Latest News

Last updated 19 Apr, 05:16 AM

BBC News

Foreign secretary concerned ministers not told of Mandelson vetting fears sooner - Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is facing calls to resign over the scandal and will address MPs on Monday.

Why Starmer still can't move on from the Mandelson mess - The decision to send Peter Mandelson to Washington has become a scandal that just won't go away for Labour.

At least six killed in Kyiv as gunman opens fire and takes hostages - The attacker, who took hostages inside a supermarket, was killed after a shoot-out with police, officials say.

Scammers are becoming ever more sophisticated - this is what the fightback looks like - Scams have exploded over the last few years. Can countries and companies come together to turn the tables on the scammers?

Police treating arson attack as antisemitic hate crime - It comes as a man attempts to ignite a plastic bag containing containing fluid in north-west London.

The Register

Cloudflare can remember it for you wholesale - Agent Memory stores AI chat scraps off to the side and recalls them when needed Not only is hardware memory scarce these days, but context memory, the conversational data exchanged with AI models, can be an issue too.…

Atlassian’s new data collection policy protects rich customers while AI eats the rest - From August 17, the outfit will collect customer metadata by default unless you pay for the top tier Unless a customer pays for the most expensive enterprise license, or the law forbids it, Atlassian is going to collect their data to train its AI models. And you can't fully opt out.…

Intel eases reliance on TSMC with 'Merica-made Core Series 3 processors - Stripped-down Ultra for laptops and low-power edge boxes Intel brought a few more chips home from Taiwan this week, with a new round of budget-oriented Core Series 3 processors fabbed right in the US-of-A.…

Anthropic mocks up Claude Design to draft fancy new pink slips for marketing teams - The bar for creating visual assets has been lowered to the ability to converse with a model Anthropic is known for its industry-leading Claude Code that writes programs, but why stop there? The company, on Friday, introduced a research preview service called Claude Design that creates visual assets, potentially putting some folks out of work.…

CISA tells feds to patch 13-year-old Apache ActiveMQ bug under active attack - Bug hiding in plain sight for over a decade lands on KEV list CISA is sounding the alarm on a newly-exploited Apache ActiveMQ bug, ordering federal agencies to patch within two weeks as attackers circle a flaw that's been quietly lurking for more than a decade.…

New Scientist - Home

How autoimmune conditions can unexpectedly drive mental illness - Antibodies mistakenly attacking the brain are linked with conditions including schizophrenia, dementia and OCD, prompting a revolution in how we think about mental health conditions

Werner Herzog searches for ghost elephants in stunning new documentary - A film about the quest for “ghost elephants” is as much about not knowing and asking the right questions as about exploration, finds Davide Abbatescianni

Electric vehicle owners could earn thousands by supporting power grid - Electric vehicles could store renewable energy when there is excess supply and give it back to the grid when demand peaks, but car companies disagree on the best way to do that

Exclusive report: Inside Chernobyl, 40 years after nuclear disaster - New Scientist reporter Matthew Sparkes secured unrivalled access to Chernobyl's most crucial scientific sites, where researchers are fighting to protect the area and ensure it remains safe amid the constant threat of attack from Russia

New Scientist recommends Jamie Bartlett's insightful How to Talk to AI - The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

Hacker News

NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers - Comments

Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7 - Comments

College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work - Comments

Updating Gun Rocket through 10 years of Unity Engine - Comments

The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker - Comments

Slashdot

Duolingo CEO Says They've Stopped Tracking Employees' AI Use for Performance Reviews - Last May Duolingo's stock peaked at $529.05. But while the learning app passed $1 billion in revenue in 2025 and 50 million daily active users, today its stock price has dropped more than 81%, to $100.51. And there's been other changes, reports Entrepreneur: In April 2025, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn made headlines after writing a memo calling the company "AI-first." In the memo, von Ahn announced that the language-learning platform would track employees' AI use in performance reviews. Now, a year later, von Ahn is backtracking and rethinking how he measures employee performance. He told the Silicon Valley Girl podcast earlier this month that Duolingo no longer considers AI use in performance reviews. The change arose after employees started to ask, "Do you just want us to use AI for AI's sake?" von Ahn explained. "We said no, look — the most important thing in your performance is that you are doing whatever your job is as well as possible. A lot of times, AI can help you with that, but if it can't, I'm not going to force you to do that," von Ahn said on the podcast. He felt as though the company was "trying to push something that in some cases did not fit" instead of "being held accountable for the actual outcome." The CEO is, however, still sticking to other "constructive constraints" he introduced in the April 2025 memo, including stopping contractor hiring in cases where AI can assume their workload... Von Ahn also mentioned that a few months ago, Duolingo had a day dedicated to vibe coding, or prompting AI to create an app without manually writing a single line of code. Every single person at the company, from engineers to human resources professionals, had to vibe code an app. Vibe coding has made an impact at the company. One of Duolingo's latest offerings, a course teaching users how to play chess, arose when two people vibe-coded the first prototype of it, the CEO said. Neither of them knew how to play chess or program, but they managed to use AI to create the whole chess curriculum and a prototype of the app in about six months last year. Now chess is Duolingo's fastest-growing course, according to von Ahn. "At this point, we have seven million daily active users that are learning chess," the CEO said on the podcast. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX, Blue Origin Compete For 'Artemis III' Mission - After Artemis II's astronauts returned to earth, "NASA has Artemis III in its sights," reports the Associated Press: In a mission recently added to the docket for next year, Artemis III's yet-to-be -named astronauts will practice docking their Orion capsule with a lunar lander or two in orbit around Earth. Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin are racing to have their company's lander ready first. Musk's Starship and Bezos' Blue Moon are vying for the all-important Artemis IV moon landing in 2028. Two astronauts will aim for the south polar region, the preferred location for [NASA Administrator Jared] Isaacman's envisioned $20 billion to $30 billion moon base. Vast amounts of ice are almost certainly hidden in permanently shadowed craters there — ice that could provide water and rocket fuel. The docking mechanism for Artemis III's close-to-home trial run is already at Florida's Kennedy Space Center. The latest model Starship is close to launching on a test flight from South Texas, and a scaled-down version of Blue Moon will attempt a lunar landing later this year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New Movie Trailer Shows First AI-Generated Performance By a Major Star: the Late Val Kilmer - "A trailer has been released for the first film to star an authorised generative AI version of a major Hollywood actor," writes The Guardian: Val Kilmer was cast in western As Deep As the Grave before his death in April 2025. Production delays meant he never shot any scenes, but the creative team worked with UK-based company Sonantic to create an AI speaking voice based on his old recordings. His estate and daughter Mercedes collaborated with the film-makers on the visual deepfake of the actor. Kilmer, who was diagnosed with throat cancer, was also assisted by technology for his cameo in 2022's Top Gun: Maverick... Writer-director Coerte Voorhees confirmed that Kilmer is seen for around an hour of the film's running time... Voorhees has said that the production followed Sag-Aftra [union] guidelines, and that Kilmer's estate — which provided archival material for them to use — was compensated financially. "Kilmer's likeness can be seen portraying Father Fintan, a Catholic priest and Native American spiritualist," adds The Hollywood Reporter. But the AV Club calls it "ghoulish puppet show time." "Having your AI Val Kilmer puppet whisper 'Don't fear the dead, and don't fear me' in a movie trailer is a bold choice..." He is accompanied (per Variety) by a whole host of disclaimers, caveats, and explanations offered by writer-director Coerte Voorhees and his associates: Kilmer deeply wanted to be in the movie, but was too sick to do so. His family endorses and supports his inclusion. He was a big fan of technology, including, presumably, its use in turning his own image into a digital avatar to then shove into movies... The fact is, of course, that nobody would be paying a fraction of this attention to As Deep As The Grave — about early female archeologist Ann Axtell Morris — if it weren't now being used as the stage on which Voorhees was very publicly accepting the dare to go full-on ghoulish with AI tech. "The filmmakers said they hoped they were showing Hollywood how to use the technology in a positive way..." notes Australia's ABC News. But their articles add that "Some have called the trailer 'terrifying' and 'disgusting' on social media." Mashable writes: "Very fitting that this trailer includes a scene where a corpse is unceremoniously yanked out of the ground," read one of the top comments on As Deep as the Grave's trailer at time of writing... [O]nline commenters have labelled it disgusting and disrespectful, not only for digitally reanimating Kilmer but also for the damaging precedent As Deep as the Grave's use of AI could set for the film industry as a whole. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Old Cars 'Tell Tales' by Storing Data That's Never Wiped - Slashdot reader Bismillah shared this report from ITNews: Research and development engineer Romain Marchand of Paris headquartered Quarkslab obtained a telematic control unit (TCU) from a salvage yard in Poland... Marchand tore down the TCU, which is based on a Qualcomm system on a chip, and extracted the Linux-based file system from the Micron multi-chip package (MCP) which contained NAND-based non-volatile storage memory. The non-volatile storage contained sensitive information, including system configuration data and more importantly, logs that revealed the vehicle's GPS positions over time. None of that information was encrypted, Marchand told iTnews, which made it possible to collect and retrieve sensitive data of interest. What's more, the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) logs with GPS positions covered the BYD's full journey from the factory in China to its operational life in the United Kingdom, and to its final wrecking in Poland, Marchand explained in an analysis... The issue is not restricted to BYD, and Marchand added that the hardware architecture of the Chinese car maker's TCU is broadly similar to what can be found in other brands. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fewer US College Students Major in CS. More Choose Data Science, Engineering - "From 2008 to 2024, the number of four-year computer science degrees granted rose about fivefold..." reports the Washington Post. Then in 2025 CS suddenly dropped from the fourth-largest undergraduate major to sixth, they report (citing data from the nonprofit National Student Clearinghouse, which compiles numbers from 97% of U.S. universities. The 54,000-student drop was "the biggest one-year drop of any major discipline going back to at least 2020." But what major are they choosing instead? Sarah Karamarkovich, a research associate with the National Student Clearinghouse, pointed to an explanation from the data that we had overlooked. Enrollments in two interdisciplinary majors, data analytics and data science, topped a combined 35,000 in the fall of 2025. That was up from a few hundred when those disciplines were broken out into their own majors in 2020. Those relatively new categories reflect colleges' zeal to create specialized majors, including in AI, data science, robotics and cybersecurity. Some of those disciplines may be counted in the national enrollment data as computer science. Others are not. The numbers suggest that some of the disappearing computer science majors didn't flee so much as they splintered into related disciplines.... The 8 percent decline in computer science majors last fall was nearly mirrored by a 7.3 percent increase in engineering majors, according to the National Student Clearinghouse data. Within engineering, mechanical and electrical engineering major enrollments increased by the largest absolute amounts — a jump of 11 percent and 14 percent, respectively. Read more of this story at Slashdot.