Latest News
Last updated 07 Feb, 12:57 PM
BBC News
Mandelson scandal is 'serious' for Starmer but PM is 'man of integrity', Brown says - Brown said Sir Keir might have been "too slow to do the right things" but backed him to "clean up the system".
MPs are shocked and angry at Mandelson - but they're furious with Starmer - Many Labour insiders say Sir Keir may not be the man to take them to the next election, writes Laura Kuenssberg.
Trump says he 'didn't see' part of video with racist clip depicting Obamas as apes - The US president says he "didn't make a mistake", adding he had only seen the beginning of the video before it was posted.
Where does air pollution go inside our bodies? - BBC health correspondent James Gallagher gets his blood analysed to understand how air pollution is killing us.
Boy charged with GBH after teacher injured at school - Police say the teacher sustained stab wounds but has now been discharged from hospital.
The Register
Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm - Research shows productivity and judgment peak decades after graduation A growing body of research continues to show that older workers are generally more productive than younger employees.…
Openreach turns up the heat to force laggards off legacy copper lines - Half a million businesses face successive price hikes ahead of PTSN shutdown Openreach is warning British businesses that the old phone network shuts down in less than a year - with half a million commercial lines still unmigrated.…
AI video company arouses fury by boasting about replacing creative jobs - Marketing stunt backfires with creators The first rule of AI-generated job loss is you don't talk about AI-generated job loss ... if you're the company that caused it. Higgsfield.ai, a startup offering AI video creation tools, recently generated outrage when it claimed it had caused artists to hit the unemployment line.…
Let there be light! DARPA seeking physics-defying photonic computers to supercharge AI - There’s about $35M up for grabs if your circuits can beat today’s limits It's no lightweight matter. DARPA is putting about $35 million in total funding on the table in the hope that it will spur researchers to work around fundamental physical constraints and build much larger-scale photonic circuits that do more of the computing with light, not electronics.…
Four horsemen of the AI-pocalypse line up capex bigger than Israel's GDP - Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft eye $635B in infrastructure spend Four tech megacorps intend to collectively fork out roughly $635 billion this year on capex, much of it for datacenters and AI infrastructure – more than the entire output of Israel's economy and well beyond all global cloud infrastructure services revenue generated last year.…
New Scientist - Home
The Beauty may be horror TV but it misses the genre's point - In The Beauty, mysterious deaths of models are linked to a new drug and a sexually transmitted infection, both of which kill as they beautify. But if you want great body horror, this isn't the place to look, concludes Bethan Ackerley
Weakening ice shelf has caused crucial Antarctic glacier to accelerate - The flow of ice at Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica has sped up dramatically due to the disintegration of the ice shelf in front of it, and this could lead to faster sea level rise
Physicists warn of 'catastrophic' impact from UK science cuts - Science funding cuts in the UK are expected to be a "devastasting blow" for physics research, affecting international projects such as particle detection experiments at CERN
The secret signals our organs send to repair tissues and slow ageing - Your organs are constantly talking to each other in ways we’re only beginning to understand. Tapping into these communication networks is opening up radical new ways to boost health
Why exercise isn't much help if you are trying to lose weight - When we exercise more, our bodies may compensate by using less energy for other things – especially if we eat less too
Hacker News
Start all of your commands with a comma - Comments
OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III - Comments
The Waymo World Model - Comments
Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production - Comments
How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes - Comments
Slashdot
Claude Code is the Inflection Point - About 4% of all public commits on GitHub are now being authored by Anthropic's Claude Code, a terminal-native AI coding agent that has quickly become the centerpiece of a broader argument that software engineering is being fundamentally reshaped by AI. SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor and AI research firm, published a report on Friday projecting that figure will climb past 20% by the end of 2026. Claude Code is a command-line tool that reads codebases, plans multi-step tasks and executes them autonomously. Anthropic's quarterly revenue additions have overtaken OpenAI's, according to SemiAnalysis's internal economic model, and the firm believes Anthropic's growth is now constrained primarily by available compute. Accenture has signed on to train 30,000 professionals on Claude, the largest enterprise deployment so far, targeting financial services, life sciences, healthcare and the public sector. On January 12, Anthropic launched Cowork, a desktop-oriented extension of the same agent architecture -- four engineers built it in 10 days, and most of the code was written by Claude Code itself. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
New Bill in New York Would Require Disclaimers on AI-Generated News Content - An anonymous reader shares a report: A new bill in the New York state legislature would require news organizations to label AI-generated material and mandate that humans review any such content before publication. On Monday, Senator Patricia Fahy (D-Albany) and Assemblymember Nily Rozic (D-NYC) introduced the bill, called The New York Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Requirements in News Act -- The NY FAIR News Act for short. "At the center of the news industry, New York has a strong interest in preserving journalism and protecting the workers who produce it," said Rozic in a statement announcing the bill. A closer look at the bill shows a few regulations, mostly centered around AI transparency, both for the public and in the newsroom. For one, the law would demand that news organizations put disclaimers on any published content that is "substantially composed, authored, or created through the use of generative artificial intelligence." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Neocities Founder Stuck in Chatbot Hell After Bing Blocked 1.5 Million Sites - Neocities founder Kyle Drake has spent weeks trapped in Microsoft's automated support loop after discovering that Bing quietly blocked all 1.5 million websites hosted on his platform, a free web-hosting service that has kept the spirit of 1990s GeoCities alive since 2013. Drake first noticed the issue last summer and thought it was resolved, but a second complete block went into effect in January, cratering Bing traffic from roughly half a million daily visitors to zero. He submitted nearly a dozen tickets through Bing's webmaster tools but could not get past the AI chatbot to reach a human. After Ars Technica contacted Microsoft, the company restored the Neocities front page within 24 hours but most subdomains remain blocked. Microsoft cited policy violations related to low-quality content yet declined to identify the offending sites or work directly with Drake to fix the problem. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Waymo is Having a Hard Time Stopping For School Buses - Waymo's robotaxis have racked up at least 24 safety violations involving school buses in Austin since the start of the 2025 school year, and a voluntary software recall the company issued in December after a federal investigation has not fixed the problem. Austin Independent School District initially reported at least 19 incidents of Waymo vehicles failing to stop for buses during loading and unloading -- illegal in all 50 states -- prompting NHTSA to open a probe. At least four more violations have occurred since the software update, including a January 19th incident where a robotaxi drove past a bus as children waited to cross the street and the stop arm was extended. Waymo also acknowledged that one of its vehicles struck a child outside a Santa Monica elementary school on January 23rd, causing minor injuries. Austin ISD has asked Waymo to stop operating near schools during bus hours until the issue is resolved. Waymo refused. Three federal investigations have been opened in three months. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Hollywood's AI Bet Isn't Paying Off - Hollywood's recent attempts to build entertainment around AI have consistently underperformed or outright flopped, whether the AI in question is a plot device or a production tool. The horror sequel M3GAN 2.0, Mission: Impossible -- The Final Reckoning, and Disney's Tron: Ares all disappointed at the box office in 2025 despite centering their narratives on AI. The latest casualty is Mercy, a January 2026 crime thriller in which Chris Pratt faces an AI judge bot played by Rebecca Ferguson; one reviewer has already called it "the worst movie of 2026," and its ticket sales have been mediocre. AI-generated content hasn't fared any better. Darren Aronofsky executive-produced On This Day...1776, a YouTube web series that uses Google DeepMind video generation alongside real voice actors to dramatize the American Revolution. Viewer response has been brutal -- commenters mocked the uncanny faces and the fact that DeepMind rendered "America" as "Aamereedd." A Taika Waititi-directed Xfinity commercial set to air during this weekend's Super Bowl, which de-ages Jurassic Park stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, has already been mocked for producing what one viewer called "melting wax figures." Read more of this story at Slashdot.