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Last updated 24 Feb, 01:16 PM
BBC News
Russian soldiers tell BBC they saw fellow troops executed on commanders' orders - Four men expose the horror and brutality of conditions in the Ukraine war, with two saying they saw soldiers being shot for refusing orders.
'Anyone who runs is shot': Watch Russian soldiers describe killings of troops who refuse orders - The men, who are on the run, told of the horrors they witnessed on the Russian side of the front lines in Ukraine.
First British baby born using transplanted womb from dead donor - Grace Bell, who was born without a viable womb, says her little boy is "simply a miracle".
Chocolate kept in anti-theft boxes as shops warn it's being stolen to order - Retailers and police forces tell the BBC that thieves are targeting chocolate and selling it on.
Hilary Duff pays tribute to Robert Carradine, after star of Lizzie McGuire dies age 71 - His family says the actor took his own life after living with bipolar disorder for nearly two decades.
The Register
KDE Plasma 6.6 isn't forcing systemd but the arguments rage on - BSD support improves, FreeBSD eyes a desktop option, and the init wars refuse to die The latest KDE desktop environment is out. Among other things, it comes with a pledge that it won't require systemd, and this version has improved OpenBSD support. FreeBSD 15.1's installer offers KDE too.…
Korean cops charge teens over bike hire breach that exposed data on 4.62M riders - Public prosecutor mulls sentencing following investigations into two separate attacks Two South Korean teenagers were this week charged with breaching Seoul's public bike service, Ttareungyi.…
West Midlands Police earn red card over Copilot's imaginary football match - Parliament committee finds AI BS helped shape a real-world decision UK Parliament has delivered the official postmortem on West Midlands Police's Copilot saga, and it reads like a case study in how not to mix generative AI with public order decision-making.…
Intel backs SambaNova's $350M bid to challenge GPUs in AI inference - Upstart's 5th-gen RDU aims to undercut Nvidia's B200 on speed and cost AI infrastructure company SambaNova has raised $350 million to advance its dataflow architecture, which it pitches as an alternative to GPU-based AI systems.…
UK tech hit by double trouble: Fewer foreign techies amid skills squeeze - Visa applications down, executives emigrating, and AI blamed for the rest The number of international workers applying for a visa to work in the UK's tech sector dropped 11 percent between Q2 and Q3 2025, and was down 6 percent year-on-year, according to consultancy RSM UK.…
New Scientist - Home
The surprising vaccine side effects that can improve long-term health - People often focus on the bad side effects of vaccines, but they can have some great side effects too, says columnist Michael Le Page. They don’t just protect us from contagious diseases but can also lower the risk of dementia and heart attacks
Saturn’s rings may have formed after a huge collision with Titan - Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, may have been even more instrumental to the system’s evolution than we thought, forming its rings, shaping its moons and even affecting the planet itself
Stone Age symbols may push back the earliest form of writing - Mysterious signs engraved on objects reveal that a form of proto-writing may have been used in Europe 40,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before the emergence of a full writing system
Birdwatching may reshape the brain and build its buffer against ageing - Expert birdwatchers have changes in their brain structure compared with novices, which probably help them better identify birds and may even protect against age-related cognitive decline
It’s your perception of sleep that’s making you feel tired all day - How we feel about a night’s sleep can have a bigger impact on mood and grogginess than actual hours of rest. Here’s how to change your mindset to feel more energised
Hacker News
Show HN: SNKV – SQLite's B-tree as a key-value store (C/C++ and Python bindings) - Comments
Diode – Build, program, and simulate hardware - Comments
λProlog: Logic programming in higher-order logic - Comments
Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf] - Comments
A distributed queue in a single JSON file on object storage - Comments
Slashdot
Firefox 148 Now Available With The New AI Controls, AI Kill Switches - Firefox 148 introduces granular AI controls and a global "AI kill switch" that allows users to disable or selectively manage the browser's AI features. Phoronix reports: Among the AI features that can be toggled individually are around translations, image alt text in the Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, key points in link previews, and AI chatbot providers in the sidebar. Firefox 148 also brings Firefox for Android, support for the Trusted Types API, CSS shape() function support, Sanitizer API support, WebGPU enhancements, and a variety of other changes. Developer chances can be found at developer.mozilla.org. Binaries are available from ftp.mozilla.org. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Quantum Algorithm Beats Classical Tools On Complement Sampling Tasks - alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: A team of researchers working at Quantinuum in the United Kingdom and QuSoft in the Netherlands has now developed a quantum algorithm that solves a specific sampling task -- known as complement sampling -- dramatically more efficiently than any classical algorithm. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, establishes a provable and verifiable quantum advantage in sample complexity: the number of samples required to solve a problem. "We stumbled upon the core result of this work by chance while working on a different project," Harry Buhrman, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org. "We had a set of items and two quantum states: one formed from half of the items, the other formed from the remaining half. Even though the two states are fundamentally distinct, we showed that a quantum computer may find it hard to tell which one it is given. Surprisingly, however, we then realized that transforming one state into the other is always easy, because a simple operation can swap between them." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Texas Is About To Overtake California In Battery Storage - U.S. battery storage installations hit a record 57.6 GWh in 2025, and Texas is now poised to surpass California as the nationâ(TM)s largest storage market in 2026. Electrek reports: According to the US Energy Storage Market Outlook Q1 2026 from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, installations are now four times higher than totals from just three years ago. The US had a total of 137 GWh of utility-scale storage installed as of 2025, plus 19 GWh of commercial and industrial systems and 9 GWh of residential storage. Analysts expect the growth streak to continue. More than 600 GWh of energy storage is projected to be deployed nationwide by 2030, even as the Trump administration targets clean energy industries. Two-thirds of utility-scale storage installed in 2025 was built in red states, including nine of the top 15 states for new installations. Texas is projected to surpass California as the countryâ(TM)s largest battery storage market in 2026. Standalone battery projects accounted for nearly 30 GWh of new capacity in 2025, while solar-plus-storage installations made up about 20 GWh. Residential storage deployments reached 3.1 GWh last year, a 51% increase year-over-year. Analysts say virtual power plant programs in states such as Massachusetts, Texas, Arizona, and Illinois are helping drive adoption by reducing costs and easing strain during peak demand periods. The supply chain is shifting to support the boom. In 2025, some battery cell manufacturers pivoted production from EV batteries to dedicated stationary storage cells, converting existing lines and adjusting future plans. Lithium-ion cell manufacturing for stationary storage reached more than 21 GWh in 2025, enough to power Houston overnight, according to SEIAâ(TM)s Solar and Storage Supply Chain Dashboard. Meanwhile, US factories now have the capacity to manufacture 69.4 GWh of battery energy storage systems annually. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US Farmers Are Rejecting Multimillion-Dollar Datacenter Bids For Their Land - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston's door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries. According to Huddleston, the men's client, an unnamed "Fortune 100 company," sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement. More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer (PDF) had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity. The unknown company was building a datacenter. "You don't have enough to buy me out. I'm not for sale. Leave me alone, I'm satisfied," Huddleston, 82, later told the men. As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston's land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development -- are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use. Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land's recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston's neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price. In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he'd worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre -- prices unimaginable just a few years ago. The rebuffs are a jarring reminder of AI's physical bounds, and limits of the dollars behind the technology. [...] As AI promises to transcend corporeal fallibility, these standoffs reveal its very physical constraints -- and Wall Street's miscalculation of what some people value most. In the rolling hills of Mason county and farmland across America, that gap is measured not in dollars but in something harder to price: identity. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
New Microsoft Gaming CEO Has 'No Tolerance For Bad AI' - In her first major interview as Microsoft's new gaming chief, Asha Sharma said that "great games" must deliver emotional resonance and a distinct creative voice, while making clear that she has "no tolerance for bad AI." Stepping in after Phil Spencer's retirement, she's pledging consistency, community trust, and a human-first approach to storytelling as Xbox enters a new era. Variety reports: Sharma was quick in laying out her top priorities for Microsoft Gaming in an internal memo announcing her promotion, noting "great games," "the return of Xbox" and the "future of play" as her three main commitments to the gaming community. So first, what makes a great game for Sharma, whose roles prior to CoreAI include top positions at Instacart and Meta? The new Microsoft Gaming CEO tells Variety it's all about games with "deep emotional resonance" and "a distinct point of view." She wants to develop stories that make players "feel something," like the kind of feelings Campo Santo's 2016 first-person mystery "Firewatch" elicited in her. Sharma takes on the mantle as head of the leading competitor to Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo knowing full well she's entering the role as an outsider to the larger gaming community and has "a lot to learn" still. But Sharma says she's got a commitment to "being grounded in what the community is telling us." "I'm coming into gaming as a platform builder," Sharma said, adding that her goal is to "earn the right to be trusted by players and developers" and show the fanbase that "consistency" over time. In her interview with Variety, Sharma acknowledged the tumultuous state of the gaming industry, referencing Matthew Ball's recent State of Video Gaming in 2026 report as evidence that the larger "transformation" of the sector is "protecting what we believe in while remaining open-minded about the future." Due to her strong background in AI, initial reactions to Sharma's appointment have raised concerns about what her specific views are on the use of generative AI in game development. Sharma says her stance is simple: she has "no tolerance for bad AI." "AI has long been part of gaming and will continue to be," Sharma said, noting that gaming needs new "growth engines," but that "great stories are created by humans." Read more of this story at Slashdot.