Latest News
Last updated 07 Jan, 02:20 AM
BBC News
US discussing options to acquire Greenland, including use of military, White House says - It came as European allies rallied behind Denmark, which is pushing back against Trump's ambitions for the Arctic island.
The painful questions for Nato and the EU as Trump threatens Greenland - The White House has said that 'utilising the US military is always an option at the commander-in-chief's disposal'
UK and France to send troops to Ukraine if peace deal agreed - The announcement was made by UK PM Sir Keir Starmer after a meeting of Ukraine's allies in Paris.
More snow and ice across nearly all of UK as cold snap continues - The Met Office warns about potential injuries from slips and falls as icy conditions continue.
Learner drivers face longer wait for tests as lower drink-drive limit proposed - A minimum learning period of up to six months could be introduced for learner drivers
The Register
Lenovo shows off new laptops that twist and roll - The company has also redesigned the X1 Carbon’s internals for easier repairs If there was a kingdom of laptop screen flexibility, Lenovo would take the crown. Last year, the company released the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, with a mechanical screen that could roll out to increase its size from 14 to 16.7 inches. Now, it’s back with the ThinkPad Rollable XD concept laptop that expands from 13.3 to 16 inches at the touch of a button or a swipe, along with the ThinkBook Plus Gen 7 Auto Twist, which uses a motor to rotate its screen and follow you around the room.…
Ring embraces the end of the world, starts using home cameras to track wildfires - Amazon's community surveillance biz bets on AI to recognize danger A year after a series of fires obliterated communities in Los Angeles, Amazon's Ring security service has announced a feature called Fire Watch intended to mitigate future wildfire risk.…
HackerOne 'ghosted' me for months over $8,500 bug bounty, says researcher - Long after CVEs issued and open source flaws fixed Last fall, Jakub Ciolek reported two denial-of-service bugs in Argo CD, a popular Kubernetes controller, via HackerOne's Internet Bug Bounty (IBB) program. Both were assigned CVEs and have since been fixed. But instead of receiving an $8,500 reward for the two flaws, Ciolek says, HackerOne ghosted him for months.…
Snowflake gets frosty with Google Gemini - Munge that corporate data using the LLM of your choice The data platform Snowflake is putting Google's Gemini to work inside its Cortex AI, aiming to give customers access to a foundational model within the boundaries of their data environment across supported clouds, the company told The Register.…
Brave refurbishes Rust adblocking engine for reduced memory footprint - Have your privacy cake and consume the web too Brave Software has reworked its browser's Rust-based adblock engine to make it significantly more memory efficient and perhaps more secure. So you get fewer ads now with fewer MB of RAM.…
New Scientist - Home
Early humans may have begun butchering elephants 1.8 million years ago - A 1.78-million-year-old partial elephant skeleton found in Tanzania associated with stone tools may represent the oldest known evidence of butchery of the giant herbivores
The first quantum fluctuations set into motion a huge cosmic mystery - The earliest acoustic vibrations in the cosmos weren’t exactly sound – they travelled at half the speed of light and there was nobody around to hear them anyway. But Jim Baggott says from the first moments, the universe was singing
Passwords will be on the way out in 2026 as passkeys take over - The curse of having to remember easily hackable passwords may soon be over, as a new alternative is set to take over in 2026
Jellyfish sleep about as much as humans do – and nap like us too - The benefits of sleep may be more universal than we thought. We know it helps clear waste from the brain in humans, and now it seems that even creatures without brains like ours get similar benefits
The secret weapon that could finally force climate action - An ambitious form of climate modelling aims to pin the blame for disasters – from floods to heatwaves – on specific companies. Is this the tool we need to effectively prosecute the world’s biggest carbon emitters?
Hacker News
Spherical Snake - Comments
Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone - Comments
Hyundai Introduces Its Next-Gen Atlas Robot at CES 2026 [video] - Comments
Most websites don't need cookie consent banners - Comments
A 30B Qwen model walks into a Raspberry Pi and runs in real time - Comments
Slashdot
Discord Files Confidentially For IPO - According to Bloomberg, Discord has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO. Reuters reports: The U.S. IPO market regained momentum in 2025 after nearly three years of sluggish activity, but hopes for a stronger rebound were tempered by tariff-driven volatility, a prolonged government shutdown and a late-year selloff in artificial intelligence stocks. Discord, which was founded in 2015, offers voice, video and text chatting capabilities aimed at gamers and streamers. According to a statement in December, the platform has more than 200 million monthly users. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NYC Wegmans Is Storing Biometric Data On Shoppers' Eyes, Voices and Faces - schwit1 shares a report from Gothamist: Wegmans in New York City has begun collecting biometric data from anyone who enters its supermarkets, according to new signage posted at the chain's Manhattan and Brooklyn locations earlier this month. Anyone entering the store could have data on their face, eyes and voices collected and stored by the Rochester-headquartered supermarket chain. The information is used to "protect the safety and security of our patrons and employees," according to the signage. The new scanning policy is an expansion of a 2024 pilot. The chain had initially said that the scanning system was only for a small group of employees and promised to delete any biometric data it collected from shoppers during the pilot rollout. The new notice makes no such assurances. Wegmans representatives did not reply to questions about how the data would be stored, why it changed its policy or if it would share the data with law enforcement. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Utah Allows AI To Renew Medical Prescriptions - sinij shares a news release from the Utah Department of Commerce: The state of Utah, through the Utah Department of Commerce's Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy, today announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with Doctronic, the AI-native health platform, to give patients with chronic conditions a faster, automated way to renew medications. This agreement marks the first state-approved program in the country that allows an AI system to legally participate in medical decision-making for prescription renewals, an emerging model that could reshape access to care and ultimately improve care outcomes. Politico provides additional context in its reporting: In data shared with Utah regulators, Doctronic compared its AI system with human clinicians across 500 urgent care cases. The results showed the AI's treatment plan matched the physicians' 99.2 percent of the time, according to the company. "The AI is actually better than doctors at doing this," said Dr. Adam Oskowitz, Doctronic co-founder and an associate professor of surgery at the University of California San Francisco. "When you go see a doctor, it's not going to do all the checks that the AI is doing." Oskowitz said the AI is designed to err on the side of safety, automatically escalating cases to a physician if there's any uncertainty. Human doctors will also review the first 250 prescriptions issued in each medication class to validate the AI's performance. Once that threshold is met, subsequent renewals in that class will be handled autonomously. The company has also secured a one-of-a-kind malpractice insurance policy covering an AI system, which means the system is insured and held to the same level of responsibility as a doctor would be. Doctronic also runs a nationwide telehealth practice that directs patients to doctors after an AI consultation. In Utah, patients who use the system will visit a webpage that verifies they are physically in the state. Then the system will pull the patient's prescription history and offer a list of medications eligible for renewal. The AI walks the patient through the same clinical questions a physician would ask to determine whether a refill is appropriate. If the system clears the renewal, the prescription is sent directly to a pharmacy. The program is limited to 190 commonly prescribed medications. Some medications -- including pain management and ADHD drugs as well as injectables -- are excluded for safety reasons. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nvidia Details New AI Chips and Autonomous Car Project With Mercedes - An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: On Monday, [Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip-making giant Nvidia] said the company would begin shipping a new A.I. chip later this year, one that can do more computing with less power than previous generations of chips could. Known as the Vera Rubin, the chip has been in development for three years and is designed to fulfill A.I. requests more quickly and cheaply than its predecessors. Mr. Huang, who spoke during CES, an annual tech conference in Las Vegas, also discussed Nvidia's surprisingly ambitious work around autonomous vehicles. This year, Mercedes-Benz will begin shipping cars equipped with Nvidia self-driving technology comparable to Tesla's Autopilot. Nvidia's new Rubin chips are being manufactured and will be shipped to customers, including Microsoft and Amazon, in the second half of the year, fulfilling a promise Mr. Huang made last March when he first described the chip at the company's annual conference in San Jose, Calif. Companies will be able to train A.I. models with one-quarter as many Rubin chips as its predecessor, the Blackwell. It can provide information for chatbots and other A.I. products for one-tenth of the cost. They will also be able to install the chips in data centers more quickly, courtesy of redesigned supercomputers that feature fewer cables. If the new chips live up to their promise, they could allow companies to develop A.I. at a lower cost and at least begin to respond to the soaring electrical demands of data centers being built around the world. [...] On Monday, he said Nvidia had developed new A.I. software that would allow customers like Uber and Lucid to develop cars that navigate roads autonomously. It will share the system, called Alpamayo, to spread its influence and the appeal of Nvidia's chip technology. Since 2020, Nvidia has been working with Mercedes to develop a class of self-driving cars. They will begin shipping an early example of their collaboration when Mercedes CLA cars become available in the first half of the year in Europe and the United States. Mr. Huang said the company started working on self-driving technology eight years ago. It has more than a thousand people working on the project. "Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous," Mr. Huang said. The Rubin chips are named for the astronomer Vera Rubin, a pioneering astronomer who helped find powerful evidence of dark matter. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google Will Now Only Release Android Source Code Twice a Year - Google will begin releasing Android Open Source Project (AOSP) source code only twice a year starting in 2026. "In the past, Google would release the source code for every quarterly Android release, of which there are four each year," notes Android Authority. From the report: Google told Android Authority that, effective 2026, Google will publish new source code to AOSP in Q2 and Q4. The reason is to ensure platform stability for the Android ecosystem and better align with Android's trunk-stable development model. Developers navigating to source.android.com today will see a banner confirming the change that reads as follows: "Effective in 2026, to align with our trunk-stable development model and ensure platform stability for the ecosystem, we will publish source code to AOSP in Q2 and Q4. For building and contributing to AOSP, we recommend utilizing android-latest-release instead of aosp-main. The aosp-latest-release manifest branch will always reference the most recent release pushed to AOSP. For more information, see Changes to AOSP." A spokesperson for Google offered some additional context on this decision, stating that it helps simplify development, eliminates the complexity of managing multiple code branches, and allows them to deliver more stable and secure code to Android platform developers. The spokesperson also reiterated that Google's commitment to AOSP is unchanged and that this new release schedule helps the company build a more robust and secure foundation for the Android ecosystem. Finally, Google told us that its process for security patch releases will not change and that the company will keep publishing security patches each month on a dedicated security-only branch for relevant OS releases just as it does today. Read more of this story at Slashdot.