Latest News
Last updated 13 Jan, 02:27 PM
BBC News
Decision time for Trump on Iran but what does he ultimately want? - As Iran's deadly crackdown on anti-government protests continue, the US president is considering how best to respond.
New Birmingham-Manchester rail link to be proposed - Previous plans for a high-speed rail line between the cities were scrapped by Rishi Sunak's government.
Stop saying we can't make things work, Streeting urges Labour colleagues - The health secretary warns a growing "excuses culture" is damaging Labour in a speech to a think tank.
Red Arrows get first woman leader - Wing Cdr Sasha Nash says it is the "opportunity of a lifetime" and hopes to inspire others.
World central banks 'stand in solidarity' with Fed chair after US threatens criminal charges - Eleven central banks have backed Jerome Powell after the US launched a criminal investigation into the US Fed.
The Register
Trump may hate renewables, but AI datacenters still fancy cheap solar - Analysts say cheap energy and storage make sense for bit barns despite policy headwinds Despite the Trump administration's opposition to renewables, solar power will likely remain part of datacenter energy supply mix due to its low cost.…
Federal agencies told to fix or ditch Gogs as exploited zero-day lands on CISA hit list - Git server flaw that attackers have been abusing for months has now caught the attention of US cyber cops CISA has ordered federal agencies to stop using Gogs or lock it down immediately after a high-severity vulnerability in the self-hosted Git service was added to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog.…
Mandiant open sources tool to prevent leaky Salesforce misconfigs - AuraInspector automates the most common abuses and generates fixes for customers Mandiant has released an open source tool to help Salesforce admins detect misconfigurations that could expose sensitive data.…
Court tosses appeal by hacker who opened port to coke smugglers with malware - Dutchman fails to convince judges his trial was unfair because cops read his encrypted chats A Dutch appeals court has kept a seven-year prison sentence in place for a man who hacked port IT systems with malware-stuffed USB sticks to help cocaine smugglers move containers, brushing off claims that police shouldn't have been reading his encrypted chats.…
Affordable housing site goes live with meme-laden test data - Yes, London property prices are high. But here's a picture of Boris Johnson From the "there but for the grace of God" department comes a new website to find affordable housing in London containing data it shouldn't.…
New Scientist - Home
We're about to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer - The world’s most powerful supercomputers can now run simulations of billions of neurons, and researchers hope such models will offer unprecedented insights into how our brains work
Pompeii’s public baths were unhygienic until the Romans took over - Before the Romans captured Pompeii, the famous town was run by the Samnite people – and a dip in their public baths might have been an unpleasant experience
Quantum computers could help sharpen images of exoplanets - Combining two kinds of quantum computing devices could be just the trick for taking better images of faint, faraway exoplanets
Our elegant universe: rethinking nature’s deepest principle - For centuries, the principle of symmetry has guided physicists towards more fundamental truths, but now a slew of shocking findings suggest a far stranger idea from quantum theory could be a deeper driving force
Is there an evolutionary reason for same-sex sexual behaviour? - Sexual behaviour among same-sex pairs is common in apes and monkeys, and a wide-ranging analysis suggests it does boost survival
Hacker News
Apple Creator Studio - Comments
Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home - Comments
Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work - Comments
Show HN: SnackBase – Open-source, GxP-compliant back end for Python teams - Comments
Show HN: An iOS budget app I've been maintaining since 2011 - Comments
Slashdot
Microsoft Pledges Full Power Costs, No Tax Breaks in Response To AI Data Center Backlash - Microsoft announced Tuesday what it calls a "community first" initiative for its AI data centers, pledging to pay full electricity costs and reject local property tax breaks following months of growing opposition from residents facing higher power bills. The announcement in Washington, D.C. marks a clear departure from past practices; Microsoft has previously accepted tax abatements for data centers in Ohio and Iowa. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said the company has been developing the initiative since September. Residential power prices in data center hubs like Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio jumped 12-16% over the past year, faster than the U.S. average. Three Democratic senators launched an investigation last month into whether tech giants are raising residential bills. Microsoft also pledged a 40% improvement in water efficiency by 2030 and committed to replenishing more water than it uses in each district where it operates. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Trump Says Microsoft To Make Changes To Curb Data Center Power Costs For Americans - An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: President Donald Trump said in a social media post on Monday that Microsoft will announce changes to ensure that Americans won't see rising utility bills as the company builds more data centers to meet rising artificial intelligence demand. "I never want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Therefore, my Administration is working with major American Technology Companies to secure their commitment to the American People, and we will have much to announce in the coming weeks." [...] Trump congratulated Microsoft on its efforts to keep prices in check, suggesting that other companies will make similar commitments. "First up is Microsoft, who my team has been working with, and which will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don't 'pick up the tab' for their POWER consumption, in the form of paying higher Utility bills," Trump wrote on Monday. Utilities charged U.S. consumers 6% more for electricity in August from a year earlier, including in states with many data centers, CNBC reported in November. Microsoft is paying close to attention to the impact of its data centers on local residents. "I just want you to know we are doing everything we can, and I believe we're succeeding, in managing this issue well, so that you all don't have to pay more for electricity because of our presence," Brad Smith, the company's president and vice chair, said at a September town hall meeting in Wisconsin, where Microsoft is building an AI data center. While Microsoft is moving forward with some facilities, the company withdrew plans for a data center in Caledonia, Wisconsin, amid loud opposition to its efforts there. The project would would have been located 20 miles away from a data center in the village of Mount Pleasant. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Researchers Beam Power From a Moving Airplane - Researchers from the startup Overview Energy have successfully demonstrated beaming power from a moving airplane to the ground using near-infrared light. It marks the first step toward space-based solar power satellites that could someday transmit energy from orbit to existing solar farms on Earth. IEEE Spectrum reports: Overview's test transferred only a sprinkling of power, but it did it with the same components and techniques that the company plans to send to space. "Not only is it the first optical power beaming from a moving platform at any substantial range or power," says Overview CEO Marc Berte, "but also it's the first time anyone's really done a power beaming thing where it's all of the functional pieces all working together," he says. "It's the same methodology and function that we will take to space and scale up in the long term." [...] Many researchers have settled on microwaves as their beam of choice for wireless power. But, in addition to the safety concerns about shooting such intense waves at the Earth, [Paul Jaffe, head of systems engineering] says there's another problem: microwaves are part of what he calls the "beachfront property" of the electromagnetic spectrum -- a range from 2 to 20 gigahertz that is set aside for many other applications, such as 5G cellular networks. "The fact is," Jaffe says, "if you somehow magically had a fully operational solar power satellite that used microwave power transmission in orbit today -- and a multi-kilometer-scale microwave power satellite receiver on the ground magically in place today -- you could not turn it on because the spectrum is not allocated to do this kind of transmission." Instead, Overview plans to use less-dense, wide-field infrared waves. Existing utility-scale solar farms would be able to receive the beamed energy just like they receive the sun's energy during daylight hours. So "your receivers are already built," Berte says. The next major step is a prototype demonstrator for low Earth orbit, after which he hopes to have GEO satellites beaming megawatts of power by 2030 and gigawatts by later that decade. Plenty of doubts about the feasibility of space-based power abound. It is an exotic technology with much left to prove, including the ability to survive orbital debris and the exorbitant cost of launching the power stations. (Overview's satellite will be built on earth in a folded configuration and it will unfold after it's brought to orbit, according to the company). "Getting down the cost per unit mass for launch is a big deal," Jaffe says. "Then, it just becomes a question of increasing the specific power. A lot of the technologies we're working on at Overview are squarely focused on that." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
You Can Now Reserve a Hotel Room On the Moon For $250,000 - A newly founded startup called GRU Space is taking deposits of up to $1 million to eventually build inflatable hotels on the Moon. The bet is that space needs destinations, not just rockets, even if the first customers are essentially early adopters of sci-fi optimism. Ars Technica reports: It sounds crazy, doesn't it? After all, GRU Space had, as of late December when I spoke to founder Skyler Chan, a single full-time employee aside from himself. And Chan, in fact, only recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. [...] The GRU in the company's name, by the way, stands for Galactic Resource Utilization. The long-term vision is to derive resources from the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and beyond to fuel human expansion into space. If all that sounds audacious and unrealistic, well, it kind of is. But it is not without foundation. GRU Space has already received seed funding from Y Combinator, and it will go through the organization's three-month program early this year. This will help Chan refine his company's product and give him more options to raise money. Regarding his vision, you can read GRU Space's white paper here. Presently, the company plans to fly its initial "mission" in 2029 as a 10-kg payload on a commercial lunar lander, demonstrating an inflatable structure capability and converting lunar regolith into Moon bricks using geopolymers. With its second mission, the company plans to launch a larger inflatable structure into a "lunar pit" to test a scaled-up version of its resource development capabilities. The first hotel, an inflatable structure, would be launched in 2032 and would be capable of supporting up to four guests at a time. The next iteration beyond this would be the fancier structure, built from Moon bricks, in the style of the Palace of the Fine Arts. "SpaceX is building the FedEx to get us there, right?" Chan said. "But there has to be a destination worthy to stay in. Obviously, there is all kinds of debate around this, and what the future is going to be like. But our conviction is that the fundamental problem we have to solve, to advance humans toward the Moon and Mars, is off-world habitation. We can't keep everyone living on that first ship that sailed to North America, right? We have to build the roads and structures and offices that we live in today." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
EPA To Stop Considering Lives Saved By Limiting Air Pollution - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency has calculated the health benefits of reducing air pollution, using the cost estimates of avoided asthma attacks and premature deaths to justify clean-air rules. Not anymore. Under President Trump, the E.P.A. plans to stop tallying gains from the health benefits caused by curbing two of the most widespread deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone, when regulating industry, according to internal agency emails and documents reviewed by The New York Times. It's a seismic shift that runs counter to the E.P.A.'s mission statement, which says the agency's core responsibility is to protect human health and the environment, environmental law experts said. The change could make it easier to repeal limits on these pollutants from coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills and other industrial facilities across the country, the emails and documents show. That would most likely lower costs for companies while resulting in dirtier air. "The idea that E.P.A. would not consider the public health benefits of its regulations is anathema to the very mission of E.P.A.," said Richard Revesz, the faculty director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. "If you're only considering the costs to industry and you're ignoring the benefits, then you can't justify any regulations that protect public health, which is the very reason that E.P.A. was set up." Read more of this story at Slashdot.