Latest News
Last updated 29 Jan, 09:47 PM
BBC News
Great Ormond Street doctor who botched surgery harmed nearly 100 children - Yaser Jabbar specialised in limb-lengthening and reconstruction for children with complex problems.
China to relax travel rules for British visitors, UK says - It comes as Sir Keir Starmer visits Beijing - the first UK prime minister to do so in eight years.
'He enjoyed hurting people': Teen attacked others before murdering schoolboy, 12 - Det Insp Joe Davenport says the killer attacked his victims in Birmingham for "violence sake".
Israeli hostage held for nearly 500 days in Gaza says he can 'breathe again' - In his first international interview, Sasha Troufanov tells the BBC how he thought he would die in captivity after he was taken hostage on 7 October 2023.
Ex-Labour MP's lobbying firm offered photo with minister and VIP dinner for £30k - Jim Murphy's company Arden Strategies apologises for "errors" in promotional material for tech event.
The Register
Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year - To what end? Who knows? Tesla isn't even using them in its own factories yet Elon Musk's car company is getting ready to be Skynet. Tesla, facing an 11 percent decline in automotive revenue in Q4 2025, has committed to $20 billion in capex spending this year on manufacturing and compute infrastructure. The goal: build lots of humanoid robots.…
Google's Project Genie could put even more game developers out of work - A Labs prototype turns prompts into short, explorable 3D worlds Google has put the video gaming industry on notice with the rollout of Project Genie, an experimental AI world-model prototype that generates explorable 3D environments from text or image prompts.…
Agents gone wild! Companies give untrustworthy bots keys to the kingdom - 'We're letting thousands of interns run around in our production environment' Corporate use of AI agents in 2026 looks like the Wild West, with bots running amok and no one quite knowing what to do about it - especially when it comes to managing and securing their identities.…
Dow Chemical says AI is the element behind 4,500 job cuts - The 129 year old chemical company uses Palantir-rival C3's AI as its software of choice. ai-pocalypse The jury is still out when it comes to determining how much job loss AI is causing. However, we now have another case study. Dow Chemical blames AI automation for its plans to cut 4,500 jobs, about 12.5 percent of its work force.…
AI datacenter boom triples US gas power builds, filling the air with more CO2 - Reduce emissions? Screw that - we have money to lose and memes to generate Fossil fuel-fired power plant development is roaring back to life in the US thanks to the AI datacenter boom, with data from 2025 suggesting we're reaching the point where the renewable energy transition - and efforts to ease carbon emissions - may well be doomed.…
New Scientist - Home
Our lifespans may be half down to genes and half to the environment - A reanalysis of twin data from Denmark and Sweden suggests that how long we live now depends roughly equally on the genes we inherit, and on where we live and what we do
Polar bears are getting fatter in the fastest-warming place on Earth - Shrinking sea ice has made life harder for polar bears in many parts of the Arctic, but the population in Svalbard seems to be thriving
Faecal transplants could boost the effectiveness of cancer treatments - Adults with kidney cancer who received faecal microbiota transplants on top of their existing drugs did better than those who had placebo transplants as their add-on intervention
The universe may be hiding a fundamentally unknowable quantum secret - Even given a set of possible quantum states for our cosmos, it's impossible for us to determine which one of them is correct
This virus infects most of us – but why do only some get very ill? - The ubiquitous Epstein-Barr virus is increasingly being linked to conditions like multiple sclerosis and lupus. But why do only some people who catch it develop these complications? The answer may lie in our genetics
Hacker News
Retiring GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini in ChatGPT - Comments
Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds - Comments
iPhone 16 Best-Selling Smartphone in 2025; Apple Takes 7 Spots in Top Models - Comments
Claude Code Daily Benchmarks for Degradation Tracking - Comments
Drug trio found to block tumour resistance in pancreatic cancer - Comments
Slashdot
ArXiv Will Require English Submissions - and Says AI Translators Are Fair Game - The preprint repository arXiv will require all submissions to be written in English or accompanied by a full English translation starting February 11, a policy change that explicitly permits the use of AI translators even as research suggests large language models remain inconsistent at the task. Until now, authors only needed to submit an abstract in English. ArXiv hosts nearly 3 million preprints and receives more than 20,000 submissions monthly, though just 1% are in languages other than English. Ralph Wijers, chair of arXiv's editorial advisory council, advises authors to verify any AI-generated translations. "Our own experience is that AI translation is good but not good enough," he says. A 2025 study from ByteDance Seed and Peking University ranked 20 LLMs on translation quality between Chinese and English; GPT-5-high scored nearly 77, just below the human expert benchmark of 80, but most models including GPT-4o, Claude 4, and Deepseek-V3 scored under 60. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US Leads Record Global Surge in Gas-Fired Power Driven by AI Demands - An anonymous reader shares a report: The US is leading a huge global surge in new gas-fired power generation that will cause a major leap in planet-heating emissions, with this record boom driven by the expansion of energy-hungry datacenters to service AI, according to a new forecast. This year is set to shatter the annual record for new gas power additions around the world, with projects in development expected to grow existing global gas capacity by nearly 50%, a report by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) found. The US is at the forefront of a global push for gas that is set to escalate over the next five years, after tripling its planned gas-fired capacity in 2025. Much of this new capacity will be devoted to the vast electricity needs of AI, with a third of the 252 gigawatts of gas power in development set to be situated on site at datacenters. All of this new gas energy is set to come at a significant cost to the climate, amid ongoing warnings from scientists that fossil fuels must be rapidly phased out to avoid disastrous global heating. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
US Life Expectancy Jumps To a Record 79 Years - An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. life expectancy rose to a record high of 79 years in 2024, an increase of six months from the previous year, reflecting a sharp decline in deaths from COVID-19 and drug overdoses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday. According to a report from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy improved for both men and women across races and among Hispanics, surpassing the previous peak set in 2014. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft Admits Windows 11 Has a Trust Problem, Promises To Focus on Fixes in 2026 - Microsoft wants you to know that it knows that Windows 11, now used by a billion users, has been testing your patience and announced that its engineers are being redirected to urgently address the operating system's performance and reliability problems through an internal process the company calls "swarming." "The feedback we're receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people," Pavan Davuluri, president of Windows and devices, told The Verge. The company plans to spend the rest of 2026 focusing on pain points including system performance, reliability, and overall user experience. January has been particularly rough for Windows 11. Microsoft issued an emergency out-of-band update to fix shutdown issues on some machines, then released a second out-of-band fix a week later to address OneDrive and Dropbox crashes. Some business PCs are also failing to boot after the January update because they were left in an "improper state" after December's monthly update failed to install. Users have also grown frustrated by aggressive Edge and Bing prompts, constant OneDrive upselling nags, and Microsoft's push to require Microsoft accounts. The core members of the company's Windows Insider team recently moved to different roles. "Trust is earned over time and we are committed to building it back with the Windows community," Davuluri said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why Private Equity Is Suddenly Awash With Zombie Firms - The private equity industry is experiencing a quiet reckoning as hundreds of midsize firms find themselves trapped between investors who have lost patience and portfolios of companies they cannot sell at acceptable prices. "There is existential risk for a number [of funds] because of the fundraising environment," said Sunaina Sinha Haldea, global head of private capital advisory at Raymond James. "If existing investors don't come and support them, new investors are highly unlikely to." According to data from Preqin, the average buyout fund that closed in 2025 spent 23 months fundraising, up from 16 months in 2021, and the total number of funds raised fell to 1,191 from 2,679 over the same period. New York's Vestar Capital scrapped plans for its eighth fund in late 2024 and has not invested in a new portfolio company since 2023. The firm's assets under management dropped from $7 billion fifteen years ago to $3.3 billion in 2024. Three-year annualized returns through June 2025 for the Cambridge Associates U.S. Private Equity Index stand at 7.4%, trailing the MSCI World stock index by 11 percentage points annually. The average holding period for buyout deals has stretched to 6.3 years from 5.1 years in 2020. Blue-chip megafunds continue raising capital normally, but smaller firms face existential pressure. Read more of this story at Slashdot.