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Last updated 30 Dec, 02:12 PM
BBC News
Idris Elba knighted as Sarina Wiegman and Lionesses lead New Year Honours - Ice skaters Torvill and Dean, and members of the winning Lionesses and Red Roses receive gongs.
Anthony Joshua in stable condition after Nigeria car crash that killed two friends - The British heavyweight boxer suffered minor injuries in the crash, which killed two team members and close friends.
Flight to edge of space left me harrassed and depressed - Blue Origin's all-female crew, which included scientist Amanda Nguyen, was launched into space in April.
Do saunas really boost your health? - Saunas and cold water swims are booming, but what does science actually say about the benefits?
French right pushes for national tribute to film star Brigitte Bardot - A petition for a national homage to Brigitte Bardot - who died on Sunday - attracts more than 23,000 signatures.
The Register
Banksy's Limitless limited by Windows Activation - Digital screen snafu or satirical comment on Microsoft's licensing policies? Bork!Bork!Bork! Today's Bork comes courtesy of an exhibition dedicated to the UK street artist Banksy and demonstrates that "Limitless" does not always apply to Windows Activation.…
When the AI bubble pops, Nvidia becomes the most important software company overnight - Want to survive the crash? Find another way to make money with GPUs Today, Nvidia’s revenues are dominated by hardware sales. But when the AI bubble inevitably pops, the GPU giant will become the single most important software company in the world.…
Tis the season when tech leaders rub their crystal balls - 2026 is the year where AI must meet ROI in the enterprise, and the key to delivering it is data governance. Leaders from Dell, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Snowflake have released their 2026 predictions for AI in the workplace, and they agree that safeguards for AI agents and ROI are the top priorities for their customers.…
We will be cruising at 35,000 feet and failing to update our Apache HTTP Server - Now replace the autopilot with Copilot Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork can happen to the best of us, but flashing one's undercarriage at the boss of a compliance company is less than ideal, particularly at 35,000 feet in the air.…
Korean telco failed at femtocell security, exposed customers to snooping and fraud - One cert, in plaintext, on thousands of devices, led to what looks like years of crime South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT has found that local carrier Korea Telecom (KT) deployed thousands of badly secured femtocells, leading to an attack that enabled micropayments fraud and snooping on customers’ communications – maybe for years.…
New Scientist - Home
Benefits of mRNA cancer vaccines could exceed $75 billion in US alone - An analysis of ongoing trials suggests that mRNA cancer vaccines have the potential to deliver health benefits worth $75 billion each year in the US alone
Mathematicians unified key laws of physics in 2025 - It took 125 years, but in 2025 a team of mathematicians discovered the solution to a long-puzzling problem about the equations that govern the behaviour of particles in a fluid
Low on energy? A new understanding of rest could help revitalise you - There is a state of relaxation that few of us spend much time in, but which comes with profound well-being benefits. With healthier ageing, reduced risk of disease and feeling more energised all on offer, here's how to get there
Human-plant hybrid cells reveal truth about dark DNA in our genome - It has been claimed that because most of our DNA is active, it must be important, but now human-plant hybrid cells have been used to show this activity is mostly random noise
The best and most ridiculous robots of 2025 in pictures - Some of the world's most advanced robots showed off their skills at tech shows and sporting events, doing everything from cooking shrimp to running half marathons
Hacker News
Netflix: Open Content - Comments
Non-Zero-Sum Games - Comments
Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts - Comments
The British Empire's Resilient Subsea Telegraph Network - Comments
Google is dead. Where do we go now? - Comments
Slashdot
'One of America's Most Successful Experiments Is Coming to a Shuddering Halt' - The six-decade flow of highly skilled Indian immigrants to the United States -- a migration pattern that produced some of the country's highest-earning households, several Nobel laureates, and the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and Pepsi -- appears to be grinding to a halt amid rising anti-Indian rhetoric from Republican officials and chaos in the visa system, according to New York Times. Indian student arrivals at American universities fell 44% this year, even as Indians had just become the largest contingent of foreign students the previous year. The decline comes as top Trump administration officials have publicly accused Indian immigrants of gaming the system. Stephen Miller, the architect of the president's immigration crackdown, declared on Fox News that Indians "engage in a lot of cheating on immigration policies that is very harmful to American workers." Governor Ron DeSantis called the H-1B visa program "chain migration run amok." The hostility extends beyond policy circles. At a Hindu temple in Sugar Land, Texas, conservative Christian protesters gathered during the dedication of a 90-foot Hanuman statue, calling the deity "a demon god." A U.S. Senate candidate wrote on social media: "Why are we allowing a false statue of a false Hindu God to be here in Texas? We are a CHRISTIAN nation." Indian Americans' median household income significantly outstrips that of white Americans, and about three-quarters hold at least a college degree. Foreign students have earned more engineering and computer science doctorates than American citizens and permanent residents for over two decades, according to the National Science Foundation. American tech giants have announced $67.5 billion in new investments in India in just the past few months. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
22 Million Affected By Aflac Data Breach - An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: Insurance giant Aflac is notifying roughly 22.65 million people that their personal information was stolen from its systems in June 2025. The company disclosed the intrusion on June 20, saying it had identified suspicious activity on its network in the US on June 12 and blaming it on a sophisticated cybercrime group. The company said it immediately contained the attack and engaged with third-party cybersecurity experts to help with incident response. Aflac's operations were not affected, as file-encrypting ransomware was not deployed. [...] The compromised information, the insurance giant says, includes names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, driver's license numbers, government ID numbers, medical and health insurance information, and other data. "The review of the potentially impacted files determined personal information associated with customers, beneficiaries, employees, agents, and other individuals related to Aflac was involved," Aflac said in a notification (PDF) on its website. The company is providing the affected individuals with 24 months of free credit monitoring, identity theft protection, and medical fraud protection services. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Meta Just Bought Manus, an AI Startup Everyone Has Been Talking About - Meta has agreed to acquire viral AI agent startup Manus, "a Singapore-based AI startup that's become the talk of Silicon Valley since it materialized this spring with a demo video so slick it went instantly viral," reports TechCrunch. "The clip showed an AI agent that could do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI's Deep Research." From the report: By April, just weeks after launch, the early-stage firm Benchmark led a $75 million funding round that assigned Manus a post-money valuation of $500 million. General partner Chetan Puttagunta joined the board. Per Chinese media outlets, some other big-name backers had already invested in Manus at that point, including Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG (formerly known as Sequoia China) via an earlier $10 million round. Though Bloomberg raised questions when Manus started charging $39 or $199 a month for access to its AI models (the outlet noted the pricing seemed "somewhat aggressive... for a membership service still in a testing phase,") the company recently announced it had since signed up millions of users and crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That's when Meta started negotiating with Manus, according to the WSJ, which says Meta is paying $2 billion -- the same valuation Manus was seeking for its next funding round. For Zuckerberg, who has staked Meta's future on AI, Manus represents something new: an AI product that's actually making money (investors have grown increasingly twitchy about Meta's $60 billion infrastructure spending spree). Meta says it'll keep Manus running independently while weaving its agents into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, where Meta's own chatbot, Meta AI, is already available to users. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PhDs Can't Find Work as Boston's Biotech Engine Sputters - The Wall Street Journal reports that Boston's once-booming biotech sector has hit a sharp downturn, leaving newly minted Ph.D.s struggling to find work as venture funding dries up, lab space sits empty, and companies downsize or relocate amid rising costs and policy uncertainty. The Wall Street Journal reports: Boston's biotech sector, long a vital economic engine for one of America's wealthiest metro areas, is sputtering. A double whammy of cutbacks in venture capital and government funding have taken a toll, leading to layoffs and struggles for job seekers. For workers who thought they would easily launch into a well-paying science career, the downturn has been especially harsh. Massachusetts experienced a slight decline in its roughly 65,000 biotech research-and-development jobs in 2024 after years of mostly strong increases, including during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to federal data. The numbers indicate that job losses continued through at least June, while hiring remains sluggish. By the end of September, nearly 28% of greater Boston's laboratory space sat empty, according to the latest estimates from real-estate firm CBRE. "Every stage of the life cycle has been impacted by policy or regulatory uncertainty this year," said Kendalle Burlin O'Connell, chief executive of MassBio, an industry trade group. The impact has hit startups especially hard, she said. A continued downturn poses risks for a region where workers will put up with sky-high real-estate costs if they can land high-paying jobs. Massachusetts faces competition from other states and China, which are eager to peel away talent and investment. "There are states and countries chasing us every single day," Gov. Maura Healey said in an interview. In late October, the Democrat testified before the Massachusetts legislature in support of a $400 million "competitiveness agenda" that she is seeking to spur new investment and supplement research funding lost this year. Lawmakers are reviewing the bill, a House spokesman said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Researchers Make 'Neuromorphic' Artificial Skin For Robots - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they are integrated with similar spike trains coming from still other neurons. Now, researchers have used spiking circuitry to build an artificial robotic skin, adopting some of the principles of how signals from our sensory neurons are transmitted and integrated. While the system relies on a few decidedly not-neural features, it has the advantage that we have chips that can run neural networks using spiking signals, which would allow this system to integrate smoothly with some energy-efficient hardware to run AI-based control software. [...] There are four ways that these trains of spikes can convey information: the shape of an individual pulse, through their magnitude, through the length of the spike, and through the frequency of the spikes. Spike frequency is the most commonly used means of conveying information in biological systems, and the researchers use that to convey the pressure experienced by a sensor. The remaining forms of information are used to create something akin to a bar code that helps identify which sensor the reading came from. In addition to registering the pressure, the researchers had each sensor send a "I'm still here" signal at regular time intervals. Failure to receive this would be an indication that something has gone wrong with a sensor. The spiking signals allow the next layer of the system to identify any pressure being experienced by the skin, as well as where it originated. This layer can also do basic evaluation of the sensory input: "Pressure-initiated raw pulses from the pulse generator accumulated in the signal cache center until a predefined pain threshold is surpassed, activating a pain signal." This can allow the equivalent of basic reflex reactions that don't involve higher-level control systems. For example, the researchers set up a robotic arm covered with their artificial skin, and got it to move the arm whenever it experiences pressure that can cause damage. The second layer also combines and filters signals from the skin before sending the information on to the arm's controller, which is the equivalent of the brain in this situation. So, the same system caused a robotic face to change expressions based on how much pressure its arm was sensing. [...] The skin is designed to be assembled from a collection of segments that can snap together using magnetic interlocks. These automatically link up any necessary wiring, and each segment of skin broadcasts a unique identity code. So, if the system identifies damage, it's relatively easy for an operator to pop out the damaged segment and replace it with fresh hardware, and then update any data that links the new segment's ID with its location. The researchers call their development a neuromorphic robotic e-skin, or NRE-skin. "Neuromorphic" as a term is a bit vague, with some people using it to mean a technology that directly follows the principles used by the nervous system. That's definitely not this skin. Instead, it uses "neuromorphic" far more loosely, with the operation of the nervous system acting as an inspiration for the system.The findings have been published in the journal PNAS. Read more of this story at Slashdot.