Latest News
Last updated 23 Feb, 04:16 PM
BBC News
The key changes being made to special educational needs - at a glance - The government has set out broad changes it will make to the SEND system in England in the coming years.
Andrew charged taxpayers for massage services when envoy, claim ex-civil servants - Whistleblower former civil servants claim there was too little scrutiny of Andrew's costs as UK trade envoy.
BBC sorry for airing racial slur shouted by guest with Tourette's at Baftas - Actors Michael B Jordan and Delroy Lindo were on stage at the time during the award ceremony in London.
Cartel henchmen unleash violence after top drug lord killed in Mexico - The death of the most-wanted Jalisco cartel chief sparks retaliatory violence in at least a dozen states in Mexico.
No 10 says 'nothing off the table' over new US tariffs as UK could be among worst hit - Downing Street says discussions are ongoing following US President Donald Trump's announcement of a 15% global tariffs.
The Register
Global regulators say AI image tools don't get a free pass on privacy rules - Watchdogs warn models that can generate realistic images of people must comply with data protection laws A global coalition of privacy watchdogs has fired a warning shot at the generative AI industry, saying companies churning out realistic synthetic images can't pretend that data protection rules don't apply.…
Break free of Ring's servers, earn a five-figure bounty - Goal is to run software locally and stream only to owners' computers If the sour taste has still not left your mouth after Ring's Super Bowl ad, there is a $10,000 prize for anyone who can find a security flaw in the company's cameras.…
Gemini users say their chat histories have quietly vanished - Complaints pile up from users after months of conversations disappear. Google insists it’s just a temporary bug Over the past few days, complaints have stacked up from people who say months of conversations with Google's AI chatbot have simply vanished, with Reg readers noting the disappearances seemed to coincide with the rollout of Gemini 3.1.…
O say, can you see: FCC pushes patriotic programming for US 250th - Stations urged to mark milestone with pro-America content The head of the Federal Communications Commission has called on broadcasters to start the day with the Star Spangled Banner or the Pledge of Allegiance to celebrate the US's 250th birthday.…
Ex-Amazon UK boss lined up to chair Britain's competition watchdog - Business Secretary praises Doug Gurr's pro-growth agenda Britain's competition regulator has tapped former Amazon UK chief Doug Gurr as preferred candidate for chair – a notable appointment given the watchdog's active investigations into major cloud providers.…
New Scientist - Home
We need to get better at identifying postpartum depression in dads - Around 40 per cent of people are unaware that men can experience postpartum depression too — that has to change
Fresh understanding of the causes of migraine reveals new drug targets - New insights into the causes of migraine are prompting a fresh look at a drug target that was sidelined 25 years ago
Why our brains tune things out and how to overcome it when you need to - We often stop noticing things we’ve become too accustomed to, as a side effect of our brains protecting us from sensory overload. Columnist Helen Thomson shares the evidence-backed ways to learn how to notice again
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
The maths quirk that can cheer you up if you're feeling unpopular - If you feel like the least popular person among your friends, then a handy piece of maths might improve your mood, says Peter Rowlett
Hacker News
The Age Verification Trap, Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection - Comments
Ladybird Browser adopts Rust - Comments
The peculiar case of Japanese web design - Comments
Elsevier shuts down its finance journal citation cartel - Comments
A simple web we own - Comments
Slashdot
Climate Physicists Face the Ghosts in Their Machines: Clouds - Climate scientists trying to predict how much hotter the planet will get have long grappled with a surprisingly stubborn problem -- clouds, which both reflect sunlight and trap heat, account for more than half the variation between climate predictions and are the main reason warming projections for the next 50 years range from 2 to 6 degrees Celsius. Two research groups are now racing to close that gap using AI, though they disagree sharply on method. Tapio Schneider at Caltech built CLIMA, a model that uses machine learning to optimize cloud parameters within traditional physics equations; it will be unveiled at a conference in Japan in March. Chris Bretherton at the Allen Institute for AI took a different path -- his ACE2 neural network, released in 2024, learns from 50 years of atmospheric data and largely bypasses physics equations altogether. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Stressful People in Your Life Could Be Adding Months To Your Biological Age - A study published last week in PNAS found that people who regularly cause problems or make life difficult -- whom the researchers call "hasslers" -- are associated with measurably faster biological aging in those around them, at a rate of roughly 1.5% per additional hassler and about nine months of additional biological age relative to same-age peers. The research drew on DNA methylation-based epigenetic clocks and ego-centric network data from a state-representative probability sample of 2,345 adults in Indiana, aged 18 to 103. Nearly 29% of respondents reported at least one hassler in their close network. The biological toll varied by relationship type: hasslers who were family members showed the strongest and most consistent associations with accelerated aging, while spouse hasslers showed no significant effect on either epigenetic measure. The damage also went beyond aging clocks -- each additional hassler was associated with greater depression and anxiety severity, higher BMI, increased inflammation, and higher multimorbidity. When benchmarked against smoking, a major behavioral risk factor for aging, the hassler effect corresponded to roughly 13 to 17% of smoking's estimated impact on the same aging clocks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sam Altman Would Like To Remind You That Humans Use a Lot of Energy, Too - OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is pushing back on growing concerns about AI's environmental footprint, dismissing claims about ChatGPT's water consumption as "totally fake" and arguing that the fairer way to measure AI's energy use is to compare it against humans. In an interview with Indian Express, Altman acknowledged that evaporative cooling in data centers once made water usage a real concern but said that is no longer the case, calling internet claims of 17 gallons of water per query "completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality." On energy, he conceded it is "fair" to worry about total consumption given how heavily the world now relies on AI, and called for a rapid shift toward nuclear, wind and solar power. He took particular issue with comparisons that pit the cost of training a model against a single human inference, noting it "takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat" before a person gets smart -- and that on a per-query basis, AI has "probably already caught up on an energy efficiency basis." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley Calculate AI's Contribution To U.S. Growth May Be Basically Zero - The narrative that AI spending has been singlehandedly propping up the U.S. economy -- a claim that captivated Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington over the past year -- is facing serious pushback from economists [non-paywalled source] at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, all of whom now calculate that the AI buildup's direct contribution to growth was dramatically overstated and possibly close to zero. The debate hinges on how GDP accounts for imported components: roughly three-quarters of AI data center costs go toward computer chips and gear largely manufactured in Asia, and that spending gets subtracted from domestic output because it boosts foreign economies. Joseph Politano of the Apricitas Economics newsletter pegs AI's actual contribution at about 0.2 percentage points of the 2.2 percent U.S. growth in 2025, and even Hannah Rubinton at the St. Louis Fed -- whose own analysis attributed 39 percent of growth to AI-related business spending through the first nine months of the year -- acknowledges that figure is probably the ceiling. "It's not like AI is propping up the economy," Rubinton said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Is AI Impacting Which Programming Language Projects Use? - "In August 2025, TypeScript surpassed both Python and JavaScript to become the most-used language on GitHub for the first time ever..." writes GitHub's senior developer advocate. They point to this as proof that "AI isn't just speeding up coding. It's reshaping which languages, frameworks, and tools developers choose in the first place." Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week. Those early exposures reset the baseline for what "easy" means. When AI handles boilerplate and error-prone syntax, the penalty for choosing powerful but complex languages disappears. Developers stop avoiding tools with high overhead and start picking based on utility instead. The language adoption data shows this behavioral shift: — TypeScript grew 66% year-over-year — JavaScript grew 24% — Shell scripting usage in AI-generated projects jumped 206% That last one matters. We didn't suddenly love Bash. AI absorbed the friction that made shell scripting painful. So now we use the right tool for the job without the usual cost. "When a task or process goes smoothly, your brain remembers," they point out. "Convenience captures attention. Reduced friction becomes a preference — and preferences at scale can shift ecosystems." "AI performs better with strongly typed languages. Strongly typed languages give AI much clearer constraints..." "Standardize before you scale. Document patterns. Publish template repositories. Make your architectural decisions explicit. AI tools will mirror whatever structures they see." "Test AI-generated code harder, not less." Read more of this story at Slashdot.