Latest News

Last updated 25 Mar, 12:49 PM

BBC News

Hospital waited two days before raising alarm about meningitis outbreak, BBC learns - Experts say the wait was indefensible and possibly delayed identification of the outbreak.

Two men arrested over Jewish charity ambulance arson attacks - Four Hatzola ambulances were set ablaze in Golders Green, London, in the early hours of Monday.

Ex-justice minister admits possessing crystal meth and cannabis - Crispin Blunt is fined £1,200 after cannabis and crystal meth were found in his Surrey home.

'I hugged armed man to stop him bombing hospital' - Nathan Newby, who persuaded the "lone-wolf terrorist" to abandon his plan, receives the George Medal.

NHS dentistry is rotting. Will the plan to fix it work? - As patients struggle to find NHS dentists, Labour has a plan but not everybody is convinced it will work

The Register

Windows 95 let installers trash its files then fixed the mess behind their backs - I'll just clear up that up, shall I? Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has shared another nugget of Windows lore – what Windows 95 did when installers stomped on its system files.…

HMRC hands £473M Fujitsu migration deal to AWS after competition melts away - Insiders say single-bidder process left little room for negotiation The UK's tax collection agency has awarded Amazon Web Services – the only remaining bidder – a contract worth nearly £500 million to migrate services from three Fujitsu-run datacenters and host them for up to a decade.…

Samsung still glued to its bad habits with Galaxy S26 Ultra - Flagship phone scores 5/10 from iFixit as the parts that break most often remain firmly out of reach Samsung's Galaxy S26 Ultra has once again scored a middling 5/10 from iFixit, suggesting that while the company knows how to build a repairable phone, it still won't quite follow through.…

Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access - A handful thrive, most scrape by as companies make billions off their code Opinion Time and again, I see people begging for companies with deep pockets to fund open source projects. I mean, after all, they've made billions from this code. You'd think they could support the code's creators and maintainers. It would be only fair, right?…

YouTuber lands on Moon using a ZX Spectrum. Conditions apply - BASIC and bit-banging used to guide a simulated lander down to a virtual lunar touchdown Could Sinclair's 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum land a spacecraft on the Moon? YouTuber Scott Manley decided to find out, and the answer is… kind of.…

New Scientist - Home

Cancer-causing chemical found to be leaking from gas cookers - One in 10 homes tested in the UK, Italy and the Netherlands have dangerous levels of benzene because of slow leaks from gas hobs and ovens

Earth may have formed from two separate rings around the sun - Our solar system’s rocky planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars – may have formed from two rings around the young sun, rather than a single disc

Cystitis or tooth decay could trigger dementia just a few years later - Infections are increasingly being linked to a higher risk of dementia. In the latest research, scientists have found that being treated in hospital for a severe infection seems to raise the risk of developing the condition over the next five to six years

The shocking fossils that show T. rex wasn't the king of the dinosaurs - We've always thought that Tyrannosaurus rex was an unchallenged apex predator during the dying days of the dinosaurs. But a fresh look at controversial fossils has prompted palaeontology’s biggest-ever U-turn

Antimatter has been transported by road for the first time - CERN is working on building an antimatter delivery service. The project passed a big test by successfully transporting 92 antiprotons around a 4-kilometre loop of road

Hacker News

Meta told to pay $375M for misleading users over child safety - Comments

TurboQuant: Redefining AI efficiency with extreme compression - Comments

Goodbye to Sora - Comments

VitruvianOS – Desktop Linux Inspired by the BeOS - Comments

Looking at Unity made me understand the point of C++ coroutines - Comments

Slashdot

Chandra Resolves Why Black Holes Hit the Brakes On Growth - alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Astronomers have an answer for a long-running mystery in astrophysics: why is the growth of supermassive black holes so much lower today than in the past? A study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other X-ray telescopes found that supermassive black holes are unable to consume material as rapidly as they did in the distant past. The results appeared in the December 2025 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. [...] The team ran tests of the three main possible scenarios currently being considered for the slowdown of black hole growth. These options were: could the decline in black hole growth be caused by less efficient rates of consumption, or by smaller typical black hole masses, or by fewer actively growing black holes? Their analysis of the data, extending over billions of years of cosmic history, led them to the conclusion that black holes are indeed consuming material less rapidly the later they are found after the Big Bang. The researchers expect this trend of slower-growing black holes to continue into the future. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA Halts Work On Gateway To Develop a Lunar Base - NASA is reportedly halting work on the lunar Gateway in favor of a more direct push to build a lunar base. The new plan would cost tens of billions over the next decade, though the change could face hurdles because Congress previously funded Gateway specifically. SpaceNews reports: "Starting today, we're building humanity's first deep space outpost," said Carlos Garcia-Galan, program executive for NASA's moon base effort. The lunar base will take place in three phases. Phase 1, running from 2026 to 2028, "is all about getting to the moon reliably," he said. That includes a significant increase in the cadence of lander missions through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services and other programs. It will also focus on developing enabling technologies and getting "ground truth" for potential base locations at the lunar south pole. Phase 2, from 2029 through 2031, starts building the base, he said. That would include building out communications, navigation, power and other infrastructure, developing larges CLPS cargo landers and supporting two crewed missions a year. Phase 3, beginning 2032, will enable "long distance and long duration human exploration" on the moon, he said, with routine logistics missions to the moon and uncrewed cargo return missions from the moon. Garcia-Galan said NASA foresees spending $10 billion each on Phases 1 and 2. Phase 3, lasting to at least 2036, would cost an additional $10 billion or more. The base would leverage existing programs, although with some changes. NASA is planning to revamp the Lunar Terrain Vehicle program after concluding the current approach would take too long to get a crew-capable rover to the moon. "We were projecting a delivery on the lunar surface by 2030," he said. The agency is instead issuing a draft request for proposals for simplified rovers that could be quicker and easier to develop but could be upgraded later. The base, though, would include some new capabilities and technologies. One example Garcia-Galan provided was MoonFall, a drone that would be able to hop from one location to another on the lunar surface. The drones will be "built on the legacy" of Ingenuity, the small Mars helicopter. "We're going to take everything that we learned from Ingenuity's systems, the avionics, all of that, to build this." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hong Kong Police Can Demand Passwords Under New National Security Rules - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Hong Kong police can now demand phone or computer passwords from those who are suspected of breaching the wide-ranging National Security Law (NSL). Those who refuse could face up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $12,700, and individuals who provide "false or misleading information" could face up to three years in jail. It comes as part of new amendments to a bylaw under the NSL that the government gazetted on Monday. The NSL was introduced in Hong Kong in 2020, in wake of massive pro-democracy protests the year before. Authorities say the laws, which target acts like terrorism and secession, are necessary for stability -- but critics say they are tools to quash dissent. The new amendments also give customs officials the power to seize items that they deem to "have seditious intention." Monday's amendments ensure that "activities endangering national security can be effectively prevented, suppressed and punished, and at the same time the lawful rights and interests of individuals and organizations are adequately protected," Hong Kong authorities said on Monday. Changes to the bylaw was announced by the city's leader, John Lee, bypassing the city's legislative council. The NSL also allows for some trials to be heard behind closed doors. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wine 11 Rewrites How Linux Runs Windows Games At the Kernel Level - Linux gamers are seeing massive performance gains with Wine's new NTSYNC support, "which is a feature that has been years in the making and rewrites how Wine handles one of the most performance-sensitive operations in modern gaming," reports XDA Developers. Not every game will see a night-and-day difference, but for the games that do benefit from these changes, "the improvements range from noticeable to absurd." Combined with improvements to Wayland, graphics, and compatibility, as well as a major WoW64 architecture overhaul, the release looks less like an incremental update and more like one of Wine's most important upgrades in years. From the report: The numbers are wild. In developer benchmarks, Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, which is an impressive 678% improvement. Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS. Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS. As well, Call of Duty: Black Ops I is now actually playable on Linux, too. Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games. The games that benefit most from NTSYNC are the ones that were struggling before, such as titles with heavy multi-threaded workloads where the synchronization overhead was a genuine bottleneck. For those games, the difference is night and day. And unlike fsync, NTSYNC is in the mainline kernel, meaning you don't need any custom patches or out-of-tree modules for it work. Any distro shipping kernel 6.14 or later, which at this point includes Fedora 42, Ubuntu 25.04, and more recent releases, will support it. Valve has already added the NTSYNC kernel driver to SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, loading the module by default, and an unofficial Proton fork, Proton GE, already has it enabled. When Valve's official Proton rebases on Wine 11, every Steam Deck owner gets this for free. All of this is what makes NTSYNC such a big deal, as it's not simply a run-of-the-mill performance patch. Instead, it's something much bigger: this is the first time Wine's synchronization has been correct at the kernel level, implemented in the mainline Linux kernel, and available to everyone without jumping through hoops. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's Android Automotive Is Moving From the Dashboard To the 'Brain' of the Car - Google is expanding Android Automotive from the infotainment screen into the broader non-safety "brain" of software-defined vehicles. With its new Android Automotive OS for Software-Defined Vehicles, the in-car experience will feel "much more cohesive and the latest features will reach your driveway faster," Matt Crowley, Android Automotive's group product manager, writes in a blog post. "From a truly integrated voice experience to proactive maintenance reminders, your car will become a true extension of your digital life," Crowley adds. The Verge reports: With its new software, Google is promising faster over-the-air software updates, better voice assistants, and more proactive vehicle maintenance alerts. Non-driving functions like climate control, lighting, and seating adjustment would fall under Android's control. And the system would move beyond basic infotainment to create a unified ecosystem for features like remote cabin conditioning, digital key management, and personalized driver profiles. For automakers, the new system promises less expensive software development costs and an opportunity to focus on what matters most to them: branding. By providing the "foundational code and a common language for their software," Google says automakers will be free to design cool experiences for their customers. Google says its already working with companies like Renault Group and Qualcomm to bring its new software-defined vehicle version of Android Automotive to more cars. A variety of automakers already use regular Android Automotive, like Volvo, Polestar, General Motors, Nissan, and Honda. Read more of this story at Slashdot.