Latest News
Last updated 09 Jan, 03:23 PM
BBC News
Owner of Swiss ski resort held in custody after deadly New Year's Eve fire - Jacques Moretti is being held as a potential flight risk, Swiss media reports say.
Changes to Elon Musk's AI tool Grok 'insulting' to sexual violence victims, UK says - It comes after government urged Ofcom to use all its powers – up to and including an effective ban – against X.
Gabby Logan pays tribute to her 'warrior' dad Terry Yorath - The presenter describes her dad as a "generous man" who instilled a "lifelong love of sport" in her.
The continued mysteries surrounding the intelligence operation to capture Maduro - From intelligence sources to intricate mission plans, some details are becoming clearer - but many questions remain unanswered.
Trump's grand plan to reshape the world order leaves Europe with a difficult choice to make - The turbocharged events of the last week - and the new US National Security Strategy - raise pressing questions about the new world order, and what it means for Europe
The Register
Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info - No naming that tune and no album covers Microsoft is celebrating the resurgence of interest in physical media in the only way it knows how… by halting the Windows Media Player metadata service.…
NASA decides to bring Crew-11 home early after astronaut health scare - Medical issue forces mission curtailment and leaves station short-handed NASA is bringing the Crew-11 astronauts back to Earth early after one encountered a medical issue that could not be dealt with aboard the orbiting outpost.…
Copper supplies set to peak just as tech needs more - Analysts say production will top out this decade while global electrification keeps ramping Concerns are mounting over copper supplies, with a fresh study warning that demand will likely outstrip production within a decade, threatening to constrain global technological advancement.…
China-linked cybercrims abused VMware ESXi zero-days a year before disclosure - Huntress analysis suggests VM escape bugs were already weaponized in the wild Chinese-linked cybercriminals were sitting on a working VMware ESXi hypervisor escape kit more than a year before the bugs it relied on were made public.…
The Microsoft 365 Copilot app rebrand was bad, but there are far worse offenders - The software wasn't actually renamed, but you couldn't be blamed for being confused Opinion Wait? What? I was just cruising along the information superhighway – yes, I'm old, deal with it – when I spotted a Y Combinator story announcing, "Microsoft Office renamed to 'Microsoft 365 Copilot app'." Excuse me!? I looked closer and found that, sure enough, it certainly looked like Microsoft had renamed Office to the God-awful "Microsoft 365 Copilot."…
New Scientist - Home
City-sized iceberg has turned into a giant swimming pool - Satellite photos show meltwater on the surface of iceberg A23a collecting in an unusual way, which may be a sign that the huge berg is about to break apart
These images explore a 'utopic' village built for teaching maths - The Nesin Mathematics Village in western Turkey was dreamed up by award-winning mathematician Ali Nesin to engage his students
Tree bark microbiome has important overlooked role in climate - Tree bark has a total surface area similar to all of the land area on Earth. It is home to a wide range of microbial species unknown to science, and they can either take up or emit gases that have a warming effect on the climate
Some quantum computers might need more power than supercomputers - A preliminary analysis suggests that industrially useful quantum computers designs come with a broad spectrum of energy footprints, including some larger than the most powerful existing supercomputers
Hominin fossils from Morocco may be close ancestors of modern humans - The jawbones and vertebrae of a hominin that lived 773,000 years ago have been found in North Africa and could represent a common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans
Hacker News
Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux - Comments
London–Calcutta Bus Service - Comments
Mathematics for Computer Science (2018) [pdf] - Comments
Linux Runs on Raspberry Pi RP2350's Hazard3 RISC-V Cores (2024) - Comments
How wolves became dogs - Comments
Slashdot
Why Care About Debt-to-GDP? - Abstract of a paper on NBER: We construct an international panel data set comprising three distinct yet plausible measures of government indebtedness: the debt-to-GDP, the interest-to-GDP, and the debt-to-equity ratios. Our analysis reveals that these measures yield differing conclusions about recent trends in government indebtedness. While the debt-to-GDP ratio has reached historically high levels, the other two indicators show either no clear trend or a declining pattern over recent decades. We argue for the development of stronger theoretical foundations for the measures employed in the literature, suggesting that, without such grounding, assertions about debt (un)sustainability may be premature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Record Ocean Heat is Intensifying Climate Disasters, Data Shows - The world's oceans absorbed yet another record-breaking amount of heat in 2025, continuing an almost unbroken streak of annual records since the start of the millennium and fueling increasingly extreme weather events around the globe. More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity's carbon emissions ends up in the oceans, making ocean heat content one of the clearest indicators of the climate crisis's trajectory. The analysis, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, drew on temperature data collected across the oceans and collated by three independent research teams. The measurements cover the top 2,000 meters of ocean depth, where most heat absorption occurs. The amount of heat absorbed is equivalent to more than 200 times the total electricity used by humans worldwide. This extra thermal energy intensifies hurricanes and typhoons, produces heavier rainfall and greater flooding, and results in longer marine heatwaves that decimate ocean life. The oceans are likely at their hottest in at least 1,000 years and heating faster than at any point in the past 2,000 years. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fusion Physicists Found a Way Around a Long-Standing Density Limit - alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: At the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), physicists successfully exceeded what is known as the Greenwald limit, a practical density boundary beyond which plasmas tend to violently destabilize, often damaging reactor components. For a long time, the Greenwald limit was accepted as a given and incorporated into fusion reactor engineering. The new work shows that precise control over how the plasma is created and interacts with the reactor walls can push it beyond this limit into what physicists call a 'density-free' regime. [...] A team led by physicists Ping Zhu of Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Ning Yan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences designed an experiment to take this theory further, based on a simple premise: that the density limit is strongly influenced by the initial plasma-wall interactions as the reactor starts up. In their experiment, the researchers wanted to see if they could deliberately steer the outcome of this interaction. They carefully controlled the pressure of the fuel gas during tokamak startup and added a burst of heating called electron cyclotron resonance heating. These changes altered how the plasma interacts with the tokamak walls through a cooler plasma boundary, which dramatically reduced the degree to which wall impurities entered the plasma. Under this regime, the researchers were able to reach densities up to about 65 percent higher than the tokamak's Greenwald limit. This doesn't mean that magnetically confined plasmas can now operate with no density limits whatsoever. However, it does show that the Greenwald limit is not a fundamental barrier and that tweaking operational processes could lead to more effective fusion reactors. The findings have been published in Science Advances. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ultimate Camouflage Tech Mimics Octopus In Scientific First - Researchers at Stanford University have created a programmable synthetic "skin" that can independently change color and texture, "a feat previously only available within the animal kingdom," reports the Register. From the report: The technique employs electron beams to write patterns and add optical layers that create color effects. When exposed to water, the film swells to reveal texture and colors independently, depending on which side of the material is exposed, according to a paper published in the scientific journal Nature this week. In an accompanying article, University of Stuttgart's Benjamin Renz and Na Liu said the researchers' "most striking achievement was a photonic skin in which color and texture could be independently controlled, mirroring the separate regulation... in octopuses." The research team used the polymer PEDOT:PSS, which can swell in water, as the basis for their material. Its reaction to water can be controlled by irradiating it with electrons, creating textures and patterns in the film. By adding thin layers of gold, the researchers turned surface texture into tunable optical effects. A single layer could be used to scatter light, giving the shiny metal a matte, textured appearance. To control color, a polymer film was sandwiched between two layers of gold, forming an optical cavity, which selectively reflects light. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Some Super-Smart Dogs Can Learn New Words Just By Eavesdropping - An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: [I]t turns out that some genius dogs can learn a brand new word, like the name of an unfamiliar toy, by just overhearing brief interactions between two people. What's more, these "gifted" dogs can learn the name of a new toy even if they first hear this word when the toy is out of sight -- as long as their favorite human is looking at the spot where the toy is hidden. That's according to a new study in the journal Science. "What we found in this study is that the dogs are using social communication. They're using these social cues to understand what the owners are talking about," says cognitive scientist Shany Dror of Eotvos Lorand University and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna. "This tells us that the ability to use social information is actually something that humans probably had before they had language," she says, "and language was kind of hitchhiking on these social abilities." [...] "There's only a very small group of dogs that are able to learn this differentiation and then can learn that certain labels refer to specific objects," she says. "It's quite hard to train this and some dogs seem to just be able to do it." [...] To explore the various ways that these dogs are capable of learning new words, Dror and some colleagues conducted a study that involved two people interacting while their dog sat nearby and watched. One person would show the other a brand new toy and talk about it, with the toy's name embedded into sentences, such as "This is your armadillo. It has armadillo ears, little armadillo feet. It has a tail, like an armadillo tail." Even though none of this language was directed at the dogs, it turns out the super-learners registered the new toy's name and were later able to pick it out of a pile, at the owner's request. To do this, the dogs had to go into a separate room where the pile was located, so the humans couldn't give them any hints. Dror says that as she watched the dogs on camera from the other room, she was "honestly surprised" because they seemed to have so much confidence. "Sometimes they just immediately went to the new toy, knowing what they're supposed to do," she says. "Their performance was really, really high." She and her colleagues wondered if what mattered was the dog being able to see the toy while its name was said aloud, even if the words weren't explicitly directed at the dog. So they did another experiment that created a delay between the dog seeing a new toy and hearing its name. The dogs got to see the unfamiliar toy and then the owner dropped the toy in a bucket, so it was out of sight. Then the owner would talk to the dog, and mention the toy's name, while glancing down at the bucket. While this was more difficult for dogs, overall they still could use this information to learn the name of the toy and later retrieve it when asked. "This shows us how flexible they are able to learn," says Dror. "They can use different mechanisms and learn under different conditions." Read more of this story at Slashdot.