Latest News

Last updated 17 Feb, 06:09 PM

BBC News

Watch: Key moments that defined Jesse Jackson's life - The civil rights leader, who ran for president twice in the 1980s, leaves a lasting legacy.

'The search is soul-destroying': Young jobseekers on the struggle to find work - Young people are bearing the brunt of a weak jobs market, the latest figures show.

Cold health alert issued as temperatures fall across the UK - Yellow weather warnings will also come into force on Wednesday across parts of England and much of Wales.

Dual nationals face scramble for British passports as new rules come into force - Entry requirements to the UK for dual nationals are being overhauled as part of sweeping changes to the immigration system.

The fallout from Labour's local elections U-turn is not over yet - Keir Starmer and his team knew last week that delays to council elections would need to be reversed.

The Register

Scientists show it's possible to solve problems in your dreams by playing the right sounds - Could the same method one day power sleep-time ads? It's like the movie Inception, but without Leonardo DiCaprio, unless you imagine him. Researchers used carefully timed sound cues to nudge dream content, and in some cases, boost next-morning problem solving. Could dreamtime product placement come next?…

React survey shows TanStack gains, doubts over server components - Not everyone's convinced React belongs on the server as well as in the browser Devographics has published its State of React survey, with over 3,700 developers speaking out about what they love and hate in the fractured React ecosystem.…

European Parliament bars lawmakers from using AI tools - Who knows where that helpful email summary is being generated? The European Parliament has reportedly turned off AI features on lawmakers' devices amid concerns about content going where it shouldn't.…

Flush with potential? Activist investor insists Japanese toilet giant is an AI sleeper - Palliser Capital says Toto is sitting on hidden semiconductor value – and wants the company to lift the lid The AI hype cycle has officially reached the toilet, with a Japanese bathroom giant suddenly being pitched as a serious tech play.…

Dear Oracle, we need to talk about the future of MySQL - Faithful pen open letter proposing independent foundation with or without Big Red's participation A group of influential users and developers of MySQL have invited Oracle to join their plans to create an independent foundation to guide the future development of the popular open source database, which Big Red owns.…

New Scientist - Home

Dream hacking helps people solve complex problems in their sleep - Hearing a sound while working on a complex puzzle, and then hearing it again during sleep, helped lucid dreamers better tackle the problem the next day

The mystery of nuclear 'magic numbers' has finally been resolved - A mathematical equivalent of a microscope with variable resolution has shed light on why some atoms are exceptionally stable, a riddle that has persisted in nuclear physics for decades

Psychedelic reduces depression symptoms after just one dose - The psychedelic DMT has been linked to improved mental health outcomes before, but now, scientists have shown it reduces depression symptoms more than a placebo when given alongside therapeutic support

We’ve glimpsed before the big bang and it’s not what we expected - The big bang wasn’t the start of everything, but it has been impossible to see what came before. Now a new kind of cosmology is lifting the veil on the beginning of time

Humans are the only primates with a chin – now we finally know why - Biologists have debated the reason why Homo sapiens evolved a prominent lower jaw, but this unique feature may actually be a by-product of other traits shaped by natural selection

Hacker News

HackMyClaw - Comments

Claude Sonnet 4.6 System Card - Comments

Using go fix to modernize Go code - Comments

GrapheneOS – Break Free from Google and Apple - Comments

Async/Await on the GPU - Comments

Slashdot

Micron's PCIe 6.0 SSD Hits Mass Production at 28 GB/s - Micron has begun mass production of the 9650 series, the industry's first PCIe 6.0 SSD, capable of sequential read speeds up to 28 GB/s and random read performance of 5.5 million IOPS -- roughly double the throughput of the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives available today. The drive targets AI and data center workloads and ships in E1.S and E3.S form factors across two variants: the Pro, available in capacities up to 30.72 TB, and the endurance-oriented Max, topping out at 25.6 TB. Both variants share the same peak sequential and random speeds but diverge on mixed workloads and endurance ratings -- the Max 25.6 TB carries a random endurance rating of 140,160 TBW compared to 56,064 TBW on the Pro 30.72 TB. Power draw holds at 25 watts, unchanged from high-end PCIe 5.0 enterprise SSDs, though the 9650 is Micron's first drive to support liquid cooling alongside air. Consumer platforms are not expected to adopt PCIe 6.0 until 2030. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

99% of Adults Over 40 Have Shoulder 'Abnormalities' on an MRI, Study Finds - Up to a third of people worldwide have shoulder pain; it's one of the most common musculoskeletal complaints. But medical imaging might not reveal the problem -- in fact, it could even cloud it. From a report: In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, 99 percent of adults over 40 were found to have at least one abnormality in a rotator cuff on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The rotator cuff is the group of muscles and tendons in a shoulder joint that keeps the upper arm bone securely in the shoulder socket -- and is often blamed for pain and other symptoms. The trouble is, the vast majority of the people in the study had no problems with their shoulders. The finding calls into question the growing use of MRIs to try to diagnose shoulder pain -- and, in turn, the growing problem of overtreatment of rotator cuff (RC) abnormalities, which includes partial- and full-thickness tears as well as signs of tendinopathy (tendon swelling and thickening). "While we cannot dismiss the possibility that some RC tears may contribute to shoulder symptoms, our findings indicate that we are currently unable to distinguish clinically meaningful MRI abnormalities from incidental findings," the study authors concluded. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China Once Stole Foreign Ideas. Now It Wants To Protect Its Own - China's courts are now handling more than 550,000 intellectual-property cases a year -- making it the world's most litigious country for IP disputes -- as the nation's own companies, once notorious for copying foreign designs and technology, find themselves on the defensive against a domestic counterfeiting epidemic fueled by excess factory capacity. The problem runs from knockoff "Lafufu" plush toys (cheap copies of Pop Mart's wildly popular Labubu dolls, which prompted a nationwide crackdown and a Shanghai police bust of a $1.7 million stash in July) to copied motorcycles and solar panels. Judges in Shanghai, the preferred venue for IP litigation, are working through cases at a rate of roughly one per day, and it still takes three months for a case to land on a court's docket. Chinese companies are also increasingly clashing abroad: patent-related cases involving Chinese businesses in America surged 56% in 2023, according to data from GEN, a Chinese law firm. Luckin Coffee and Trina Solar have both filed suits against foreign-based copycats. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mazda Finally Admits Its Infotainment System Is the Worst - Mazda, the automaker that for years defended its scroll-wheel infotainment system as a safer alternative to touchscreens, is abandoning the approach entirely in the 2026 CX-5 in favor of a 15.6-inch touchscreen and zero physical buttons. The current lineup -- the CX-50 Hybrid, CX-70 and CX-90 -- still relies on a console-mounted scroll wheel and dedicated action buttons to navigate a tablet-like screen perched atop the dashboard. Upper-trim CX-70 and CX-90 models do have 12.3-inch touchscreens, but touch input only works when parked and only inside CarPlay; it disables automatically once the car is in drive. The new CX-5 goes the other direction entirely, eliminating all hard buttons including the volume knob and physical climate controls that current models still offer. Mazda says the touchscreen is safe because core functions like climate are pinned to a persistent bottom bar -- an approach Ford, Rivian, and most of the industry adopted years ago. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

'Software Isn't Dead, But Its Cosy Business Model Might Be' - The software industry's decades-old habit of charging companies a flat fee for every employee who uses a product is running into a fundamental problem: AI agents don't sit in chairs, and they don't need licences. As autonomous agents take on tasks that human workers once handled, the per-seat pricing model that made SaaS revenue so predictable is giving way to consumption-based and hybrid alternatives. Snowflake and Databricks (valued at $134 billion) already charge based on usage. Salesforce initially priced its Agentforce customer relations bot at $2 per conversation but faced customer pushback and now offers action-based pricing, upfront credits and fixed fees. ServiceNow's finance chief Amit Zavery said last month that some customers aren't ready for purely consumption-based models. Goldman Sachs estimates US software spending will nearly triple to $2.8 trillion by 2037 as automated tasks blur the boundary between IT and wage budgets, but that money will no longer arrive in the neat recurring instalments that investors and private equity firms have come to expect. Read more of this story at Slashdot.