Latest News

Last updated 05 May, 09:35 AM

BBC News

Dangerous baby-sleep advice given to parents by self-described experts, secret filming reveals - The advice puts babies at risk of serious harm, even death, medical professionals have told the BBC.

Antisemitism 'a crisis for all of us', Starmer to say at Downing Street summit - The prime minister will meet leaders from a number of sectors at Downing Street on Tuesday.

Beyoncé, Rihanna and Heidi Klum turn heads at the Met Gala - The theme for 2026 Met Gala fundraiser is "Costume Art", exploring fashion as an embodied art form.

Poverty and technology leading to record levels of slavery in UK - An independent report warns cost of living pressures are driving up exploitation levels in Britain.

Second hantavirus case confirmed after three die in suspected cruise ship outbreak - The operator of the MV Hondius ship says a Dutch couple and a German national have died.

The Register

NHS to close-source hundreds of GitHub repos over AI, security concerns - Healthcare giant's maintainers handed May deadline to enact the change The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is ordering all of its technology leaders to temporarily wall off the organization's open source projects over concerns relating to advanced AI and Anthropic's Mythos.…

Microsoft's bad obsession is showing up in shabby services and slipshod software. Here's proof - If you can't bother to keep GitHub running, why should we bother with you? Opinion It's been another shabby week for Microsoft, and a shabbier one for its users. We learnt that Windows 11's epic habit of trying to corral customers into paid-for Microsoft services just got worse with a low-rent trick. Remote Desktop got a bit more secure, which is good, but in a way that suggests not too much user testing took place. As for GitHub… GitHub got two helpings of Chef Redmondo's Special Sauce.…

Classic ASCII game NetHack debuts version 5.0 just 11 years after last major release - New monsters! New magic items! An Arm port! And compliance with a dead C standard Antiques Code Show Admirers of Roguelike games have a new distraction: Version 5.0 of NetHack dropped last weekend.…

Microsoft to stop taking reservations for 17 Azure VM flavours, kill 13 in 2028 - Haswell’s had its day and Skylake and Cascade Lake are draining away Microsoft will stop offering long-term rentals for 17 Azure instance types – most of them powered by CPUs Intel released in the 2010s – again showing that cloud computing isn’t always a seamless and easy choice.…

Singapore boffins get diverse SIEMs singing in harmony with agentic rule translation - Vendors all use different formats. This tech translates them all so you can smooth your SOC Academics from Singapore and China have found a way to make AI useful for cyber-defenders, by creating a technique that translates rules from diverse Security Information and Event Managements (SIEMs) so they’re easier to consume across multiple systems.…

New Scientist - Home

Man destined to get Alzheimer’s saved by accidental heat therapy - Doug Whitney has a genetic mutation that means he should have developed Alzheimer’s disease decades ago, but his long-term work in hot engine rooms may have protected him in a similar way to sauna therapy

Quantum computers simulated their biggest molecule yet – with help - Two quantum computers and two supercomputers teamed up to break the record on the biggest molecule yet to be simulated using quantum hardware

Honey has been used as medicine for centuries – does it really work? - It is appealing to think something as simple as honey could cure a cold or prevent hay fever, but is there evidence to back up honey’s health benefits? Columnist Alice Klein finds that it has legitimate medicinal uses, depending on the type of honey you’ve got

A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it really began - A long-overlooked writing system from 5000 years ago is still largely undeciphered, but could mark the moment humans first represented their speech with written words

Tiny frozen world unexpectedly appears to have an atmosphere - A 500-kilometre-wide object in a similar orbit to Pluto challenges our assumptions about small bodies in the outer solar system

Hacker News

Async Rust never left the MVP state - Comments

Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap? - Comments

Hand Drawn QR Codes - Comments

CVE-2026-31431: Copy Fail vs. rootless containers - Comments

Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust - Comments

Slashdot

Astronomers May Have Detected an Atmosphere Around a Tiny, Icy World Past Pluto - "The Associated Press is reporting on a new study in Nature Astronomy suggesting that a tiny, icy world beyond Pluto harbors a thin, delicate atmosphere that may have been created by volcanic eruptions or a comet strike," writes longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot. From the report: Just 300 miles (500 kilometers) or so across, this mini Pluto is thought to be the solar system's smallest object yet with a clearly detected global atmosphere bound by gravity, said lead researcher Ko Arimatsu of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. This so-called minor planet -- formally known as (612533) 2002 XV93 -- is considered a plutino, circling the sun twice in the time it takes Neptune to complete three solar orbits. At the time of the study, it was more than 3.4 billion miles (5.5 billion kilometers) away, farther than even Pluto, the only other object in the Kuiper Belt with an observed atmosphere. This cosmic iceball's atmosphere is believed to be 5 million to 10 million times thinner than Earth's protective atmosphere, according to the the study [...]. It's 50 to 100 times thinner than even Pluto's tenuous atmosphere. The likeliest atmospheric chemicals are methane, nitrogen or carbon monoxide, any of which could reproduce the observed dimming as the object passed before the star, according to Arimatsu. Further observations, especially by NASA's Webb Space Telescope, could verify the makeup of the atmosphere, according to Arimatsu. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion - OpenAI president Greg Brockman's testimony dominated the fifth day of the trial for Elon Musk's lawsuit against the AI company. Brockman took the witness stand on Monday, disclosing that his stake in OpenAI is worth nearly $30 billion, despite not personally investing money in OpenAI. The judge also declined to admit a pretrial text in which Musk allegedly warned Brockman that he and Altman would become "the most hated men in America." From a report: Brockman's disclosure would put him on the Forbes list of the world's richest people, with wealth comparable to Melinda French Gates. [...] Late Sunday, OpenAI lawyers tried to admit as evidence a text message Musk sent to Brockman two days before the trial began. According to a court filing -- which did not include the actual text exchange -- Musk sent a message to Brockman to gauge interest in settlement. When Brockman replied that both sides should drop their respective claims, Musk shot back, according to the filing, "By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be." Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is overseeing the trial, did not admit the text exchange as evidence. Brockman acknowledged that he had promised to personally donate $100,000 to OpenAI's charity but never did. In explaining the delay, Brockman put the onus on Altman: "I asked Sam when I should donate this, and he said he would let me know," reports Business Insider. The first witness to testify on Monday was Stuart Russell, an artificial intelligence expert who teaches computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. "The most memorable part of Russell's testimony was when he talked about how much Musk's legal team paid him," notes Business Insider. "He received an eye-popping $5,000 per hour for 40 hours of preparatory work. Expert witnesses in high-profile cases typically make between $500 to $1,000 per hour." Recap: Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four) Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three) Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

White House Considers Vetting AI Models Before They Are Released - The Trump administration is reportedly considering an executive order to create a working group that could review advanced AI models before public release. The shift follows concerns over Anthropic's powerful Mythos model and its cyber capabilities, with officials weighing whether the government should get early access to frontier models without necessarily blocking their release. The New York Times reports: In meetings last week, White House officials told executives from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI about some of those plans, people briefed on the conversations said. The working group is likely to consider a number of oversight approaches, officials said. But a review process could be similar to one being developed in Britain, which has assigned several government bodies to ensure that A.I. models meet certain safety standards, people in the tech industry and the administration said. The discussions signal a stark reversal in the Trump administration's approach to A.I. Since returning to office last year, Mr. Trump has been a major booster of the technology, which he has said is vital to winning the geopolitical contest against China. Among other moves, he swiftly rolled back a Biden administration regulatory process that asked A.I. developers to perform safety evaluations and report on A.I. models with potential military applications. "We're going to make this industry absolutely the top, because right now it's a beautiful baby that's born," Mr. Trump said of A.I. at an event in July. "We have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive. We can't stop it. We can't stop it with politics. We can't stop it with foolish rules and even stupid rules." Mr. Trump left room for some rules, but he added that "they have to be more brilliant than even the technology itself." The White House wants to avoid any political repercussions if a devastating A.I.-enabled cyberattack were to occur, people in the tech industry and the administration said. The administration is also evaluating whether new A.I. models could yield cyber-capabilities that could be useful to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies, they said. To get ahead of models like Mythos, some officials are pushing for a review system that would give the government first access to A.I. models, but that would not block their release, people briefed on the talks said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft Back Bill To Fund 'AI Literacy' In Schools - An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A new, bipartisan bill introduced (PDF) by Democratic Senator of California Adam Schiff and endorsed by the biggest AI developers in the world -- including OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft -- would change the K-12 curriculum to shoehorn in "AI literacy," something that young people and teachers alike already hate in schools. The Literacy in Future Technologies Artificial Intelligence, or LIFT AI Act, would empower the new director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to make grant awards "on a merit-reviewed, competitive basis to institutions of higher education or nonprofit organizations (or a consortium thereof) to support research activities to develop educational curricula, instructional material, teacher professional development, and evaluation methods for AI literacy at the K-12 level," the bill says. It defines AI literacy as using AI; specifically, "having the age-appropriate knowledge and ability to use artificial intelligence effectively, to critically interpret outputs, to solve problems in an AI-enabled world, and to mitigate potential risks." The bill is endorsed by the American Federation of Teachers, Google, OpenAI, Information Technology Industry Council, Software & Information Industry Association, Microsoft, and HP Inc. [...] The grant would support "AI literacy evaluation tools and resources for educators assessing proficiency in AI literacy," according to the bill. It would also fund "professional development courses and experiences in AI literacy," and the development of "hands-on learning tools to assist in developing and improving AI literacy." Most importantly for real-world implications, it would fund changing the existing curriculum "to incorporate AI literacy where appropriate, including responsible use of AI in learning." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Pixel 11 Could Be the Next Victim of the RAM Shortage - Google's Pixel 11 lineup could see RAM cuts or lower starting configurations because of the global memory shortage, with leaks suggesting the base model may drop from 12GB to 8GB while Pro models could add 12GB versions below the current 16GB tier. The Verge reports: There will be 16GB configurations available for each, but adding a lower-spec model could mean the 16GB version is getting a price hike. However, the silver lining is that the specs from MysticLeaks also include camera upgrades and brighter displays for the Pro models. The RAM shortage is pushing other phone makers, including Samsung, to raise prices, too. Read more of this story at Slashdot.