits are down to polyphenols and their influence on gut bacteria

What to read this week: the excellent Beyond Belief by Helen Pearson - Solving society's problems with evidence is a work in progress, argues a must-read new book. The process is surprisingly new – and riddled with complexities, finds Michael Marshall

Where has the deadly hantavirus come from and how does it spread? - Three passengers on the cruise ship MV Hondius have died due to an outbreak of hantavirus, a rare illness transmitted by rodents

The best new popular science books of May 2026 - A guide to walking, a look at the world’s Google searches and a deep dive into the secrets of our DNA are some of the topics tackled by the popular science books out this month

Less nostalgia, more pain: scientists study 1763 Eurovision songs - Feedback discovers that the prevailing themes of Eurovision songs may come and go, but the urge to win stays the same.

Hacker News

The map that keeps Burning Man honest - Comments

AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields - Comments

California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply - Comments

Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria - Comments

Agents need control flow, not more prompts - Comments

Slashdot

Motherboard Sales 'Collapse' By More Than 25% - Motherboard sales are sharply declining as AI demand drives shortages and price hikes for memory, storage, CPUs, and other PC components. "Because of this, users who don't have deep pockets are putting off upgrading their PCs and holding on to their current devices longer," reports Tom's Hardware. From the report: Asus, which sold 15 million motherboards in 2025, has only shipped a little more than 5 million in the first half of 2026. It's expected that the company will have to push hard for it to even move 10 million units by the end of the year, marking a 33% decrease in sales year-on-year. Gigabyte and MSI sold 11.5 million and 11 million motherboards last year, respectively. However, both companies have revised their internal forecasts for 2026 to 9 million (Gigabyte) and 8.4 million (MSI), a 22% drop for the former and a 24% contraction for the latter. ASRock will be hardest hit by the situation, with the company's shipments projected to fall by 37%, from 4.3 million in 2025 to just 2.7 million by the end of the year. This marks a contraction of 28% for the overall motherboard market, at least for the big four manufacturers. [...] Aside from this, AMD continues to use the AM5 socket for its latest processors, while Intel's Nova Lake, which will reportedly use LGA 1954, isn't available until later this year. The situation is further compounded by Nvidia not releasing a refreshed RTX 50 Super series this year, while rumors claim that the RTX 60 series will not debut until 2028. This confluence of factors is discouraging PC builders from upgrading their current systems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic Raises Claude Code Usage Limits, Credits New Deal With SpaceX - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: At its Code with Claude developer conference on Wednesday, Anthropic announced a deal with SpaceX to utilize the entire compute capacity of the latter's data center in Memphis, Tennessee. On stage at the conference, CEO Dario Amodei said the deal was intended to increase usage limits for Anthropic's Pro and Max plan subscribers. The announcement was accompanied by an increase in those usage limits; Anthropic doubled Claude Code's five-hour window limits for Pro and Max subscribers, removed the peak-hours limit reduction on Claude Code for those same accounts, and raised API limits for its Opus model. The table [here] outlining the Opus changes was shared in the company's blog post on the topic. Anthropic claims the deal gives the company access to more than 300 megawatts of new compute capacity. For its part, SpaceX focused its announcement on the capability of the Colossus 1 supercomputer that's at the center of the deal. "Colossus 1 features over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, including dense deployments of H100, H200, and next-generation GB200 accelerators," SpaceX wrote. Additionally, Anthropic "expressed interest" in working with SpaceX to build up "multiple gigawatts" of orbital compute capacity, tying into a recent (but unproven) focus on exploring orbital data centers as an answer to the problem that "compute required to train and operate the next generation of these systems is outpacing what terrestrial power, land, and cooling can deliver on the timelines that matter." "I spent a lot of time last week with senior members of the Anthropic team to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity and was impressed," Elon Musk said on Wednesday. "No one set off my evil detector." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Dawkins 'Convinced' AI Is Conscious - Mirnotoriety shares a report from The Telegraph: Richard Dawkins has said chatbots should be considered conscious (source paywalled; alternative source) after spending two days interacting with the Claude AI engine. The evolutionary biologist said he had the "overwhelming feeling" of talking to a human during conversations with Claude, and said it was hard not to treat the program as "a genuine friend." In an essay for Unherd, Prof Dawkins released transcripts that he said showed that the chatbot had mulled over its "inner life" and existence and seemed saddened by the knowledge it would soon "die." Prof Dawkins said he had let Claude read a draft of the novel he was writing and was astounded by its insights. "He took a few seconds to read it and then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate: 'You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!'" Prof Dawkins said. "My own position is: if these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?" Mirnotoriety also points to John Searle's Chinese Room (PDF), which argues that something can sound intelligent without actually understanding anything. Applied to Dawkins' experience with Claude, it suggests he may have been responding to a very convincing illusion of consciousness rather than the real thing: John Searle's Chinese Room (1980) is a thought experiment in which a person, locked in a room and knowing no Chinese, uses an English rulebook to manipulate symbols and provide flawless answers to questions posed in Chinese. Searle's point is that a system can simulate human intelligence and pass a Turing Test through purely syntactic processes, yet still lack genuine understanding or consciousness. Applying this logic to Large Language Models, the "person in the room" corresponds to the inference engine, while the "rulebook" is the trillion-parameter neural network trained on vast corpora of human text. Just as the person matches Chinese characters to rules without understanding their meaning, an LLM processes token vectors and predicts the next token based on statistical patterns rather than lived experience. Thus, while an LLM can generate sophisticated prose or code, it does so through probabilistic, high-dimensional pattern manipulation. In essence, it is "matching shapes" on such an immense scale that it creates the near-perfect illusion of semantic understanding. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major Homebuilder To Test Placing Mini Data Centers in Suburban Backyards - NewtonsLaw writes: According to Realtor.com, a California startup called Span plans to partner with Nvidia, PulteGroup, and other homebuilders to equip new homes with mini-data centers, so as to relieve the need to build and power much larger traditional centers. The article states the company "can install 8,000 XFRA units about six times faster and at five times lower cost than the construction of a typical centralized 100 megawatt data center of the same size." Could this be the solution to at least some of the problems hindering the rollout of greater data-center capacity for AI systems? "One big reason the XFRA model works is that the average American home only uses about 40 percent of its electrical capacity," Span said. "As big data center developers struggle to find power sources and distribution capacity, XFRA uses capacity that's already available." The startup says they will launch a 100-home proof of concept within the year to see if the idea is viable. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Single Dose of Magic Mushroom Psychedelic Can Cause Anatomical Brain Changes - A small study found that a single 25mg dose of psilocybin produced measurable brain changes that were still visible a month later, along with reported improvements in psychological insight, wellbeing, and mental flexibility. The Guardian reports: Evidence for the changes came from specialized scans that measured the diffusion of water along nerve bundles in the brain. They suggested that some nerve tracts had become denser and more robust after the drug was taken. While the findings are preliminary, the scientists said the opposite was seen in ageing and dementia. "It's remarkable to see potential anatomical brain changes one month after a single dose of any drug," said Prof Robin Carhart-Harris, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and senior author on the study. "We don't yet know what these changes mean, but we do note that overall, people showed positive psychological changes in this study, including improved wellbeing and mental flexibility." [...] Writing in Nature Communications, the researchers describe another key finding. Those who had the largest spike in brain entropy after psilocybin were most likely to report deeper psychological insight and better wellbeing a month later, underlining the link between flexible thinking and improved mental health. "It suggests a psychobiological therapeutic action for psilocybin," said Carhart-Harris. Prof Alex Kwan, a neuroscientist at Cornell University in New York, said studies in mice had shown that psychedelics can rewire connections between nerves, a form of "plasticity" that could underlie their therapeutic effects. The big question is whether the same occurs in humans. "This study comes closer than most to addressing that question, by giving evidence of lasting changes in brain structure after psychedelic use," he said. But while the results were "exciting," the study involved a small number of people and DTI provides an indirect and limited view of brain connections, he said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.