Latest News

Last updated 28 Mar, 10:53 PM

BBC News

Potential Houthi threat to Red Sea shipping could further damage global economy - The Iran-backed group could bring a second crucial waterway to a standstill, writes Sebastian Usher.

'I was naive,' says minister who quit over Labour Together claims - Josh Simons resigned after facing claims a think tank he used to run commissioned a report into journalists' backgrounds.

Another car crash and another arrest - what now for Tiger Woods? - BBC golf correspondent Iain Carter assesses where Tiger Woods' latest arrest leaves his legacy.

Drone footage shows huge fire engulf historic mill - The former silk mill has been derelict since 2007 and has attracted anti-social behaviour.

Where have weekend jobs for teenagers gone? - Youth unemployment and minimum wage increases are causing teens to be squeezed out of job market.

The Register

Anthropic struggling with Chinese competition, its own safety obsession - The maker of Claude faces headwinds as it rushes to go public Anthropic, riding a wave of goodwill after resisting demands from the US Defense Department to soften model safeguards, is reportedly planning to go public as soon as Q4 2026.…

To BSOD or not to BSOD? Only Microsoft knows the answer - Famous blue screens remind conference of security pros that this OS sometimes has bad days Bork!Bork!Bork! When is a bork not a bork? Perhaps when it's on a Microsoft stand at a US security conference.…

Microsoft takes up residence next to OpenAI, Oracle at Crusoe's 900 MW Texas datacenter expansion - New campus to include on-site power generation Bitcoin farmer turned bit barn builder Crusoe revealed plans to add 900 megawatts of capacity to its Abilene Texas datacenter campus on Friday to support Microsoft's AI ambitions.…

Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right - Sycophantic bots coach users into selfish, antisocial behavior, say researchers, and they love it AI can lead mentally unwell people to some pretty dark places, as a number of recent news stories have taught us. Now researchers think sycophantic AI is actually having a harmful effect on everyone.…

Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow - Farewell, Mac Pro: Increasing integration means the end of expandable computers Apple has discontinued the Mac Pro – but it's just the first of the tower computers to go. The rest will follow soon.…

New Scientist - Home

How working out like an astronaut can reduce back pain and slow ageing - The same principles that help astronauts stay strong in microgravity can help us all resist the slow collapse of ageing – and it’s not all about hitting the gym more

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

How our ancestors used mushrooms to change the course of human history - Mushrooms have been used by ancient humans for millennia, but archaeologists have only just uncovered their pivotal role in shaping civilisation

The simple questions cracking the hard problem of consciousness - Do we all see the same red? Or feel joy and sadness alike? Mapping how our inner experiences relate to one another could finally reveal how physical processes in the brain give rise to consciousness

AI data centres can warm surrounding areas by up to 9.1°C - Hundreds of millions of people live close enough to data centres used to power AI to feel warmer average temperatures in their local area

Hacker News

Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies - Comments

CSS is DOOMed - Comments

Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem - Comments

Linux is an interpreter - Comments

AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice - Comments

Slashdot

SystemD Contributor Harassed Over Optional Age Verification Field, Suggests Installer-Level Disabling - It's FOSS interviewed a software engineer whose long-running open source contributions include Python code for the Arch Linux installer and maintaining packages for NixOS. But "a recent change he made to systemd has pushed him into the spotlight" after he'd added the optional birthDate field for systemd's user database. Critics saw it not merely as a technical addition, but as a symbolic capitulation to government overreach. A crack in the philosophical foundation of freedom that Linux is built on. What followed went far beyond civil disagreement. Dylan revealed that he faced harassment, doxxing, death threats, and a flood of hate mail. He was forced to disable issues and pull request tabs across his GitHub repositories... Q: Should FOSS projects adapt to laws they fundamentally disagree with? Because these kinds of laws are certainly in conflict with what a lot of Linux users believe in. A. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, the answer is yes — at least for any distribution with corporate backing. The small independent distributions are much more flexible to refuse as a protest. If we ignore regulations entirely, we risk Linux being something that companies are not willing to contribute to, and Linux may be shipped on less hardware. I'm talking about things like Valve and System76 (despite them very vocally hating these laws). That does not help us; it just lowers the quality of software contributions due to less investment in the platform and makes Linux less accessible to the average person. We need Linux and other free operating systems to remain a viable alternative to closed systems. Q. Do you think regulations like these will reshape desktop Linux in the next 5-10 years where we might have "compliant Linux" and "Freedom-first Linux"? A. Unfortunately, yes, to some degree this is likely. I imagine the split will be mostly along the lines of independent distributions and those with corporate backing. We're already seeing it as far as which distributions plan on implementing some sort of age verification and which ones are not, and that sucks. I'd rather nobody have to deal with this mess at all, but this is the reality of things now. As I said in the previous response, the corporate-backed distributions really have no choice in the matter. Companies are notoriously risk-adverse, but something like Artix or Devuan? Those are small and independent enough where the individual maintainers may be willing to take on more risk. I was actually thinking about what this would look like if we added it to [Linux system installer] Calamares and chatting about that with the maintainers before that thread got brigaded by bad actors posting personal information and throwing around insults. I completely support the freedom for the distro maintainers to choose their risk tolerance. If the distribution is based out of Ireland or something (like Linux Mint) without these silly laws in the jurisdiction the developer operates in, I think that we should leave it up to them to make a choice here. They think the installer should have a date picker with a flag to disable it, and "We can even default it to off, and corporate distributions using Calamares or those not willing to take the risk could flip it on if they need to. That way if maintainers of the distributions do not wish to collect the birth date, they won't have to, and no forking is required to patch it out." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IBM Quantum Computer Simulates Real Magnetic Materials and Matches Lab Data - "IBM says its quantum computer can now simulate real magnetic materials and match actual lab experiment results," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, "which is something people have been waiting years to see." Instead of just theoretical output, the system reproduced neutron scattering data from a known material, meaning it lines up with real world physics. It still relies on a mix of quantum and classical computing and this is a narrow use case for now, but it is one of the first times quantum hardware has produced results that scientists can directly validate against experiments, which makes it a lot more interesting than the usual hype. Classical computers "are not great at modeling quantum systems," according to this article at Nerds.xyz. "The math gets messy fast, and scientists end up relying on approximations... Quantum computers are supposed to solve that problem..." If this direction continues, it could start to matter in areas like superconductors, battery tech, and even drug development. Those are the kinds of problems where better simulations can actually lead to better outcomes, not just nicer charts in a research paper. "I am extremely excited about what this means for science," said study co-author Allen Scheie from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In an announcement from IBM, Scheie calls this "the most impressive match I've seen between experimental data and qubit simulation, and it definitely raises the bar for what can be expected from quantum computers." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony is Raising PlayStation 5 Prices Again, Between $100 and $150 - Memory and storage shortages and price hikes have "steadily rippled outward across all kinds of consumer tech," reports Ars Technica. "Today's bad news comes from Sony, which is raising prices for PlayStation 5 consoles in the US just eight months after their last price hike." The drive-less Digital Edition will increase from $500 to $600; the base PS5 with an optical drive will increase from $550 to $650; and the PS5 Pro is going up from $750 to a whopping $900. At the beginning of 2025, these consoles cost $450, $500, and $700, respectively... RAM and flash memory chips are in short supply primarily because of demand from AI data centers — memory manufacturers have shifted more production toward making the kind of memory found in AI accelerators like Nvidia's H200, leaving less for the consumer market. And the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon, barring a major shift in demand from the AI industry. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thousands of Americans Treated With Psilocybin in 2025 - In a new 4,000-word article, CNN tells the story of a retired appellate paralegal and grandmother in her early 70s who was treated for depression with psilocybin. CNN notes there's now retreats featuring psilocybin in a few countries — and while psilocybin is illegal under United States federal law, "In Oregon, 5,935 clients received psilocybin services through Oregon's state-regulated program in 2025." High doses of psilocybin are effective in treating depression, a growing body of research suggests, with promise for other conditions, like PTSD and addiction, said Dr. Albert Garcia-Romeu, associate director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University... Some researchers suggest it disrupts entrenched traffic patterns in the brain or grows new neuron connections to change thinking. Others say the results from psilocybin could have to do with its anti-inflammatory effect, Garcia-Romeu said... Colorado became the second state to make psilocybin legal with a 2023 law and issued its first healing center" last year. A law adopted in New Mexico last year established that state's Medical Psilocybin Program, now in development... Psilocybin seems to be "knocking on the door of FDA approval," said Dr. Lynn Marie Morski, president of the Psychedelic Medicine Association, which educates health care providers on the therapeutic use of psychedelics so they can answer patients' questions through the lenses of clinical evidence and harm reduction. Psilocybin therapy first received a "breakthrough therapy" designation for treatment-resistant depression from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2018, and now psilocybin drug products are on track to be submitted to the FDA for possible approval in the not-too-distant future. While psilocybin is illegal under United States federal law, more states are creating their own paths for legal use under state laws. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux Maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman Says AI Tools Now Useful, Finding Real Bugs - Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman tells The Register that AI-driven code review has "really jumped" for Linux. "There must have been some inflection point somewhere with the tools..." "Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports." It's not just Linux, he continued. "All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real." Security teams across major open source projects talk informally and frequently, he noted, and everyone is seeing the same shift. "All open source security teams are hitting this right now...." For now, AI is showing up more as a reviewer and assistant than as a full author of Linux kernel code, but that line is starting to blur. Kroah-Hartman has already done his own experiments with AI-generated patches. "I did a really stupid prompt," he recounted. "I said, 'Give me this,' and it spit out 60: 'Here's 60 problems I found, and here's the fixes for them.' About one-third were wrong, but they still pointed out a relatively real problem, and two-thirds of the patches were right." Mind you, those working patches still needed human cleanup, better changelogs, and integration work, but they were far from useless. "The tools are good," he said. "We can't ignore this stuff. It's coming up, and it's getting better...." [H]e said that for "simple little error conditions, properly detecting error conditions," AI could already generate dozens of usable patches today. The sudden increase in AI-generated reports and AI-assisted work has also spurred a parallel push to build AI into the kernel's own review infrastructure. A key piece of that is Sashiko, a tool originally developed at Google and now donated to the Linux Foundation. Kroah-Hartman said some patches are being generated with AI now. "You have a little co-develop tag for that now. We're seeing some things for some new features, but we're seeing AI mostly being used in the review." Read more of this story at Slashdot.