Latest News
Last updated 02 Apr, 11:32 AM
BBC News
Heathrow warned by airlines about power supply days before shutdown - MPs hear the airport was warned about power supply resilience days before the disruptive closure.
Top Gun and Batman actor Val Kilmer dies aged 65 - He starred in some of the biggest movies of the 1980s and 90s, also including The Doors and Heat.
Chris Mason: Jitters, uncertainty and hope as UK awaits tariff decision - Talks are continuing between London and Washington at quite an intensity, our political editor writes.
UK couple's death in New Zealand probed as murder-suicide - The bodies were found after officers forced entry to a house in Roseneath, near Wellington, on Monday.
Woman who reported predatory officer blamed by Met - The woman accused the force of trying to discredit her over her complaints against a Met constable.
The Register
Oracle faces Texas-sized lawsuit over alleged cloud snafu and radio silence - Victims expect to spend considerable time and money over privacy incident, lawyers argue Specialist class action lawyers have launched proceedings against Oracle in Texas over two alleged data breaches.…
One of the last of Bletchley Park's quiet heroes, Betty Webb, dies at 101 - Kept quiet for 30 years before becoming an 'unrivalled advocate' for the site Obit Betty Webb MBE, one of the team who worked at the code-breaking Bletchley Park facility during the Second World War, has died at the age of 101.…
Specsavers takes off the Oracle glasses, sees better ERP options - £5M in savings? Should've gone to third-party support International optometry company Specsavers has paused the global standardization of its Oracle ERP system and moved to third-party support, saving £5 million ($6.5 million) that can be reallocated to the business.…
Speech now streaming from brains in real-time - Boosted human-computer interface promises better communication for patients who lost ability to speak Some smart cookies have implemented a brain-computer interface that can synthesize speech from thought in near real-time.…
Apple belatedly patches actively exploited bugs in older OSes - Cupertino already squashed 'em in more recent releases - which this week get a fresh round of fixes Apple has delivered a big batch of OS updates, some of which belatedly patch older versions of its operating systems to address exploited-in-the-wild flaws the iGiant earlier fixed in more recent releases.…
New Scientist - Home
US government fired researchers running a crucial drug use survey - A termination letter obtained by New Scientist reveals that the Trump administration has gutted the office that runs the country’s only nationwide survey on drug use and mental health
How nothing could destroy the universe - The concept of nothing once sparked a 1000-year-long war, today it might explain dark energy and nothingness even has the potential to destroy the universe, explains physicist Antonio Padilla
NASA cut $420 million for climate science, moon modelling and more - Under pressure from Elon Musk’s DOGE task force, NASA is cancelling grants and contracts for everything from lunar dust research to educational programmes
The animals revealing why human culture isn't as special as we thought - Even animals with very small brains turn out to have cultural traditions, which poses a puzzler for biologists wondering what makes human culture unique
Do Ozempic and Wegovy really cause hair loss? - As semaglutide-based weight loss treatments such as Ozempic and Wegovy become more popular, new side effects are emerging – and one is hair loss
Hacker News
RIP Val Kilmer: Real Genius .. the Film Nerd Culture Deserves (2015) - Comments
Stop syncing everything - Comments
A 6-Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno's Music for Airports - Comments
DEDA – Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation Toolkit - Comments
Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001) - Comments
Slashdot
Brain Interface Speaks Your Thoughts In Near Real-time - Longtime Slashdot reader backslashdot writes: Commentary, video, and a publication in this week's Nature Neuroscience herald a significant advance in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, enabling speech by decoding electrical activity in the brain's sensorimotor cortex in real-time. Researchers from UC Berkeley and UCSF employed deep learning recurrent neural network transducer models to decode neural signals in 80-millisecond intervals, generating fluent, intelligible speech tailored to each participant's pre-injury voice. Unlike earlier methods that synthesized speech only after a full sentence was completed, this system can detect and vocalize words within just three seconds. It is accomplished via a 253-electrode array chip implant on the brain. Code and the dataset to replicate the main findings of this study are available in the Chang Lab's public GitHub repository. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Most Galaxies Rotate Clockwise - The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed that a surprising majority of galaxies rotate clockwise, challenging the long-held belief in a directionally uniform universe; this anomaly could suggest either our universe originated inside a rotating black hole or that astronomers have been misinterpreting the universe's expansion due to observational biases. Smithsonian Magazine reports: The problem is that astronomers have long posited that galaxies should be evenly split between rotating in one direction or the other, astronomer Dan Weisz from the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the study, wrote for Astronomy back in 2017. "This stems from the idea that we live in an 'isotropic' universe, which means that the universe looks roughly the same in every direction. By extension, galaxies shouldn't have a preferred direction of spin from our perspective," he added. According to Shamir, there are two strong potential explanations for this discrepancy. One explanation is that the universe came into existence while in rotation. This theory would support what's known as black hole cosmology: the hypothesis that our universe exists within a black hole that exists within another parent universe. In other words, black holes create universes within themselves, meaning that the black holes in our own universe also lead to other baby universes. "A preferred axis in our universe, inherited by the axis of rotation of its parent black hole, might have influenced the rotation dynamics of galaxies, creating the observed clockwise-counterclockwise asymmetry," Nikodem Poplawski, a theoretical physicist at the University of New Haven who was not involved in the study, tells Space.com's Robert Lea. "The discovery by the JWST that galaxies rotate in a preferred direction would support the theory of black holes creating new universes, and I would be extremely excited if these findings are confirmed." Another possible explanation involves the Milky Way's rotation. Due to an effect called the Doppler shift, astronomers expect galaxies rotating opposite to the Milky Way's motion to appear brighter, which could explain their overrepresentation in telescopic surveys. "If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe," Shamir explains in the statement. "The re-calibration of distance measurements can also explain several other unsolved questions in cosmology such as the differences in the expansion rates of the universe and the large galaxies that according to the existing distance measurements are expected to be older than the universe itself." The findings have been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why Watts Should Replace mAh as Essential Spec for Mobile Devices - Tech manufacturers continue misleading consumers with impressive-sounding but less useful specs like milliamp-hours and megahertz, while hiding the one measurement that matters most: watts. The Verge argues that the watt provides the clearest picture of a device's true capabilities by showing how much power courses through chips and how quickly batteries drain. With elementary math, consumers could easily calculate battery life by dividing watt-hours by power consumption. The Verge: The Steam Deck gaming handheld is my go-to example of how handy watts can be. With a 15-watt maximum processor wattage and up to 9 watts of overhead for other components, a strenuous game drains its 49Wh battery in roughly two hours flat. My eight-year-old can do that math: 15 plus 9 is 24, and 24 times 2 is 48. You can fit two hour-long 24-watt sessions into 48Wh, and because you have 49Wh, you're almost sure to get it. With the least strenuous games, I'll sometimes see my Steam Deck draining the battery at a speed of just 6 watts -- which means I can get eight hours of gameplay because 6 watts times 8 hours is 48Wh, with 1Wh remaining in the 49Wh battery. Unlike megahertz, wattage also indicates sustained performance capability, revealing whether a processor can maintain high speeds or will throttle due to thermal constraints. Watts is also already familiar to consumers through light bulbs and power bills, but manufacturers persist with less transparent metrics that make direct comparisons difficult. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
OpenAI Accused of Training GPT-4o on Unlicensed O'Reilly Books - A new paper [PDF] from the AI Disclosures Project claims OpenAI likely trained its GPT-4o model on paywalled O'Reilly Media books without a licensing agreement. The nonprofit organization, co-founded by O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly himself, used a method called DE-COP to detect copyrighted content in language model training data. Researchers analyzed 13,962 paragraph excerpts from 34 O'Reilly books, finding that GPT-4o "recognized" significantly more paywalled content than older models like GPT-3.5 Turbo. The technique, also known as a "membership inference attack," tests whether a model can reliably distinguish human-authored texts from paraphrased versions. "GPT-4o [likely] recognizes, and so has prior knowledge of, many non-public O'Reilly books published prior to its training cutoff date," wrote the co-authors, which include O'Reilly, economist Ilan Strauss, and AI researcher Sruly Rosenblat. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Cheap TVs' Incessant Advertising Reaches Troubling New Lows - An anonymous reader quotes an op-ed from Ars Technica's Scharon Harding: TVs offer us an escape from the real world. After a long day, sometimes there's nothing more relaxing than turning on your TV, tuning into your favorite program, and unplugging from the realities around you. But what happens when divisive, potentially offensive messaging infiltrates that escape? Even with streaming services making it easy to watch TV commercial-free, it can still be difficult for TV viewers to avoid ads with these sorts of messages. That's especially the case with budget brands, which may even force controversial ads onto TVs when they're idle, making users pay for low-priced TVs in unexpected, and sometimes troubling, ways. [...] Buying a budget TV means accepting some trade-offs. Those trade-offs have historically been around things like image quality and feature sets. But companies like Vizio are also asking customers to accept questionable advertising decisions as they look to create new paths to ad revenue. Numerous factors are pushing TV OS operators deeper into advertising. Brands are struggling to grow profits as people buy new TVs less frequently. As the TV market gets more competitive, hardware is also selling for cheaper, with some companies selling TVs at a loss with hopes of making up for it with ad sales. There's concern that these market realities could detract from real TV innovation. And as the Secretary Noem ad reportedly shown to Vizio TV owners has highlighted, another concern is the lack of care around which ads are being shown to TV owners -- especially when all they want is simple "ambient background" noise. Today, people can disable ambient mode settings that show ads. But with some TV brands showing poor judgment around where they sell and place ads, we wouldn't bank on companies maintaining these boundaries forever. If the industry can't find a way to balance corporate needs with appropriate advertising, people might turn off not only their TVs more often, but also unplug from those brands completely. Some of the worst offenders highlighted in the article include Vizio TVs' "Scenic Mode," which activates when the TV is idle and displays "relaxing, ambient content" accompanied by ads. Roku City takes a similar approach with its animated cityscape screensaver, saturated with brand logos and advertisements. Even Amazon Fire TV and premium brands like LG have adopted screensaver ads, showing that this intrusive trend isn't limited to budget models. Read more of this story at Slashdot.