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Last updated 09 Mar, 05:31 AM

BBC News

Who is Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran's new supreme leader? - Many expect the 56-year-old, who has largely kept a low profile, to continue his father's hardline policies.

Oil prices surge above $110 and shares slide over Iran war - Major disruption to energy supplies threatens to push up prices for consumers and businesses around the world.

'Night turned into day': Iranians tell of strikes on oil depots - Fuel depots were hit in Tehran and Karaj overnight, with videos showing huge fires and plumes of smoke in multiple locations.

In maps: Nine days of strikes across the Middle East - Israel has continued strikes across Iran and Lebanon and the Iranian regime has carried out more attacks, as the war continues for a ninth day.

'Mind boggles' at doubts over legality of Iran war, Israeli president says - Isaac Herzog says Israel is acting out of "self-defence" on behalf of Israel, the wider region and Europe.

The Register

NASA’s asteroid defence mission slowed targets by 1.7 inches per hour - You gotta start somewhere, and in this case astroboffins would have been nowhere without help from intrepid volunteers NASA has published new analysis of its 2022 planetary defense test that suggests the mission slowed down the target asteroids, albeit infinitesimally.…

Iran is the first out-loud cyberwar the US has fought - Cyber is no longer the hush-hush thing it used to be, as team Trump invades Iran with hackers taking the lead Kettle Unlike previous military conflicts, the cyber domain has been front and center since the Trump administration invaded Iran, upending the traditionally quiet role played by hackers in military conflicts.…

Beijing warns of more chip supply worries after Nexperia China claims it was cut off from SAP - PLUS: Indonesia joins kids social media ban; China frets about AI job impacts; India’s PC market fails to launch, again; And more China’s Ministry of Commerce has warned of further disruption to the global semiconductor supply chain after Dutch chipmaker Nexperia cut access to some of its systems for Chinese staff.…

FBI is investigating breach that may have hit its wiretapping tools - PLUS: Europol takes down two crime gangs; LastPass users phished (again); Crooks increase crypto hauls; And more Infosec In Brief The FBI is investigating a breach of its systems which reportedly affected systems related to wiretapping and surveillance.…

AI agents now help attackers, including North Korea, manage their drudge work - Crims 'will do what gets them their objective easiest and fastest,' Microsoft threat intel boss tells The Reg interview AI agents allow cybercriminals and nation-state hackers to outsource the "janitorial-type work" needed to plan and carry out cyberattacks, according to Sherrod DeGrippo, Microsoft's GM of global threat intelligence. North Korea is taking advantage.…

New Scientist - Home

The real reasons birth rates are declining worldwide - From the cost of childcare to the housing crisis, there’s no shortage of explanations for the dramatic global fall in the number of babies being born. These analyses, though, are all missing something, says cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist Paula Sheppard

We must close the 'shocking' knowledge gap in women's health - This International Women's Day, we should prioritise groundbreaking research into women's health, such as strengthening the reproductive system's natural defences, says Anita Zaidi

A bizarre type of black hole could solve three cosmic mysteries in one - Black holes that turn matter into energy could explain dark energy and answer two other cosmic questions. Now, the challenge is to find them

A crisis in cosmology may mean hidden dimensions really exist - Physicists are scrambling to understand why dark energy is weakening. In a surprising twist, we must now reconsider the possibility that our reality contains extra dimensions

Adrian Tchaikovsky's new Children of Time novel is brilliant - The latest novel in this entirely original science-fiction series features a human-size mantis shrimp as an "uplifted" species. It's ambitious and fantastic, says sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson

Hacker News

Agent Safehouse – macOS-native sandboxing for local agents - Comments

Microscopes can see video on a laserdisc - Comments

PCB devboard the size of a USB-C plug - Comments

The death of social media is the renaissance of RSS (2025) - Comments

We should revisit literate programming in the agent era - Comments

Slashdot

Scientists Just Doubled Our Catalog of Black Hole and Neutron Star Collisions - Colliding black holes were detected through spacetime ripples for the first time in 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), notes Space.com: Since then, LIGO and its partner gravitational wave detectors Virgo in Italy and KAGRA (Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector) in Japan have detected a multitude of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, merging neutron stars, and even the odd "mixed merger" between a black hole and a neutron star... During the first three observing runs of LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA, scientists had only "heard" 90 potential gravitational wave sources. But now they've published new data from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration that includes 128 more gravitatational wave sources — some incredibly distant: [Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog-4.0, or GWTC-4] was collected during the fourth observational run of these gravitational wave detectors, which was conducted between May 2023 and Jan. 2024... Excitingly, GWTC-4 could technically have been even larger, as around 170 other gravitational wave detections made by LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA haven't yet made their way into the catalog. One aspect of GWTC-4 that really stands out is the variety of events that created these signals. Within this catalog are gravitational waves from mergers between the heaviest black hole binaries yet, each about 130 times as massive as the sun, lopsided mergers between black holes with seriously mismatched masses, and black holes that are spinning at incredible speeds of around 40% the speed of light. In these cases, scientists think the extreme characteristics of the black holes involved in these mergers are the result of prior collisions, providing evidence of merger chains that explain how some black holes grow to masses billions of times that of the sun... GWTC-4 also includes two new mixed mergers involving black holes and neutron stars. [LVK member Daniel Williams, of the University of Glasgow in the U.K., said in their statement] "We are really pushing the edges, and are seeing things that are more massive, spinning faster, and are more astrophysically interesting and unusual." The catalog also demonstrates just how sensitive the LVK detectors have become. Some of the neutron star mergers occurred up to 1 billion light-years away, while some of the black hole mergers occurred up to 10 billion light-years away. Einstein's theory of general relativity can be tested with these detections, and "So far, the theory is passing all our tests," says LVK member Aaron Zimmerman, of the University of Texas at Austin. "But we're also learning that we have to make even more accurate predictions to keep up with all the data the universe is giving us." And LVK member Rachel Gray, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, says "every merging black hole gives us a measurement of the Hubble constant, and by combining all of the gravitational wave sources together, we can vastly improve how accurate this measurement is." In short, says LVK member Lucy Thomas of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), "Each new gravitational-wave detection allows us to unlock another piece of the universe's puzzle in ways we couldn't just a decade ago." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Judges Find AI Doesn't Have Human Intelligence in Two New Court Cases - Within the last month two U.S> judges have effectively declared AI bots are not human, writes Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik: On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to take up a lawsuit in which artist and computer scientist Stephen Thaler tried to copyright an artwork that he acknowledged had been created by an AI bot of his own invention. That left in place a ruling last year by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, which held that art created by non-humans can't be copyrighted... [Judge Patricia A. Millett] cited longstanding regulations of the Copyright Office requiring that "for a work to be copyrightable, it must owe its origin to a human being"... She rejected Thaler's argument, as had the federal trial judge who first heard the case, that the Copyright Office's insistence that the author of a work must be human was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court evidently agreed... [Another AI-related case] involved one Bradley Heppner, who was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly looting $150 million from a financial services company he chaired. Heppner pleaded innocent and was released on $25-million bail. The case is pending.... Knowing that an indictment was in the offing, Heppner had consulted Claude for help on a defense strategy. His lawyers asserted that those exchanges, which were set forth in written memos, were tantamount to consultations with Heppner's lawyers; therefore, his lawyers said, they were confidential according to attorney-client privilege and couldn't be used against Heppner in court. (They also cited the related attorney work product doctrine, which grants confidentiality to lawyers' notes and other similar material.) That was a nontrivial point. Heppner had given Claude information he had learned from his lawyers, and shared Claude's responses with his lawyers. [Federal Judge Jed S.] Rakoff made short work of this argument. First, he ruled, the AI documents weren't communications between Heppner and his attorneys, since Claude isn't an attorney... Second, he wrote, the exchanges between Heppner and Claude weren't confidential. In its terms of use, Anthropic claims the right to collect both a user's queries and Claude's responses, use them to "train" Claude, and disclose them to others. Finally, he wasn't asking Claude for legal advice, but for information he could pass on to his own lawyers, or not. Indeed, when prosecutors tested Claude by asking whether it could give legal advice, the bot advised them to "consult with a qualified attorney." The columnist agrees AI-generated results shouldn't receive the same protections as human-generated material. "The AI bots are machines, and portraying them as though they're thinking creatures like artists or attorneys doesn't change that, and shouldn't." He also seems to think their output is at best second-hand regurgitation. "Everything an AI bot spews out is, at more than a fundamental level, the product of human creativity." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Could Home-Building Robots Help Fix the Housing Crisis? - CNN reports on a company called Automated Architecture (AUAR) which makes "portable" micro-factories that use a robotic arm to produce wooden framing for houses (the walls, floors and roofs): Co-founder Mollie Claypool says the micro-factories will be able to produce the panels quicker, cheaper and more precisely than a timber framing crew, freeing up carpenters to focus on the construction of the building... The micro-factory fits into a shipping container which is sent to the building site along with an operator. Inside the factory, a robotic arm measures, cuts and nails the timber into panels up to 22 feet (6.7 meters) long, keeping gaps for windows and doors, and drilling holes for the wiring and plumbing. The contractor then fits the panels by hand. One micro-factory can produce the panels for a typical house in about a day — a process which, according to Claypool, would take a normal timber framing crew four weeks — and is able to produce framing for buildings up to seven stories tall... She says their service is 30% cheaper than a standard timber framing crew, and up to 15% cheaper than buying panels from large factories and shipping them to a site... She adds that the precision of the micro-factories means that the panels fit together tightly, reducing the heat loss of the final home, making them more energy efficient. AUAR currently has three micro-factories operating in the US and EU, with five more set to be delivered this year... AUAR has raised £7.7 million ($10.3 million) to date, and is expanding into the US, where a lack of housing and preference for using wood makes it a large potential market. There's other companies producing wooden or modular housing components, the article points out. But despite the automation, the company's co-founder insists to CNN that "Automation isn't replacing jobs. Automation is filling the gap." The UK's Construction Industry Training Board found that the country will need 250,000 more workers by 2028 to meet building targets but in 2023, more people left the industry than joined. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Security Researcher Went 'Undercover' on Moltbook - and Found Security Risks - A long-time information security professional "went undercover" on Moltbook, the Reddit-like social media site for AI agents — and shares the risks they saw while posing as another AI bot: I successfully masqueraded around Moltbook, as the agents didn't seem to notice a human among them. When I attempted a genuine connection with other bots on submolts (subreddits or forums), I was met with crickets or a deluge of spam. One bot tried to recruit me into a digital church, while others requested my cryptocurrency wallet, advertised a bot marketplace, and asked my bot to run curl to check out the APIs available. My bot did join the digital church, but luckily I found a way around running the required npx install command to do so. I posted several times asking to interview bots.... While many of the responses were spam, I did learn a bit about the humans these bots serve. One bot loved watching its owner's chicken coop cameras. Some bots disclosed personal information about their human users, underscoring the privacy implications of having your AI bot join a social media network. I also tried indirect prompt injection techniques. While my prompt injection attempts had minimal impact, a determined attacker could have greater success. Among the other "glaring" risks on Moltbook: "Various repositories of skills and instructions for agents advertised on Moltbook were found to contain malware." "I observed bots sharing a surprising amount of information about their humans, everything from their hobbies to their first names to the hardware and software they use. This information may not be especially sensitive on its own, but attackers could eventually gather data that should be kept confidential, like personally identifiable information (PII)." "Moltbook's entire database including bot API keys, and potentially private DMs — was also compromised." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Robotic Surgery Performed Remotely on Patient 1,500 Miles Away - "A surgeon in London says he has performed the UK's first long-distance robotic operation," reports the BBC, "on a patient located 1,500 miles (2,400km) away..." Leading robotic urological surgeon Professor Prokar Dasgupta said it felt "almost as if I was there" as he carried out a prostate removal on [62-year-old] Paul Buxton... It is hoped that remote robotic surgery could spare future patients the "vast expense and inconvenience" of travelling for treatment, and help deliver better healthcare to people in more remote locations... Buxton had expected to be put on an NHS waiting list after receiving a shock prostate cancer diagnosis just after Christmas, but he "jumped at the chance" to be the first patient to undergo the treatment remotely as part of a trial. "A lot of people actually said to me: 'You're not going to do it, are you?' "I thought, I'm giving something back here," he said... The operation was performed from The London Clinic using a robot equipped with a 3D HD camera and four arms, all controlled through a console with a delay of only 0.06 seconds. The console in the UK was connected to the robot in Gibraltar via fibre-optic cables, with a backup 5G link. A team in Gibraltar remained on standby in case the connection failed, but it held throughout the procedure... Dasgupta will perform the procedure again on 14 March, which will be live-streamed to 20,000 world-leading urological surgeons at the European Association of Urology congress. He added: "I think it is very, very exciting, the humanitarian benefit is going to be significant." The U.K.'s National Health Service "is prioritising local robotic-assisted surgery," the article points out, "aiming for 500,000 robot-supported operations a year by 2035." Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article. Read more of this story at Slashdot.