Latest News
Last updated 03 Jan, 12:15 AM
BBC News
'Living a nightmare': Families of teens missing after ski resort fire desperate for news - Families are appealing for information about children as young as 15 who are thought to have been at the bar.
Sparklers on champagne bottles likely cause of deadly Swiss bar fire - The investigation into the fire that killed 40 people will consider whether criminal prosecutions are necessary, officials said.
Man, 67, dies after being pulled from sea as search continues - Emergency services and HM Coastguard are at the scene in the East Yorkshire resort.
Weather warnings extended as snow and ice blanket parts of UK - Weather warnings are in place for various parts of the UK until Monday, with the heaviest snowfall expected to hit Scotland.
Anthony Joshua's driver charged over Nigeria crash that killed two - The former heavyweight champion was a passenger in the crash, which killed two of his team members on Monday.
The Register
Headset hype meets harsh reality as Apple and Meta VR shipments fizzle in 2025 - But how about some smart glasses instead? Apple’s pricey Vision Pro VR headset had a tough 2025.…
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadell becomes AI influencer, asks us all to move beyond slop - Exec argues we need a new metaphor focused on AI as a lever rather than a job killer Microsoft CEO and head AI peddler Satya Nadella wants you to know that it's time for the next phase of AI acceptance, where we focus on how humans are empowered by tools and agents and how we deploy resources to support this growth.…
Bitfinex crypto thief who was serving five years thanks Trump for early release - Netflix documentary part 2 in the works? Ilya Lichtenstein, who pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges tied to the 2016 theft of about 120,000 bitcoins from the Bitfinex exchange and was sentenced to five years in prison, has been released after roughly 14 months in the slammer.…
Cybercrook claims to be selling infrastructure info about three major US utilities - For the bargain price of 6.5 bitcoin A cybercrook claims to have breached Pickett and Associates, a Florida-based engineering firm whose clients include major US utilities, and is selling what they claim to be about 139 GB of engineering data about Tampa Electric Company, Duke Energy Florida, and American Electric Power. The price is 6.5 bitcoin, which amounts to about $585,000.…
Finnish cops grill crew of ship suspected of undersea cable sabotage - EU 'closely monitoring' along with NATO as state action suspected but not confirmed Finnish police have arrested and are interviewing two crew members from a class A cargo ship sailing from Russia after suspected cable sabotage in the Baltic Sea.…
New Scientist - Home
Was our earliest ancestor a knuckle-dragger, or did it walk upright? - Did Sahelanthropus, which lived 7 million years ago, walk on two legs like a modern human? It's complicated
Russia-US nuclear pact set to end in 2026 and we won't see another - After the New START treaty expires in February, there will be no cap on the number of US and Russian nuclear weapons - but some are sceptical about whether the deal actually made the world safer
Gargantuan black hole may be a remnant from the dawn of the universe - Astronomers were puzzled by a black hole around 50 million times the mass of the sun with no stars, spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope – now simulations suggest it could be a primordial black hole, something we have never seen before
Chess can be made fairer by rearranging the pieces - Chess960 involves shuffling the pieces at the back of the board, and an analysis suggests doing so can increase the complexity of the game to favour white, black or neither player
The cost of weight-loss drugs should fall in 2026 - The price of weight-loss drugs like Wegovy put them out of reach for most people with obesity, but new arrivals and expiring patents should change that this year
Hacker News
Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere - Comments
Daft Punk Easter Egg in the BPM Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger? - Comments
NY Fed cash transfers to banks increase dramatically in Q4 2025 - Comments
Unix v4 (1973) – Live Terminal - Comments
Clicks Communicator - Comments
Slashdot
MTV's Music-Only Channels Go Off the Air - An anonymous reader shares a report: MTV shut down many of its last dedicated 24-hour music channels Dec. 31. The move, announced back in October, affected channels around the world, with the U.K. seeing five different MTV stations going dark. These include MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV, and MTV Live. As Consequence notes, MTV Music -- which launched in 2011 -- notably ended its run by airing the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," the first visual to air when MTV launched in the United States in 1981. MTV's parent company, Paramount Skydance, is also expected to shutter music-only channels in Australia, Poland, France, and Brazil. Despite axing much of its dedicated music programming, MTV's flagship channels are still expected to keep broadcasting in the U.K. and elsewhere. Like in the U.S., these channels primarily air massively popular reality programs, as opposed to music videos. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google AI Overviews Put People at Risk of Harm With Misleading Health Advice - A Guardian investigation published Friday found that Google's AI Overviews -- the generative AI summaries that appear at the top of search results -- are serving up inaccurate health information that experts say puts people at risk of harm. The investigation, which came after health groups, charities and professionals raised concerns, uncovered several cases of misleading medical advice despite Google's claims that the feature is "helpful" and "reliable." In one case described by experts as "really dangerous," Google advised people with pancreatic cancer to avoid high-fat foods, which is the exact opposite of what should be recommended and could jeopardize a patient's chances of tolerating chemotherapy or surgery. A search for liver blood test normal ranges produced masses of numbers without accounting for nationality, sex, ethnicity or age of patients, potentially leaving people with serious liver disease thinking they are healthy. The company also incorrectly listed a pap test as a test for vaginal cancer. The Eve Appeal cancer charity noted that the AI summaries changed when running the exact same search, pulling from different sources each time. Mental health charity Mind said some summaries for conditions such as psychosis and eating disorders offered "very dangerous advice." Google said the vast majority of its AI Overviews were factual and that many examples shared were "incomplete screenshots," adding that the accuracy rate was on par with featured snippets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Trump Signs Defense Bill Prohibiting China-Based Engineers in Pentagon IT Work - President Donald Trump signed into law this month a measure that prohibits anyone based in China and other adversarial countries from accessing the Pentagon's cloud computing systems. From a report: The ban, which is tucked inside the $900 billion defense policy law, was enacted in response to a ProPublica investigation this year that exposed how Microsoft used China-based engineers to service the Defense Department's computer systems for nearly a decade -- a practice that left some of the country's most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary. U.S.-based supervisors, known as "digital escorts," were supposed to serve as a check on these foreign employees, but we found they often lacked the expertise needed to effectively supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills. In the wake of the reporting, leading members of Congress called on the Defense Department to strengthen its security requirements while blasting Microsoft for what some Republicans called "a national betrayal." Cybersecurity and intelligence experts have told ProPublica that the arrangement posed major risks to national security, given that laws in China grant the country's officials broad authority to collect data. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
AMD Closes in on Intel in Latest Steam Hardware Survey - AMD's share of processors among Steam users climbed to 47.27% in December 2025, a 4.66% jump in a single month that continues the company's steady encroachment on Intel's once-dominant position in the gaming CPU market. Intel held roughly 77% of the Steam Hardware Survey five years ago, and that lead has eroded considerably as AMD broke the 40% threshold in the third quarter of 2025 and kept climbing. The gains came despite an ongoing memory shortage that has pushed DDR5 prices to record highs -- AMD's AM5 platform requires DDR5 exclusively, while Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh chips support both DDR4 and DDR5. Many gamers are turning to older AMD Zen 3 processors like the Ryzen 5 5800X, which topped Amazon's bestseller lists during the holiday period and work on DDR4-compatible platforms. Meanwhile, the proportion of Steam users running 32GB of RAM rose to 39.07%, nearly matching the 40.14% still on 16GB, as gamers likely rushed to upgrade before prices climbed further amid AI's demand for memory. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Reading is a Vice - The International Publishers Association spent the past year promoting the slogan "Democracy depends on reading," but Atlantic senior editor Adam Kirsch argues that this utilitarian pitch fundamentally misunderstands why people become readers in the first place. The most recent Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found that less than half of Americans read a single book in 2022, and only 38% read a novel or short story. A University of Florida and University College London study found daily reading for pleasure fell 3% annually from 2003 to 2023. Among 13-year-olds, just 14% read for fun almost every day in 2023, down from 27% a decade earlier. Kirsch says to stop treating reading as civic medicine. "It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice," he writes. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn't stop people from buying dangerous books. Now that books are deemed virtuous, nobody picks them up. He points to Don Quixote and Madame Bovary -- novels whose protagonists are ruined by their reading habits. Great writers, he notes, never idealized literature the way educators do. The pitch to young readers should emphasize staying up late reading under the covers by flashlight, hoping nobody finds out. Read more of this story at Slashdot.