Latest News

Last updated 27 Jan, 06:45 PM

BBC News

Pubs given support package after business rates backlash - Treasury Minister Dan Tomlinson says the three-year aid is worth £1,650 for the average pub in 2026/27.

'We all know someone who was killed' - Iran protesters tell BBC of brutal crackdown - Young Iranians able tell the BBC how they saw friends and other people die as security forces crushed protests earlier this month.

UK has removed 281 migrants under France deal, minister says - The home secretary says there are "practical issues" around how quickly people can be detained.

Tearful Carol Kirkwood announces she is to leave BBC - The 63-year-old said it had been an "absolute privilege" to bring viewers the weather every day.

Pornhub to restrict access for UK users from February - The changes mean only those who have a Pornhub account and have verified their age will be able to access it in the UK soon.

The Register

European firms push on with AI pilots even as payoff doubts grow - IDC and Lenovo say enterprises are pressing ahead with pilot deployments despite mixed evidence on returns Despite a growing number of reports that AI is not benefiting many businesses, Lenovo and IDC say that firms in EMEA are pushing ahead with pilot deployments and still expect it to drive growth and transform how they operate.…

Micron continues fab spending spree with $24B NAND storage plant in Singapore - No salvation from the memory winter, though - plant won't start churning out chips until 2028 Flush with cash from skyrocketing memory prices, Micron continued its fab expansion this week, this time breaking ground on a $24 billion manufacturing complex that will eventually produce chips used in storage devices.…

Salesforce signs $5.6B deal to inject agentic AI into the US Army - Analytics features arrive first; agentic AI comes later Salesforce is getting cosier with the US Army via a deal worth up to $5.6 billion, selling cloud analytics as the groundwork for a future agentic AI push across the service and the wider DoD.…

Pope warns flock to raise their faces, protect their voices in fightback against AI - Vicar of Rome decries naive and unquestioning reliance on technology Catholics need to develop critical thinking skills to counter the dark side of AI and counter unnatural attachments to chatbots, the pope said this week in a message marking the Church's social communications day.…

China-linked group accused of spying on phones of UK prime ministers' aides – for years - Reports say Salt Typhoon attackers accessed handsets of senior govt folk Chinese state-linked hackers are accused of spending years inside the phones of senior Downing Street officials, exposing private communications at the heart of the UK government.…

New Scientist - Home

Our brains play a surprising role in recovering from a heart attack - A newly discovered collection of neurons suggests the brain and heart communicate to trigger a neuroimmune response after a heart attack, which may pave the way for new therapies

Nobel prizewinner Omar Yaghi says his invention will change the world - Chemist Omar Yaghi invented materials called MOFs, a few grams of which have the surface area of a football field. He explains why he thinks these super-sponges will define the next century

We have a new way to explain why we agree on the nature of reality - An evolution-inspired framework for how quantum fuzziness gives rise to our classical world shows that even imperfect observers can eventually agree on an objective reality

Stick shaped by ancient humans is the oldest known wooden tool - Excavations at an opencast mine in Greece have uncovered two wooden objects more than 400,000 years old that appear to have been fashioned as tools by an unknown species of ancient human

Menstrual pad could give women insights into their changing fertility - A woman's fertility can be partly gauged by levels of a hormone that reflects how many eggs she has. Now, scientists have built a strip that changes colour according to levels of this hormone, which is present in period blood, into a menstrual pad

Hacker News

430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found - Comments

SoundCloud Data Breach Now on HaveIBeenPwned - Comments

OpenSSL: Stack buffer overflow in CMS AuthEnvelopedData parsing - Comments

Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor - Comments

I made my own Git - Comments

Slashdot

Microsoft Was Routing Example-Domain Traffic To a Japanese Cable Company for Five Years - Microsoft has quietly suppressed an unexplained anomaly on its network that was routing traffic destined for example.com -- a domain reserved under RFC2606 specifically for testing purposes and not obtainable by any party -- to sei.co.jp, a domain belonging to Japanese electronics cable maker Sumitomo Electric. The misconfiguration meant anyone attempting to set up an Outlook account using an example.com email address could have inadvertently sent test credentials to Sumitomo Electric's servers. Under RFC2606, example.com resolves only to IP addresses assigned to the Internet Assigned Names Authority. Microsoft confirmed it has "updated the service to no longer provide suggested server information for example.com" and said it is investigating. Security researcher Dan Tentler of Phobos Group noted the company appears to have simply removed the problematic endpoint rather than fixing the underlying routing -- "not found" errors now appear where the JSON responses previously occurred. Tinyapps.org, which noted the behavior earlier this month, said the misconfiguration had persisted for five years. Microsoft has not explained how Sumitomo Electric's domain entered its configuration. The incident follows 2024's revelation that a forgotten test account with admin privileges enabled Russia-state hackers to monitor Microsoft executives' email for two months. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Doomsday Clock Ticks To 85 Seconds Before Midnight, Its Closest Ever - The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Tuesday set their symbolic Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight -- the closest the timepiece has ever been to the theoretical point of annihilation since scientists created it during the Cold War in 1947. The clock now stands four seconds nearer than last year's setting, and this marks the third time in four years that the Bulletin has moved it closer to midnight. The Chicago-based nonprofit pointed to aggressive behavior by nuclear powers Russia, China and the United States, fraying nuclear arms control frameworks, ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, unregulated AI integration into military systems, and climate change. "In terms of nuclear risks, nothing in 2025 trended in the right direction," said Alexandra Bell, the Bulletin's president and CEO. The last remaining nuclear arms pact between the US and Russia, the New START treaty, expires on February 5. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon To Shut Down All Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh Stores - Amazon is closing all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores in a shift to focus on its online same-day delivery service and new big-box retail stores. From a report: The e-commerce giant said Tuesday that some of its shuttered Amazon-branded brick-and-mortar stores would be converted into Whole Foods Market locations. Amazon said its branded stores failed to deliver the right economic model and distinctive customer experience necessary for large-scale expansion. Amazon's same-day delivery service for groceries is currently available in more than 5,000 U.S. cities and towns. The company said it plans to expand the service to more communities in 2026 but didn't specify where. Amazon said it planned to open over 100 new Whole Foods Market stores over the next few years. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI's Science Chief Says LLMs Aren't Ready For Novel Discoveries and That's Fine - OpenAI launched a dedicated team in October called OpenAI for Science, led by vice president Kevin Weil, that aims to make scientists more productive -- but Weil admitted in an interview with MIT Technology Review that the LLM cannot yet produce novel discoveries and says that's not currently the mission. UC Berkeley statistician Nikita Zhivotovskiy, who has used LLMs since the first ChatGPT, told the publication: "So far, they seem to mainly combine existing results, sometimes incorrectly, rather than produce genuinely new approaches." "I don't think models are there yet," Weil admitted. "Maybe they'll get there. I'm optimistic that they will." The models excel at surfacing forgotten solutions and finding connections across fields, but Weil says the bar for accelerating science doesn't require "Einstein-level reimagining of an entire field." GPT-5 has read substantially every paper written in the last 30 years, he says, and can bring together analogies from unrelated disciplines. That accumulation of existing knowledge -- helping scientists avoid struggling on problems already solved -- is itself an acceleration. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pinterest Cuts Up To 15% Jobs To Redirect Resources To AI - Pinterest said on Tuesday it would trim its workforce by less than 15% and reduce office space, as the social media company looks to reallocate resources to AI-focused roles and initiatives. From a report: The announcement comes as the company competes with TikTok and Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram for digital advertising budgets, as these platforms continue to draw marketers with their extensive user base. Pinterest had 5,205 full-time employees as of September 2025. The latest job cut would translate to less than 780 positions. Top executives at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting said while jobs would disappear, new ones would spring up, with two telling Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies which were planning layoffs anyway. Last week, design software maker Autodesk also announced a 7% job cut to redirect investments to its cloud platform and AI efforts. Read more of this story at Slashdot.