Latest News

Last updated 27 Jan, 03:44 PM

BBC News

Pubs given support package after business rates backlash - Treasury Minister Dan Tomlinson says the three-year aid is worth £1,650 for the average pub.

Tearful Carol Kirkwood announces she is to leave BBC - The 63-year-old said it had been an "absolute privilege" to bring viewers the weather every day.

One Battle After Another leads Bafta nominations - The political thriller has 14 nominations, with Sinners, Hamnet and Marty Supreme also recognised.

Ground rents to be capped at £250 a year for leaseholders - The reforms for England and Wales also include proposals to ban the sale of new leasehold flats.

Coco Gauff calls for more player privacy after racquet smash - Coco Gauff calls for more privacy for players after she was filmed smashing a racquet after a devastating defeat by Elina Svitolina in the Australian Open quarter-finals.

The Register

Watchdog says US weather alerts are getting lost in translation - GAO urges NWS to firm up its AI language plans as policy shifts slow multilingual warnings US spending watchdogs have called on the National Weather Service (NWS) to deliver an updated plan for its AI language translation project to reduce the risk posed by extreme weather events to people not proficient in English.…

NASA begins formal anomaly review after MAVEN probe lost in space - Communication attempts ongoing for stricken spacecraft NASA is setting up an anomaly review board to look into the fate of its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which was last heard from on December 6.…

France to replace US videoconferencing wares with unfortunately named sovereign alternative - French govt says state-run service 'Visio' will be more secure. Now where have we heard that name before? France has officially told Zoom, Teams, and the rest of the US videoconferencing herd to take a hike in favor of its own homegrown app.…

Succession: Linux kernel community gets continuity plan for post-Linus era - Conclave doc outlines path to eternal releases The Linux kernel project has finally answered one of the biggest questions gripping the community: what happens if Linus Torvalds is no longer able to lead it?…

Japan doubles down on Trump's Genesis AI supercomputing effort - RIKEN links up with Argonne, Fujitsu, and Nvidia to build next-gen infrastructure Japan's RIKEN scientific research institute and Fujitsu are working with America's Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Nvidia to build and operate next-gen compute infrastructure for AI and high-performance computing (HPC), in line with President Trump's Genesis Mission.…

New Scientist - Home

We have a new way to explain why we agree on the nature of reality - An evolution-inspired framework for how quantum fuzziness gives rise to our classical world shows that even imperfect observers can eventually agree on an objective reality

Stick shaped by ancient humans is the oldest known wooden tool - Excavations at an opencast mine in Greece have uncovered two wooden objects more than 400,000 years old that appear to have been fashioned as tools by an unknown species of ancient human

Menstrual pad could give women insights into their changing fertility - A woman's fertility can be partly gauged by levels of a hormone that reflects how many eggs she has. Now, scientists have built a strip that changes colour according to levels of this hormone, which is present in period blood, into a menstrual pad

The best map of dark matter has revealed never-before-seen structures - JWST has created a map of dark matter that is twice as good as anything we have had before, and it may help unravel some of the deepest mysteries of the universe

The daring idea that time is an illusion and how we could prove it - The way time ticks forward in our universe has long stumped physicists. Now, a new set of tools from entangled atoms to black holes promises to reveal time’s true nature

Hacker News

Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor - Comments

I made my own Git - Comments

Heathrow scraps liquid container limit - Comments

Snow Simulation Toy - Comments

The Enchiridion by Epictetus - Comments

Slashdot

Pinterest Cuts Up To 15% Jobs To Redirect Resources To AI - Pinterest said on Tuesday it would trim its workforce by less than 15% and reduce office space, as the social media company looks to reallocate resources to AI-focused roles and initiatives. From a report: The announcement comes as the company competes with TikTok and Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram for digital advertising budgets, as these platforms continue to draw marketers with their extensive user base. Pinterest had 5,205 full-time employees as of September 2025. The latest job cut would translate to less than 780 positions. Top executives at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting said while jobs would disappear, new ones would spring up, with two telling Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies which were planning layoffs anyway. Last week, design software maker Autodesk also announced a 7% job cut to redirect investments to its cloud platform and AI efforts. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold Will Cost $2,900 in the US - Samsung said today that its Galaxy Z TriFold, the first tri-fold smartphone to ship in the U.S., will be available starting January 30 at a price point of $2,899 -- substantially more expensive than any other phone on the U.S. market, including Samsung's own $2,000 Galaxy Z Fold 7 and a fully loaded 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max. The company will only sell the device through its website and Samsung Experience Stores; mobile carrier partners including Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T won't be offering it directly. The TriFold unfolds into a 10-inch tablet, measures 3.9mm at its thinnest point, and is rated for 200,000 folds over its lifetime. Samsung launched the TriFold in South Korea on December 12 at 3.59 million won, about $2,450 at the time. Early reviews have praised the expansive inner screen for video but noted the 309-gram weight, thick folded dimensions, and half-baked software as significant drawbacks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How Anthropic Built Claude: Buy Books, Slice Spines, Scan Pages, Recycle the Remains - Court documents unsealed last week in a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic reveal that the AI company ran an operation called "Project Panama" to buy millions of physical books, slice off their spines, scan the pages to train its Claude chatbot, and then send the remains to recycling companies. The company spent tens of millions of dollars on the effort and hired Tom Turvey, a Google executive who had worked on the legally contested Google Books project two decades earlier. Anthropic bought books in batches of tens of thousands from retailers including Better World Books and World of Books. A vendor document noted the company was seeking to scan between 500,000 and two million books. Before Project Panama, Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann downloaded books from LibGen, a shadow library of pirated material, over 11 days in June 2021. He later shared a link to the Pirate Library Mirror site with colleagues, writing "this is awesome!!!" Meta employees similarly downloaded books from torrent platforms after approval from Mark Zuckerberg, court filings allege, though one engineer wrote that "torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right." Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion in August without admitting wrongdoing. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Is Refreshing the Xbox Cloud Gaming Web Experience - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Thurrott: Microsoft is testing a refresh of the Xbox Cloud Gaming web experience in public preview. "This preview is a first look at our new web interface on your browser and lets you try the updated design and product flow before it is rolled out broadly," Microsoft's Patrick Siu explains. "Players who opt in to this preview will see some changes to their experience including updated navigation features and a refreshed look and feel. As this is a preview, some functions may not yet be available or may behave differently than the current web experience. We will continue iterating during the preview period and changes may be made over time." [...] There's no real info about what's in the new experience, oddly. Microsoft notes only that it "lays the foundation for accelerating [their] ability to build new experiences for players," and that it "helps [them] validate the new web platform and refine the experience for everyone." The public preview can be found at xbox.com/play. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReactOS Celebrates 30 Years - jeditobe writes: ReactOS, the open-source operating system aimed at binary compatibility with Windows, recently marked its 30th anniversary. Launched in 1996, ReactOS has focused on providing a free alternative to Windows, with compatibility for Windows applications and drivers. Though still in development, it has made significant progress in recent years, including improvements to USB support, better hardware compatibility, and enhanced performance with the release of version 0.4.15. The upcoming 0.4.16 release is set to introduce UEFI support, KMDF and WDDM graphics driver support, marking a major step forward in ReactOS's development. Read more of this story at Slashdot.