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Last updated 10 Apr, 07:06 AM
BBC News
Iran conflict must be 'line in sand' to build more resilient UK, Starmer says - The prime minister says "shocks" like the conflict in Iran are becoming more frequent.
Ceasefire or no ceasefire, the Middle East's reshuffling is not yet done - Both sides have reason to end the war but share no common ground.
Melania Trump denies ties to Jeffrey Epstein and urges hearing for survivors - She called rumours that Epstein introduced her to Donald Trump "mean-spirited attempts to defame my reputation".
Watch: Melania Trump's surprise Epstein statement in full - She tells reporters at the White House that any claims linking the two "need to end today".
Want to help garden birds? Don't feed them in warmer months, says RSPB - The UK's largest bird charity has issued new guidance advising people to stop using feeders to help wildlife thrive.
The Register
Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job - The right person for the job didn't have the right passport for the job On Call Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that shares your stories of tech support incidents that crossed a line.…
AWS ponders selling its home-grown chips by the rack-load, has almost sold out AI capacity - Annual CEO letter reveals two customers want all Graviton servers, huge drone rollout, a million robots, and more megalomania Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Thursday delivered his annual letter to shareholders and it’s full of interesting news about the cloud and e-tail giant.…
South Korea introduces universal basic mobile data access - Everyone gets unlimited 400 Kbps access, oldies get expanded caps, and leaky telcos get their social license back Universal basic income is an idea that hasn’t gained much traction, but South Korea on Thursday implemented a universal basic mobile data access scheme.…
Microsoft cuts cloudy desktop prices by 20 percent, warns they’ll wake up slowly - Just in time to get buyers thinking as physical PC prices rise Microsoft has told its channel partners to get ready for a 20 percent price cut for Windows 365 cloud PCs, effective May 1st.…
Chatbots are great at manipulating people to buy stuff, Princeton boffins find - Urge restraints before AdLand does this without appropriate disclosures Large language models can be very persuasive, and researchers say that's a problem when they’re used to create advertising.…
New Scientist - Home
Chimpanzee group's violent rupture hints at evolutionary roots of war - Researchers who observed a murderous conflict unfolding in a once-unified group of wild chimpanzees say there are parallels with civil wars in human societies
CAR T-cell therapy takes woman from bedridden to 'perfectly fine' - A woman with three different autoimmune conditions had all of them treated simultaneously by genetically modifying her immune cells to kill off the rogue ones causing problems
Sci-fi show The Miniature Wife underwhelms – despite the big names - Elizabeth Banks stars as an author shrunk by her scientist husband Matthew Macfadyen in this major new series – but it fails to live up to its promise, finds Josh Bell
Mysterious 'compound X' clears toxic Parkinson’s proteins from brain - A drug known only as compound X helped to remove the problematic proteins associated with Parkinson's disease from the brains of mice, and improved their balance and mobility
Emperor penguins added to endangered list after rapid decline - The International Union for Conservation of Nature has updated the Red List status for three of Antarctica’s most famous species after a dire assessment of their prospects under climate change
Hacker News
The tool that won't let AI say anything it can't cite - Comments
How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer - Comments
Native Instant Space Switching on macOS - Comments
Generative art over the years - Comments
I still prefer MCP over skills - Comments
Slashdot
Particles Seen Emerging From Empty Space For First Time - Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from NewScientist: According to quantum chromodynamics (QCD) -- widely considered to be our best theory for describing the strong force, which binds quarks inside protons and neutrons -- even a perfect vacuum isn't truly empty. Instead, it is filled with short-lived disturbances in the underlying energy of space that flicker in and out of existence, known as virtual particles. Among them are quark-antiquark pairs. Under normal conditions, these fleeting pairs vanish almost as soon as they appear. But if enough energy is injected into a vacuum, QCD predicts they can be promoted into real, detectable particles with measurable mass. Now, the STAR collaboration -- an international team of physicists working at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state -- has observed this process for the first time. The team smashed together high-energy protons in a vacuum, producing a spray of particles. Some of these particles should be quark-antiquark pairs pulled directly from the vacuum itself, but quarks can never exist alone and immediately combine into composite particles. Quarks and antiquarks are born with their spins correlated -- a shared quantum alignment inherited from the vacuum. The researchers found that this link persists even after the quarks and antiquarks become part of larger particles called hyperons, which decay in less than a tenth of a billionth of a second. Spotting these spin-aligned hyperons in the aftermath of the proton collisions allowed the researchers to confirm that the quarks within them came from the vacuum. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US Fertility Rate Falls To All-Time Low - An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Women in the U.S. gave birth to roughly 710,000 fewer children last year compared with the nation's peak in 2007, according to preliminary data released (PDF) this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lead researcher Brady Hamilton, a demographer with the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, said the latest one percent drop in "general fertility" from 2024 to 2025 is part of a long-running downward trend. "Since 2007, there's been a decline in the general fertility rate [in the U.S.] of 23%," Hamilton told NPR. The impact of that change in real numbers is sizable: In 2007, there were 4,316,233 babies born. Last year, even though the nation's population as a whole is larger, there were only 3,606,400 newborns. There's no consensus over why women and couples have shifted their behavior so significantly. Some experts point to economic factors, others say cultural influences, and better access to education and contraception for women are driving the change. "We're seeing big drops in fertility rates for young women, teenagers and women in their 20s," said economist Martha Bailey, head of the California Center for Population Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. "What's not yet clear is whether or not those same women will go on to have children later on." "People are having the number of children they want and that they can afford at a time that makes the most sense for them," she said. "What I don't think anyone is in favor of is a Handmaid's Tale type policy regime, where we're trying to talk families into having children they don't want." One silver lining in the data is the 7% decline in teen pregnancies in 2025. Bianca Allison, pediatrician and associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, said: "What is actually affecting the birth rates are likely lower rates of teen pregnancy overall, which is in the context of higher use of contraception and lower sexual activity for youth, and then also continued access to abortion care." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
'Negative' Views of Broadcom Driving Thousands of VMware Migrations, Rival Says - "One of VMware's biggest competitors, Nutanix, claims to have swiped tens of thousands of VMware customers," reports Ars Technica. They said higher prices, forced bundling, licensing changes, and more strained partner relationships have frustrated customers and driven them away from the leading virtualization firm. From the report: Speaking at a press briefing at Nutanix's .NEXT conference in Chicago this week, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said that "about 30,000 customers" have migrated from VMware to the rival platform, pointing to customer disapproval over Broadcom's VMware strategy, SDxCentral, a London-based IT publication, reported today. "I think there's no doubt that the customer sentiment continues to be negative about Broadcom," Ramaswami said, per SDxCentral. Nutanix hasn't specified how many of the customers that it got from VMware are SMBs or enterprise-sized; although, adoption is said to be strongest among mid-market customers as Nutanix also tries wooing larger customers, often by starting with partial deployments. During this week's press briefing, Ramaswami reportedly said that some of the customers that moved from VMware to Nutanix during the latter's most recent fiscal quarter represented Nutanix's "strongest quarterly new logo additions in eight years." "Most of the logos came from our typical VMware migrations on to the [hyperconverged infrastructure] platform," he said. During the Nutanix conference, Brandon Shaw, Nutanix VP and head of technology services, said that Western Union has been migrating from VMware to Nutanix for six months, The Register reported. The financial services company is moving 900 to 1,200 applications across 3,900 cores. Shaw said that Western Union has been exploring new IT suppliers to help it become more customer-focused. Despite Broadcom's history of "decent lines of communication" with Western Union, Shaw said that Western Union had "challenges partnering with them." Shaw also pointed to Broadcom's efforts to push customers to buy the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), despite the product often having more features than companies need and at high prices. Since moving to Nutanix, the Denver-headquartered financial firm is also benefiting from having more flexibility around workload locations, which is important since Western Union is in over 200 countries, The Register said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mozilla Accuses Microsoft of Sabotaging Firefox With Windows and Copilot Tactics - BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla is accusing Microsoft of stacking the deck against Firefox, arguing that design choices in Windows steer users toward Edge even when they explicitly choose another browser. According to Mozilla, parts of Windows still open links in Edge regardless of the default browser setting, including results from the taskbar search and links launched from apps like Outlook and Teams. Mozilla says this means Firefox often never even gets the opportunity to handle those links, which quietly shifts user activity back into Microsoft's ecosystem. The company also points to Microsoft's aggressive rollout of Copilot as another example of platform power being used to push Microsoft services. Copilot appeared pinned to the taskbar, arrived automatically on many systems with Microsoft 365, and even received a dedicated keyboard key on some laptops. Mozilla argues that when the maker of the dominant desktop operating system promotes its own browser and AI tools at the system level, it becomes far harder for independent browsers like Firefox to compete. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Amazon May Sell Trainium AI Chips To Third Parties In Shot At Nvidia - Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company may eventually sell its Trainium AI chips directly to outside customers, not just through AWS, which would put Amazon in more direct competition with Nvidia. "There's so much demand for our chips that it's quite possible we'll sell racks of them to third parties in the future," Jassy wrote in his annual shareholder letter Thursday. He also revealed the company's chip business is already running at more than $20 billion annually, with demand so strong that current and even future generations are largely spoken for. Quartz reports: Access to Amazon's chips is currently limited to Amazon Web Services, with customers paying for cloud-based usage rather than owning any physical hardware. Selling to AWS and external customers alike, as standalone chipmakers do, would put annual revenue at around $50 billion, up from the $20 billion the company estimates for the year, Jassy said. The $20 billion figure spans three product lines: Trainium, the AI accelerator chip; Graviton, a general-purpose processor; and Nitro, a chip that helps run Amazon's EC2 server instances. All three are growing at triple-digit rates year over year, Jassy claimed in his letter. Jassy said demand for Trainium has outpaced supply at each generation. Trainium2 is essentially unavailable, with its entire allocated capacity spoken for. Trainium3 started reaching customers in early 2026, and reservations have filled nearly all available supply. Even Trainium4 -- which is not expected to reach wide release for another year and a half -- has substantial pre-orders committed. Jassy argued that a full-scale Trainium rollout could shave tens of billions off annual capital costs while meaningfully widening profit margin. Read more of this story at Slashdot.