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Last updated 16 Apr, 03:13 PM

BBC News

Home Office investigating after BBC finds migrants making false claims to stay in UK - No 10 says the government is working to ensure "anyone potentially abusing our immigration system is held accountable".

Migrants making false domestic abuse claims to stay in UK, BBC investigation reveals - In the third part of an undercover investigation, the BBC reveals how rules aimed at protecting abuse victims are being exploited.

Rollout of Covid vaccines an extraordinary feat, inquiry report finds - Covid vaccines saved hundreds of thousands of lives, but a small minority harmed need better support, says report.

Former Arsenal goalkeeper Alex Manninger dies after car struck by train in Austria - Former Arsenal goalkeeper Alex Manninger dies at the age of 48 after his car is struck by a train.

Church warden murder conviction quashed - Benjamin Field has been in prison for the murder of Peter Farquhar, 69.

The Register

Brussels tells Google to hand rivals its search crown jewels as privacy row brews - Includes a to-do list on search data sharing and platform access as DMA enforcement ramps up Brussels has told Google to open up its search data and give rivals equal footing on its own platforms, sketching out how it expects the tech giant to comply with the bloc's competition rulebook.…

Make crappy moves around AI and face voter backlash, govts warned - When the taxpayers are wondering whose side you are on... Britain's government faces a public backlash against AI unless it can show ordinary people that they stand to benefit from its push to inject the technology into every area of the UK in the name of growth.…

Visual Studio 18.5 lands with AI debugging at a price, devs still feeling blue - Latest version points to a shift in how Microsoft thinks about IDEs Visual Studio 2026 18.5 arrives with two headline changes – a smarter code suggestion system and an AI-powered debugger. Yet developer frustration over color contrast and forced updates continue to overshadow the improvements.…

Git identity spoof fools Claude into giving bad code the nod - Forged metadata made AI reviewer treat hostile changes as though they came from known maintainer Security boffins say Anthropic's Claude can be tricked into approving malicious code with just two Git commands by spoofing a trusted developer's identity.…

Textbook titan McGraw Hill on ransomware crew's reading list after 13.5M records exposed - Publisher claims misconfigured Salesforce-hosted page leaked data Textbook giant McGraw Hill has landed on a ransomware crew's leak site after an alleged Salesforce-linked misconfiguration spilled 13.5 million records into the wild.…

New Scientist - Home

Our dreams become more emotive and symbolic as we approach death - Terminally ill people are commonly reunited with lost loved ones in their dreams and have visions of doors, stairways and light, which are said to help them accept the dying process

How to spot the Lyrid meteor shower tonight - The Lyrid meteor shower will soon hit its peak. Here's how to spot it, including by using the New Scientist stargazing companion

Neanderthal infants were enormous compared with modern humans - A detailed analysis of the best-preserved Neanderthal infant skeleton ever found suggests that our ancient relatives grew much faster as young children

Exclusive report: Inside Chernobyl, 40 years after nuclear disaster - New Scientist reporter Matthew Sparkes secured unrivalled access to Chernobyl's most crucial scientific sites, where researchers are fighting to protect the area and ensure it remains safe amid the constant threat of attack from Russia

What to read this week: Emma Chapman's mind-expanding Radio Universe - An imaginative and compelling book reveals how radio waves help us tune in to our universe – and even search for alien civilisations, says Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Hacker News

Claude Opus 4.7 - Comments

Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent - Comments

Cloudflare Email Service - Comments

Mozilla Thunderbolt - Comments

IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark - Comments

Slashdot

Researchers Induce Smells With Ultrasound, No Chemical Cartridges Required - An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR: A group of independent researchers built a device that can artificially induce smell using ultrasound, with no consumable cartridges required. [...] The team of four are Lev Chizhov, Albert Yan-Huang, Thomas Ribeiro, Aayush Gupta. Chizhov is a neurotech entrepreneur with a background in math and physics, Yan-Huang is a researcher at Caltech with a background in computation and neural systems, and Ribeiro and Gupta are co-researchers on the project with software engineering and AI expertise. Instead of targeting your nose at all, the device directly targets the olfactory bulb in your brain with "focused ultrasound through the skull." The researchers say that as far as they're aware, no one has ever done this before, even in animals. A challenge in targeting the olfactory bulb is that it's buried behind the top of your nose, and your nose doesn't provide a flat surface for an emitter. Ultrasound also doesn't travel well through air. The solution the researchers came up with was to place the emitter on your forehead instead, with a "solid, jello-like pad for stability and general comfort," and the ultrasound directed downward towards the olfactory bulb. To determine the best placement, they say they used an MRI of one of their skulls to "roughly determine where the transducer would point and how the focal region (where ultrasound waves actually concentrate) aligned with the olfactory bulb (the target for stimulation)". [...] According to the researchers, they were able to induce the sensation of fresh air "with a lot of oxygen", the smell of garbage "like few-day-old fruit peels," an ozone-like sensation "like you're next to an air ionizer," and a campfire smell of burning wood. While technically head-mounted, the current device does require being held up with two hands. But as with all such prototypes, it likely could be significantly miniaturized. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bullet Train Upgrade Brings 5G Windows, Noise-Cancelling Cabins To Japan - Some Japanese bullet trains will soon support premium private suites this October, featuring windows with embedded 5G antennas for steadier onboard Wi-Fi and NTT noise-cancelling cabin tech to reduce train noise. The 5G window antennas are designed to maintain line-of-sight connections as trains race past base stations at up to 285 km/h. The Register reports: Rail operator JR Central announced the new tech late last month and will initially deploy a couple of the suites on six trains. The carrier explained that the antennas come from a Japanese company called AGC that weaves microscopic wires through glass to form an antenna. JR Central will connect the windows to an on-train Wi-Fi router. AGC says rival tech relies on 5G signals reaching a train and then bouncing around inside before reaching the Wi-Fi unit. The company says antennas woven into train windows maintain line of sight to nearby 5G base stations. That matters because JR Central's Shinkansen can achieve speeds of up to 285 km/h, which means they speed past cellular network base stations so quickly that it's frequently necessary to reconnect to another radio. AGC says keeping a line of sight connection means its antennas allow increased 5G signal strength, so Wi-Fi service on board trains should be more stable and speedy. The sound-deadening kit JR Central will deploy is called Personalized Sound Zone (PSZ) and comes from Japan's tech giant NTT. The tech uses the same principles applied to noise-cancelling headphones -- determine the waveform of sound and project an inversion of that waveform that cancels out ambient noise. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UK Households To Be Urged To Use More Power This Summer As Renewables Soar - Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Guardian: Households will be called on to boost their consumption of Great Britain's record renewable energy this summer to help balance the power grid and lower energy bills. Under the new plans, people could be encouraged to run dishwashers and washing machines or charge up their electric vehicles when there is more wind and solar power than the electricity grid needs. The plan will be delivered with the help of energy suppliers, which may choose to offer heavily discounted or free electricity to their customers during specific periods when the energy system operator predicts there will be a surplus of electricity. Many suppliers already offer more than 2 million households the opportunity to pay lower rates for electricity used during off-peak hours but this will be the first time that the system operator will use this tool to help balance the grid. The National Energy System Operator (Neso) hopes that by issuing a market notice to call on energy users to increase their consumption it can avoid making hefty payments to turn wind and solar farms off when demand for electricity is low, which are ultimately paid for through energy bills. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nature Is Still Molding Human Genes, Study Finds - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Many scientists have contended that humans have evolved very little over the past 10,000 years. A few hundred generations was just a blink of the evolutionary eye, it seemed. Besides, our cultural evolution -- our technology, agriculture and the rest -- must have overwhelmed our biological evolution by now. A vast study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests the opposite. Examining DNA from 15,836 ancient human remains, scientists found 479 genetic variants that appeared to have been favored by natural selection in just the past 10,000 years. The researchers also concluded that thousands of additional genetic variants have probably experienced natural selection. Before the new study, scientists had identified only a few dozen variants. "There are so many of them that it's hard to wrap one's mind around them," said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the new study. He and his colleagues found that a mutation that is a major risk factor for celiac disease, for example, appeared just 4,000 years ago, meaning the condition may be younger than the Egyptian pyramids. The mutation became ever more common. Today, an estimated 80 million people worldwide have celiac disease, in which the immune system attacks gluten and damages the intestines. The steady rise of the mutation came about through natural selection, the scientists argue. For some reason, people with the mutation had more descendants than people without it -- even though it put them at risk of an autoimmune disorder. Other findings are even more puzzling. The researchers found that genetic variants that raise the odds of a smoking habit have been getting steadily rarer in Europe for the past 10,000 years. Something is working against those variants -- but it can't be the harm from smoking. Europeans have been smoking tobacco for only about 460 years. The scientists can't see from their research so far what forces might be making these variants more or less common. "My short answer is, I don't know," said Ali Akbari, a senior staff scientist at Harvard and an author of the study. The researchers also found that some variants, like the one linked to Type B blood, became much more common in Europe around 6,000 years ago, while others changed direction over time. For example, a TYK2 immune gene variant that may have once been beneficial later became harmful because it increased tuberculosis risk. The study also found signs of natural selection in 44 out of 563 traits. Variants linked to Type 2 diabetes, wider waists, and higher body fat have become less common, possibly because farming and carbohydrate-heavy diets made once-useful fat-storing traits more harmful. Other findings, such as selection favoring genes linked to more years of schooling, are harder to interpret. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boston Dynamics' Robot Dog Can Now Read Gauges, Spot Spills, and Reason - Boston Dynamics has integrated Google DeepMind into its robotic dog Spot, giving it more autonomous reasoning for industrial inspections like spotting spills and reading gauges. Spot can also now recognize when to call on other AI tools. IEEE Spectrum reports: Boston Dynamics is one of the few companies to commercially deploy legged robots at any appreciable scale; there are now several thousand hard at work. Today the company is announcing that its quadruped robot Spot is now equipped with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, a high-level embodied reasoning model that brings usability and intelligence to complex tasks. [T]he focus of this partnership is on one of the very few applications where legged robots have proven themselves to be commercially viable: inspection. That is, wandering around industrial facilities, checking to make sure that nothing is imminently exploding. With the new AI onboard, Spot is now able to autonomously look for dangerous debris or spills, read complex gauges and sight glasses, and call on tools like vision-language-action models when it needs help understanding what's going on in the environment around it. "Advances like Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 mark an important step toward robots that can better understand and operate in the physical world," Marco da Silva, vice president and general manager of Spot at Boston Dynamics, says in a press release. "Capabilities like instrument reading and more reliable task reasoning will enable Spot to see, understand, and react to real-world challenges completely autonomously." You can watch a demo of Spot's new capabilities on YouTube. Read more of this story at Slashdot.