Latest News
Last updated 23 Feb, 07:16 PM
BBC News
Watch: Peter Mandelson led away by police from Camden home - The Metropolitan Police said a 72-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office.
At least 25 National Guard troops killed in violence after death of Mexican drug lord - Violence has erupted across Mexico since a powerful drug cartel boss died after being captured by special forces.
Care home boss sexually abused children for decades - A jury hears children were preyed upon by Malcolm Phillips and his assistant for more than 20 years.
BBC sorry for airing racial slur shouted by guest with Tourette's at Baftas - Actors Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo were on stage at the time during the award ceremony in London.
Special educational needs system to be overhauled in England - Only children with the most complex needs will be eligible for education, health and care plans from 2035.
The Register
Microsoft execs worry AI will eat entry level coding jobs - Russinovich and Hanselman say firms must train juniors to fix agent mistakes – not replace them with prompts Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP of Developer Community Scott Hanselman have written a paper arguing that senior software engineers must mentor junior developers to prevent AI coding agents from hollowing out the profession's future skills base.…
Indie web browser Ladybird flutters toward Rust with a little help from AI - Project ditches Swift and translates C++ with LLM assistance The independent Ladybird web browser project is changing course on its choice of programming languages, with LLM-based coding assistants helping to evaluate the shift.…
Artemis II headed back to the bay; helium issues force another delay - Sending humans around the Moon in February, er, March - now April 2026, maybe The quest to return to the Moon has hit another snag. NASA is delaying Artemis II again, as interrupted helium flow to the rocket’s upper stage forces a rollback to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and wipes out the March launch window.…
Global regulators say AI image tools don't get a free pass on privacy rules - Watchdogs warn models that can generate realistic images of people must comply with data protection laws A global coalition of privacy watchdogs has fired a warning shot at the generative AI industry, saying companies churning out realistic synthetic images can't pretend that data protection rules don't apply.…
Break free of Ring's servers, earn a five-figure bounty - Goal is to run software locally and stream only to owners' computers If the sour taste has still not left your mouth after Ring's Super Bowl ad, there is a $10,000 prize for anyone who can find a security flaw in the company's cameras.…
New Scientist - Home
We need to get better at identifying postpartum depression in dads - Around 40 per cent of people are unaware that men can experience postpartum depression too — that has to change
Fresh understanding of the causes of migraine reveals new drug targets - New insights into the causes of migraine are prompting a fresh look at a drug target that was sidelined 25 years ago
Why our brains tune things out and how to overcome it when you need to - We often stop noticing things we’ve become too accustomed to, as a side effect of our brains protecting us from sensory overload. Columnist Helen Thomson shares the evidence-backed ways to learn how to notice again
We’ve glimpsed before the big bang and it’s not what we expected - The big bang wasn’t the start of everything, but it has been impossible to see what came before. Now a new kind of cosmology is lifting the veil on the beginning of time
The maths quirk that can cheer you up if you're feeling unpopular - If you feel like the least popular person among your friends, then a handy piece of maths might improve your mood, says Peter Rowlett
Hacker News
The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection - Comments
Ladybird Browser adopts Rust - Comments
'Viking' was a job description, not a matter of heredity: Ancient DNA study - Comments
Show HN: PgDog – Scale Postgres without changing the app - Comments
A simple web we own - Comments
Slashdot
'How Many AIs Does It Take To Read a PDF?' - Despite AI's progress in building complex software, the ubiquitous PDF remains something of a grand challenge -- a format Adobe developed in the early 1990s to preserve the precise visual appearance of documents. PDFs consist of character codes, coordinates, and rendering instructions rather than logically ordered text, and even state-of-the-art models asked to extract information from them will summarize instead, confuse footnotes with body text, or outright hallucinate contents, The Verge writes. Companies like Reducto are now tackling the problem by segmenting pages into components -- headers, tables, charts -- before routing each to specialized parsing models, an approach borrowed from computer vision techniques used in self-driving vehicles. Researchers at Hugging Face recently found roughly 1.3 billion PDFs sitting in Common Crawl alone, and the Allen Institute for AI has noted that PDFs could provide trillions of novel, high-quality training tokens from government reports, textbooks, and academic papers -- the kind of data AI developers are increasingly desperate for. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anthropic Accuses Chinese Companies of Siphoning Data From Claude - U.S. artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic said three Chinese AI companies set up more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts with its Claude AI model to help their own systems catch up. From a report: The three companies -- DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax -- prompted Claude more than 16 million times, siphoning information from Anthropic's system to train and improve their own products, Anthropic said in a blog post Monday. Earlier this month, an Anthropic rival, OpenAI, sent a memo to House lawmakers accusing DeepSeek of using the same tactic, called distillation, to mimic OpenAI's products. Anthropic said distillation had legitimate uses -- companies use it to build smaller versions of their own products, for example -- but it could also be used to build competitive products "in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost." The scale of the different companies' distillation activity varied. DeepSeek engaged in 150,000 interactions with Claude, whereas Moonshot and MiniMax had more than 3.4 million and 13 million, respectively, Anthropic said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible - The first fiber-optic cable ever laid across an ocean -- TAT-8, a nearly 6,000-kilometer line between the United States, United Kingdom, and France that carried its first traffic on December 14, 1988 -- is now being pulled off the Atlantic seabed after more than two decades of sitting dormant, bound for recycling in South Africa. Subsea Environmental Services, one of only three companies in the world whose entire business is cable recovery and recycling, began the operation last year using its new diesel-electric vessel, the MV Maasvliet, and had already brought 1,012 kilometers of the cable to the Portuguese port of Leixoes by August. TAT-8, short for Trans-Atlantic Telephone 8, was built by AT&T, British Telecom, and France Telecom, and hit full capacity within just 18 months of going live. A fault too expensive to repair took it out of service in 2002. The recovered cable is being shipped to Mertech Marine in South Africa, where it will be broken down into steel, copper, and two types of polyethylene -- all commercially valuable, especially the high-quality copper at a time when the International Energy Agency projects global shortages within a decade. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PayPal Attracts Takeover Interest After Stock Slump - An anonymous reader shares a report: PayPal, the digital payments pioneer, is attracting takeover interest from potential buyers after a stock slide wiped out almost half of its value, according to people familiar with the matter. The San Jose, California-based company has fielded meetings with banks amid unsolicited interest from suitors, the people said. At least one large rival is looking at the whole company, while some other suitors are only interested in certain PayPal assets, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. Buyer interest in PayPal is still at a preliminary stage and may not lead to a transaction, the people cautioned. Founded in the late 1990s, PayPal was an early mover in the world of digital payments. But the company now finds itself in a rut with its customers increasingly turning to alternative ways to pay for things. PayPal's shares have fallen around 46% in New York trading over the last 12 months, giving the company a market value of about $38.4 billion. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Climate Physicists Face the Ghosts in Their Machines: Clouds - Climate scientists trying to predict how much hotter the planet will get have long grappled with a surprisingly stubborn problem -- clouds, which both reflect sunlight and trap heat, account for more than half the variation between climate predictions and are the main reason warming projections for the next 50 years range from 2 to 6 degrees Celsius. Two research groups are now racing to close that gap using AI, though they disagree sharply on method. Tapio Schneider at Caltech built CLIMA, a model that uses machine learning to optimize cloud parameters within traditional physics equations; it will be unveiled at a conference in Japan in March. Chris Bretherton at the Allen Institute for AI took a different path -- his ACE2 neural network, released in 2024, learns from 50 years of atmospheric data and largely bypasses physics equations altogether. Read more of this story at Slashdot.