Latest News

Last updated 10 Feb, 04:00 PM

BBC News

Six key questions about Keir Starmer's future - There is no doubting the peril the prime minister was in, but while Labour MPs have decided to stick with him, his future is far from certain.

Macron urges Europe to start acting like world power - The French president warns of growing threats from China, Russia and now the US, saying Europe faces a "wake-up call".

Afghan asylum seeker guilty of raping girl, 12 - The 12-year-old suffered "extremely horrific sexual offences" in the Nuneaton attack, police say.

Marc Anthony says the way Beckham feud has played out is 'hardly the truth' - The 57-year-old performed at Brooklyn and Nicola Peltz Beckham's wedding reception in 2022.

Captivating chemistry or a hollow misfire? Wuthering Heights splits critics - Emerald Fennell's take on Emily Bronte's classic novel has received a mixed response from film reviewers.

The Register

Trump to hyperscalers: your datacenters, your power bill - As communities push back on utility costs, White House tells Big Tech to fund their own AI expansion The Trump administration continues its AI push, working to defuse public opposition to datacenter energy and water consumption - while dangling a promise to exempt hyperscalers from chip tariffs to help them stock their facilities with GPUs and accelerators.…

Microsoft dials up the nagging in Windows, calls it security - More prompts when apps and agents roam around a user's system Microsoft is introducing a raft of Windows security features that users and administrators alike might assume are already part of the operating system.…

Oracle Java licensing worries are percolating through the userbase - Survey finds nine in ten customers concerned as pricing changes push many toward open source alternatives Concerns over changes to Oracle's Java licensing strategy are hitting more than nine out of ten users as businesses struggle to adapt to the regime, according to research.…

Singapore spent 11 months booting China-linked snoops out of telco networks - Operation Cyber Guardian involved 100-plus staff across government and industry Singapore spent almost a year flushing a suspected China-linked espionage crew out of its telecom networks in what officials describe as the country's largest cyber defense operation to date.…

GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability - Slowdowns, outages, and Copilot problems afflict code shack Scarcely a day goes by without an outage at a cloud service. Forget five nines – the way things are going, one nine is looking like an ambitious goal.…

New Scientist - Home

How clinical research is still failing underrepresented communities - As a doctor working in genomic research, I know that we lack vital data for Black people and many other groups. Here's how we can change that, says Drews Adade

Specific cognitive training has 'astonishing' effect on dementia risk - A type of cognitive training that tests people's quick recall seems to reduce the risk of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease

Is this carved rock an ancient Roman board game? - The lines worn into an engraved limestone object from the Netherlands are consistent with the idea that it was a Roman game board, according to an AI analysis

'Hidden' group of gut bacteria may be essential to good health - Scientists have pinpointed a group of bacteria that consistently appear in high numbers in healthy people, suggesting that these could one day be targeted through diet or probiotics

We’re finally abandoning BMI for better ways to assess body fat - People classed as “overweight” according to BMI can be perfectly healthy. But there are better measures of fat, and physicians are finally using them

Hacker News

I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed - Comments

Simplifying Vulkan One Subsystem at a Time - Comments

Parse, Don't Validate (2019) - Comments

Oxide raises $200M Series C - Comments

Clean-room implementation of Half-Life 2 on the Quake 1 engine - Comments

Slashdot

The Big Money in Today's Economy Is Going To Capital, Not Labor - The American economy's most valuable companies are now worth trillions of dollars more than their predecessors were a generation ago, yet they employ a fraction of the workers -- and a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal argues that this widening gap between capital and labor is the defining economic story of our time. Labor received 58% of gross domestic income in 1980; by the third quarter of 2025, that figure had fallen to 51.4%. Corporate profits' share rose from 7% to 11.7% over the same period. Nvidia, the most valuable US company in 2026, is nearly 20 times as valuable as IBM was in 1985 in inflation-adjusted terms and employs roughly a tenth as many people. Since the end of 2019, real average hourly wages have risen 3% while corporate profits have climbed 43%. Household stock wealth now equals almost 300% of annual disposable income, up from 200% in 2019. Yale economist Pascual Restrepo predicted that AI integration will shrink labor's share of revenue further, just as factory automation did for blue-collar workers in decades past. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NYC Private School Tuition Breaks $70,000 Milestone for Fall - The top private schools in New York City plan to charge more than $70,000 this year for tuition, an amount exceeding that of many elite colleges, as they pass on the costs of soaring expenses including teacher salaries. From a report: Spence School, Dalton School and Nightingale-Bamford School on Manhattan's Upper East Side are among at least seven schools where the fees now exceed that threshold, according to school disclosures and Bloomberg reporting Fees among 15 private schools across the city rose a median of 4.7%, outpacing inflation. Sending a kid to New York private school has always been expensive, but the cost now is so high that even those with well-above-average salaries are feeling squeezed. Prices have risen dramatically in the past decade, up from a median of $39,900 in 2014. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Software Poses 'All-Time' Risk To Speculative Credit, Deutsche Bank Warns - The software and technology sectors pose one of the all-time great concentration risks to the speculative-grade credit market, according to Deutsche Bank AG analysts. Bloomberg: They comprise $597 billion and $681 billion of the speculative-grade credit universe, or about 14% and 16% respectively, analysts led by Steve Caprio wrote in a Monday note. Speculative debt spans high-yield debt, leveraged loans and US private credit. That's "a meaningful chunk of debt outstanding that risks souring broader sentiment, if software defaults increase," the analysts wrote, with "a potential impact that would rival that of the Energy sector in 2016." Unlike in 2016, pressures would likely first emerge in private credit, business development companies and leveraged loans, with the high-yield market weakening later, the analysts added. The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence tools risks further weighing down multiples and revenues for software-as-a-service firms, while the US Federal Reserve's hawkish stance since 2022 has pressured cash flows, the analysts wrote. For instance, software payment-in-kind loan usage has risen to 11.3% in BDC portfolios, over 2.5 percentage points higher than the already elevated index average of 8.7%, according to Deutsche. PIK deals typically allow borrowers to pay interest in more debt rather than cash. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2 To 3 Cups of Coffee a Day May Reduce Dementia Risk. But Not if It's Decaf. - If you think your daily doses of espresso or Earl Grey sharpen your mind, you just might be right, new science suggests. The New York Times: A large new study provides evidence of cognitive benefits from coffee and tea -- if it's caffeinated and consumed in moderation: two to three cups of coffee or one to two cups of tea daily. People who drank that amount for decades had lower chances of developing dementia than people who drank little or no caffeine, the researchers reported. They followed 131,821 participants for up to 43 years. "This is a very large, rigorous study conducted long term among men and women that shows that drinking two or three cups of coffee per day is associated with reduced risk of dementia," said Aladdin Shadyab, an associate professor of public health and medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn't involved in the study. The findings, published Monday in JAMA, don't prove caffeine causes these beneficial effects, and it's possible other attributes protected caffeine drinkers' brain health. But independent experts said the study adjusted for many other factors, including health conditions, medication, diet, education, socioeconomic status, family history of dementia, body mass index, smoking and mental illness. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Deepfake Fraud Taking Place On an Industrial Scale, Study Finds - Deepfake fraud has gone "industrial," an analysis published by AI experts has said. From a report: Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams -- leveraging, for example, deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus -- are no longer niche, but inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale, said the analysis from the AI Incident Database. It catalogued more than a dozen recent examples of "impersonation for profit," including a deepfake video of Western Australia's premier, Robert Cook, hawking an investment scheme, and deepfake doctors promoting skin creams. These examples are part of a trend in which scammers are using widely available AI tools to perpetuate increasingly targeted heists. Last year, a finance officer at a Singaporean multinational paid out nearly $500,000 to scammers during what he believed was a video call with company leadership. UK consumers are estimated to have lost $12.86bn to fraud in the nine months to November 2025. "Capabilities have suddenly reached that level where fake content can be produced by pretty much anybody," said Simon Mylius, an MIT researcher who works on a project linked to the AI Incident Database. He calculates that "frauds, scams and targeted manipulation" have made up the largest proportion of incidents reported to the database in 11 of the past 12 months. He said: "It's become very accessible to a point where there is really effectively no barrier to entry." Read more of this story at Slashdot.