Latest News

Last updated 12 Mar, 03:35 PM

BBC News

British man charged in Dubai for alleged filming of Iranian missiles - Foreign Office officials are understood to be supporting his family.

Woman who kept vulnerable victim as slave sentenced to 13 years - Mandy Wixon, 56, forced the victim to clean her squalid home and subjected her to a miserable life.

Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and Halifax apps showed customers other users' transactions - The Lloyds Banking Group customers reported being able to view payments and charges from other sources.

PM says Mandelson appointment was mistake as No 10 denies cover-up - Documents show Sir Keir Starmer was warned the peer's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein posed a "reputational risk".

Fire-ravaged remains of Glasgow building to be demolished - Glasgow City Council said the decision was made due to public safety concerns.

The Register

Musk makes the Macrohard joke again - The idea being that fleets of AI agents could emulate the 'function of entire companies' Elon Musk wheeled out his "Macrohard" dad joke again in the form of a supposed fleet of "Digital Optimus" agents that he claims would be capable of "emulating the function of entire companies."…

Users protest as Google Antigravity price floats upward - Google evolves its pricing for agentic AI tool, pointing devs towards on-demand credits or $250 per month Ultra plan Developers using Google's Antigravity agentic AI coding tool are complaining about higher prices following an announcement yesterday that the company is evolving its AI plans.…

Quicksort inventor Tony Hoare reaches the base case at 92 - Classicist, philosopher, wit, and one of the greatest British computer scientists of all time Obit Professor Charles Anthony Richard Hoare has died at the age of 92. Known to many computer science students as C. A. R. Hoare, and to his friends as Tony, he was not only one of the greatest minds in the history of programming – he also came up with a number of the field's pithiest quotes.…

NASA probe checks out years early because this solar cycle is a real drag - Van Allen spacecraft re-enters over the Pacific with 1 in 4,200 chance of causing injury NASA's Van Allen Probe A has re-entered Earth's atmosphere eight years earlier than expected, with a 1 in 4,200 chance that its components could cause injury.…

CISA warns max-severity n8n bug is being exploited in the wild - No rest for project maintainers battered by slew of vulnerability disclosures The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has confirmed that hackers are exploiting a max-severity remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in workflow automation platform n8n.…

New Scientist - Home

How our ancestors used mushrooms to change the course of human history - Mushrooms have been used by ancient humans for millennia, but archaeologists have only just uncovered their pivotal role in shaping civilisation

We’ve only just confirmed that Homo habilis really existed - Their species name is well known, but until recently we’ve understood very little for certain about Homo habilis. Columnist Michael Marshall reveals what new fossils are telling us about the hominins that have been considered the first humans

Rumours of a Firefly reboot abound, but should the Serenity fly again? - Star Nathan Fillion is stoking rumours that cult western-in-space television series Firefly could be rebooted. Emily H. Wilson realises she is being toyed with – but is still praying for its return

Undisclosed ads on TikTok skirt ban on profiling minors - Teenagers are being bombarded with highly targeted commercial content on TikTok, despite an EU law that prohibits profiling minors for advertising

A miniature magnet rivals behemoths in strength for the first time - Strong magnets tend to be large and power-hungry, but a new design has produced a powerful magnet that fits in the palm of your hand, making it more practical and affordable

Hacker News

Malus – Clean Room as a Service - Comments

US banks' exposure to private credit hits $300B (2025) - Comments

Kotlin creator's new language: a formal way to talk to LLMs instead of English - Comments

Show HN: Axe A 12MB binary that replaces your AI framework - Comments

Dolphin Progress Release 2603 - Comments

Slashdot

Strait of Hormuz Closure Triggers Work From Home, 4-Day Weeks In Asia - Asian governments are implementing emergency measures like four-day workweeks and work-from-home mandates to cope with a fuel shortage triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. "Asia is particularly dependent on oil exports from the Middle East; Japan and South Korea respectively source 90% and 70% of their oil from the region," notes Fortune. From the report: On March 10, Thailand ordered civil servants to take the stairs rather than the elevator, and to work-from-home for the duration of the crisis. It increased the air-conditioning temperature to 27 degrees Celsius, and will tell government employees to wear short-sleeved shirts over suits. (Thailand has about 95 days of energy reserves left, according to Reuters). Vietnam also called on businesses to let people work-from-home to "reduce the need for travel and transportation." The Philippines is pushing for a four-day work week, and has ordered officials to limit travel "to essential functions only." South Asia is getting hit hard too. Bangladesh brought forward the Eid-al-fitr holiday, allowing universities to close early in a bid to save fuel. Pakistan also instituted a four-day week for government offices and closed schools. India suspended shipments of liquefied petroleum gas to commercial operators to prioritize supplies for households, leading to worries from hotels and restaurants that they may be forced to close without fuel supplies. Countries across the region are also considering price caps, subsidies, and tapping strategic oil reserves. On Wednesday, the International Energy Agency "unanimously" agreed to release 400 million barrels of oil and refined products from its reserves. The Associated Press offers a look at the energy supplies that countries hold and when they tap them. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reducing Europe's Nuclear Energy Sector Was 'Strategic Mistake', EU Chief Says - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Reducing Europe's nuclear energy sector was a "strategic mistake," European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday, as governments grapple with an energy crunch from the Iran war. Europe produced around a third of electricity from nuclear power in 1990 but that has fallen to 15%, she told an event in Paris, leaving it reliant on oil and gas imports whose prices have surged in recent days. Being "completely dependent on expensive and volatile imports" of fossil fuels puts Europe at a disadvantage to other regions, von der Leyen said in a speech. "This reduction in the share of nuclear was a choice. I believe that it was a strategic mistake for Europe to turn its back on a reliable, affordable source of low-emissions power." The report notes that the EU does not directly fund nuclear energy projects because all 27 member states have not unanimously supported the technology. However, von der Leyen said the Commission plans to provide a 200-million-euro guarantee from the EU's carbon market to help attract private investment in innovative nuclear technologies. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Only Half of Americans Went To a Movie Theater In 2025, Study Finds - A Pew Research Center survey found that only 53% of U.S. adults went to a movie theater in the past year, while 7% said they've never seen a movie in a theater at all. "The findings reflected a domestic box office still fighting to regain its footing since the COVID-19 pandemic, when ticket sales collapsed 81% in 2020 due to theater closures," reports Variety. From the report: In 2025, moviegoers in the U.S. and Canada bought 769.2 million tickets, less than half of the all-time peak of roughly 1.6 billion tickets sold in 2002, according to data from Nash Information Services. However, an August 2025 study field by NRG/National Research Group showed that 77% of Americans ages 12-74 went to see at least one movie in a theater in the previous 12 months. Box office revenue peaked at an inflation-adjusted $16.4 billion in 2002, and annual ticket revenue held relatively steady through the 2000s and 2010s before falling to under $3 billion in 2020 when theaters closed for months. Last year, U.S. theaters sold just over $9 billion worth of tickets, per media analytics firm Comscore. The number represents a recovery, but nowhere near a full one, as ticket sales have been lagging around 20% below pre-pandemic levels. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GFiber and Astound Broadband To Join Forces - GFiber (a.k.a. Google Fiber) and Astound Broadband announced that they plan to merge into a deal backed by infrastructure investor Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners. The resulting company will be majority owned by Stonepeak, with Alphabet becoming a "significant minority shareholder." Light Reading reports: Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners teamed with Patriot Media to acquire Astound in November 2020 for $8.1 billion. Stonepeak is Astound's largest investor. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026. The combined business will be led by the existing GFiber executive team. GFiber is currently led by CEO Dinni Jain. Jain, a former Time Warner Cable and Insight Communications exec, took the helm of what was then called Google Fiber in 2018. "This agreement advances GFiber's mission of redefining internet connectivity and represents a major step toward its goal of operational and financial independence," the companies said. "GFiber will have the external capital and strategic focus needed to accelerate its next phase of growth, expanding its customer-first approach and pioneering fiber technology across the country." GFiber's combination with Astound represents "a strategic opportunity to scale our customer-focused approach to connect more households to a truly different type of internet service," Jain said in a statement. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why Falling Cats Always Seem To Land On Their Feet - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: In a paper, published last month in the journal The Anatomical Record, researchers offered a novel take on falling felines. Their evidence suggests new insights into the so-called falling cat problem, particularly that cats have a very flexible segment of their spines that allows them to correct their orientation midair. [...] People have been curious about falling cats perhaps as long as the animals have been living with humans, but the method to their acrobatic abilities remains enigmatic. Part of the difficulty is that the anatomy of the cat has not been studied in detail, explains Yasuo Higurashi, a physiologist at Yamaguchi University in Japan and lead author of the study. [...] Modern research has split the falling cat problem into two competing models. The first, "legs in, legs out," suggests that cats correct their falling trajectory by first extending their hind limbs before retracting them, using a sequential twist of their upper and then lower trunk to gain the proper posture while in free fall. The second model, "tuck and turn," suggests that cats turn their upper and lower bodies in simultaneous juxtaposed movements. [...] The researchers found that the feline spine was extremely flexible in the upper thoracic vertebrae, but stiffer and heavier in the lower lumbar vertebrae. The discovery matches video evidence showing the cats first turn their front legs, and then their lower legs. The results suggest the cat quickly spins its flexible upper torso to face the ground, allowing it to see so that it can correctly twist the rest of its body to match. "The thoracic spine of the cat can rotate like our neck," Dr. Higurashi said. Experiments on the spine show the upper vertebrae can twist an astounding 360 degrees, he says, which helps cats make these correcting movements with ease. The results are consistent with the "legs in, legs out" model, but definitively determining which model is correct will take more work, Dr. Higurashi says. The results also yielded another discovery: Cats, like many animals, appear to have a right-side bias. One of the dropped cats corrected itself by turning to the right eight out of eight times, while the other turned right six out of eight times. Read more of this story at Slashdot.