Latest News

Last updated 15 Jan, 05:29 AM

BBC News

Twenty one English councils ask for election delays - Nearly a third of eligible authorities have want to postpone local polls scheduled for May.

Trump says Iran has 'no plan' to execute protesters - The US president does not rule out military action in Iran, as Tehran temporarily shuts its airspace to nearly all flights.

'I carried my wife's body for an hour and a half' - BBC hears stories of protesters killed in Iran - BBC Persian has received dozens of accounts from inside Iran. Defiant despite potential repercussions, the witnesses said they wanted to ensure the rest of the world knew of the violence against the protesters.

Denmark warns of 'fundamental disagreement' after White House talks on Greenland - There was no major breakthrough during the meeting, and President Trump reiterated his interest in acquiring the island shortly afterwards.

X to stop Grok AI from undressing images of real people after backlash - Grok will no longer allow users to remove clothing from images of real people in jurisdictions where it is illegal.

The Register

China's Z.ai claims it trained a model using only Huawei hardware - Hasn’t revealed how much kit did the job, so Nvidia can probably rest easy Chinese outfit Zhipu AI claims it trained a new model entirely using Huawei hardware, and that it’s the first company to build an advanced model entirely on Chinese hardware.…

AI may be everywhere, but it's nowhere in recent productivity statistics - Forrester principal analyst JP Gownder says jobs eaten by bots don't come back Interview Analyst firm Forrester’s vice president and principal analyst J. P. Gownder remains unconvinced that AI will revolutionize productivity.…

Maker fight! SparkFun cuts ties with Adafruit in harassment dispute - Adafruit claims SparkFun aims to shoot the messenger for criticizing corporate tolerance of intolerance Retailer SparkFun Electronics last month said it would no longer do business with electronics kit-maker Adafruit Industries, citing violations of SparkFun's Code of Conduct during online interactions.…

CrowdStrike shareholders lose battle to recoup losses from 2024 outage - Investors didn't present a valid claim, says judge, but they're welcome to try again A group of CrowdStrike shareholders who sued the company over losses sustained following its 2024 global outage will have to head back to the drawing board if they hope to recoup losses, as a Texas judge has deemed they failed to adequately state a claim.…

Google offers bargain: Sell your soul to Gemini, and it'll give you smarter answers - But private data will stay private and won't be used for training, Google says Google on Wednesday began inviting Gemini users to let its chatbot read their Gmail, Photos, Search history, and YouTube data in exchange for possibly more personalized responses.…

New Scientist - Home

Woolly rhino genome recovered from meat in frozen wolf pup’s stomach - A piece of woolly rhinoceros flesh hidden inside a wolf that died 14,400 years ago has yielded genetic information that improves our understanding of why one of the most iconic megafauna species of the last glacial period went extinct

Sinking river deltas put millions at risk of flooding - Some of the world’s biggest megacities are located in river deltas threatened by subsidence due to excessive groundwater extraction and urban expansion, compounding the threat they face from sea-level rise

Psychiatry has finally found an objective way to spot mental illness - A decades-long push to identify clear biomarkers for anxiety and depression is at last achieving results

China has applied to launch 200,000 satellites, but what are they for? - A Chinese application to the International Telecommunications Union suggests plans for the largest satellite mega constellation ever built – but something else might be going on here

T. rex took 40 years to become fully grown - An analysis of growth rings in the leg bones of 17 Tyrannosaurus rex individuals reveals that the dinosaurs matured much more slowly than previously thought, and adds to the evidence that they weren't all one species

Hacker News

The URL shortener that makes your links look as suspicious as possible - Comments

Claude Cowork exfiltrates files - Comments

Furiosa: 3.5x efficiency over H100s - Comments

Ask HN: What is the best way to provide continuous context to models? - Comments

Scaling long-running autonomous coding - Comments

Slashdot

The Swedish Start-Up Aiming To Conquer America's Full-Body-Scan Craze - An anonymous reader quotes a report from DealBook: Fifteen years ago, Daniel Ek broke into America's digital-content wars with his streaming music start-up, Spotify, which has turned into a publicly traded company with a $110 billion market value. Now he and his business partner, the Swedish entrepreneur Hjalmar Nilsonne, aim to crack a higher-stakes consumer market: American health care. The pair plan to bring Neko Health, the health tech start-up they founded in 2018, to New York this spring, DealBook is first to report. Mr. Ek and Mr. Nilsonne hope to capitalize on the growing number of prevention-minded Americans who are hungry to track their biometric data. Whether through wearables like Oura rings or more intensive screenings, consumers are turning to technology to improve their health and help spot the early onset of some big killers, including cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. The United States will be the third market, after Sweden and Britain, for Neko Health, which offers full-body diagnostic scans and is valued at roughly $1.7 billion. [...] Mr. Nilsonne and Mr. Ek said Neko Health's big aim was to change the health care model, in which spending across much of the developed world skyrockets but longevity gains have stalled. They want to make their noninvasive scans as routine as an annual checkup. The company, which advertises its service as "a health check for your future self," did not say what the U.S. scans would cost. But in Stockholm, an hourlong visit at one of its clinics costs 2,750 Swedish krona (about $300). Prenuvo's and Ezra's most comprehensive scans can cost $3,999. [...] Neko Health's technology differs from that of many of its U.S. rivals. It does not use M.R.I. or X-rays, instead relying on scores of sensors and cameras and a mix of proprietary and off-the-shelf technologies to measure heart function and circulation, and to photograph and map every inch of a patient's body looking for cancerous lesions. At the moment, the company's biggest challenge is scaling. [...] Mr. Nilsonne said Neko Health scans have detected the early onset of diseases or serious medical conditions for thousands of its patients. But the medical community is divided on the need for proactive screening technologies. The fear is that mass adoption could spur a wave of false positives and send healthy people to seek follow-up medical advice, overwhelming an already swamped health care system. Mr. Ek and Mr. Nilsonne believe they have built a better solution. And now they're ready to test it in the U.S. market. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Are QWERTY Phones Trying To Make a Comeback? - After nearly two decades of touchscreen dominance, QWERTY smartphones are staging a niche comeback, with Clicks and Unihertz unveiling new physical-keyboard phones at CES 2026. Gizmodo reports: At CES 2026, Clicks, the company behind the Clicks keyboard case and the new Power Keyboard, announced plans to sell the Communicator, a "second phone" with a QWERTY keypad. Clicks pitches the $500 phone, launching later this year, as a device primarily intended for messaging -- sending texts, DMs, Slack messages, whatever. The company didn't have a functional unit -- only a mockup dummy to fondle at the show -- but it looked cool enough, even if it'll be a very niche product. It's a cool idea, but how many people will carry a companion phone to their main phone just to shoot off a few DMs? $500 is a lot to ask for that satisfaction. But Clicks isn't the only one trying to bring back QWERTY phones. Unihertz, makers of the really tiny Jelly Android phones and also Tank phones with massive battery capacities, also teased a new phone with a physical keyboard. The Titan 2 Elite seems to be a less gimmicky version of the Titan 2, which itself was a BlackBerry Passport knockoff but with a bizarre square screen on the backside. Look closely, and there are some weird similarities between the Clicks Communicator and the Titan 2 Elite. We don't have dimension specs yet, but the screens seem to have the same rounded corners, and even the hole-punch camera is in the same upper-left corner. The only difference seems to be the keyboards; the Communicator uses individual keys, whereas the Titan 2 Elite's keyboard is more BlackBerry-esque. After digging into the Clicks Communicator's specs, a few other features stood out that Slashdotters might appreciate. There's a dedicated 3.5mm headphone jack, a physical "kill switch" (essentially an alert slider), fingerprint scanner and even a customizable notification LED. The last time we saw a phone with a dedicated notification LED was around 2019! Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Digg Launches Its New Reddit Rival To the Public - Digg is officially back under the ownership of its original founder, Kevin Rose, along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. "Similar to Reddit, the new Digg offers a website and mobile app where you can browse feeds featuring posts from across a selection of its communities and join other communities that align with your interests," reports TechCrunch. "There, you can post, comment, and upvote (or 'digg') the site's content." From the report: [T]he rise of AI has presented an opportunity to rebuild Digg, Rose and Ohanian believe, leading them to acquire Digg last March through a leveraged buyout by True Ventures, Ohanian's firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian themselves, and the venture firm S32. The company has not disclosed its funding. They're betting that AI can help to address some of the messiness and toxicity of today's social media landscape. At the same time, social platforms will need a new set of tools to ensure they're not taken over by AI bots posing as people. "We obviously don't want to force everyone down some kind of crazy KYC process," said Rose in an interview with TechCrunch, referring to the 'know your customer' verification process used by financial institutions to confirm someone's identity. Instead of simply offering verification checkmarks to designate trust, Digg will try out new technologies, like using zero-knowledge proofs (cryptographic methods that verify information without revealing the underlying data) to verify the people using its platform. It could also do other things, like require that people who join a product-focused community verify they actually own or use the product being discussed there. As an example, a community for Oura ring owners could verify that everyone who posts has proven they own one of the smart rings. Plus, Rose suggests Digg could use signals acquired from mobile devices to help verify members -- for instance, the app could identify when Digg users attended a meetup in the same location. "I don't think there's going to be any one silver bullet here," said Rose. "It's just going to be us saying ... here's a platter of things that you can add together to create trust." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cerebras Scores OpenAI Deal Worth Over $10 Billion - Cerebras Systems landed a more than $10 billion deal to supply up to 750 megawatts of compute to OpenAI through 2028, according to a blog post by OpenAI. CNBC reports: The deal will help diversify Cerebras away from the United Arab Emirates' G42, which accounted for 87% of revenue in the first half of 2024. "The way you have three very large customers is start with one very large customer, and you keep them happy, and then you win the second one," Cerebras' co-founder and CEO Andrew Feldman told CNBC in an interview. Cerebras has built a large processor that can train and run generative artificial intelligence models. [...] "Cerebras adds a dedicated low-latency inference solution to our platform," Sachin Katti, who works on compute infrastructure at OpenAI, wrote in the blog. "That means faster responses, more natural interactions, and a stronger foundation to scale real-time AI to many more people." The deal comes months after OpenAI worked with Cerebras to ensure that its gpt-oss open-weight models would work smoothly on Cerebras silicon, alongside chips from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. OpenAI's gpt-oss collaboration led to technical conversations with Cerebras, and the two companies signed a term sheet just before Thanksgiving, Feldman said in an interview with CNBC. The report notes that this deal helps strengthen Cerebras' IPO prospects. The $10+ billion OpenAI deal materially improves revenue visibility, customer diversification, and strategic credibility, addressing key concerns from its withdrawn filing and setting the stage for a more compelling refile with updated financials and narrative. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DoorDash and UberEats Cost Drivers $550 Million In Tips, NYC Says - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gothamist: City regulators on Tuesday accused Uber and DoorDash of deliberately altering their app interfaces to discourage customers from tipping food delivery workers, a move that has cost the employees more than $550 million over the last two years. A report (PDF) published by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection argues that food delivery app giants retaliated against minimum wage rules for delivery drivers that took effect in December 2023 by implementing "design tricks" that obscure opportunities to offer a tip in their mobile apps. DoorDash explicitly blames the new wage rules for removing the simpler tipping option. "In response to regulations in New York City, you will now only be able to add a tip for your Dasher after they have been assigned," a message on the app's checkout page states. Other food delivery apps like GrubHub allow customers the option to add a tip before checking out. The average tip for DoorDash and Uber Eats drivers in the city fell from $2.17 to 76 cents per delivery after the companies made the changes to their apps, the report found. Both companies also issue messages to customers in the city telling them the prices for their orders were "set by an algorithm using your personal data." Further reading: Uber and DoorDash Try To Halt NYC Law That Encourages Tipping Read more of this story at Slashdot.