Latest News

Last updated 25 Feb, 08:17 AM

BBC News

Household energy bills to fall in April after charges shake-up - Changes announced in the Budget mean all energy bills will see some kind of reduction, but it will vary.

Analysis: Trump issues patriotic rallying cry with eye on crucial elections - The BBC's Anthony Zurcher says the US president appealed to his base and taunted his opponents in a marathon speech.

One in four councils to miss food waste collection deadline - find out if yours is one - Local authorities blame the delays on a lack of funding and a shortage of bin lorries.

What is the UK's new travel system and how are dual nationals affected? - From 25 February, a new system will come into force which will affect many people, including British dual nationals.

Mandelson's lawyers say he was arrested over 'baseless' claim he was a flight risk - The peer's lawyers say there is no truth in the suggestion he was planning to leave the UK.

The Register

Threat intelligence supply chain is full of weak links, researchers find - And they're being stressed by geopolitical concerns that threaten to slow important data-sharing efforts Researchers from Georgia Tech have found that the supply chain for threat intelligence data is susceptible to adversarial action, and proposed a method to improve data sharing that they think will make it stronger.…

HP says memory’s contribution to PC costs just doubled to 35 percent - Speeds up qualification of new suppliers to get more cheap parts into PCs, faster HP Inc. has revealed that memory now accounts for 35 percent of the cost of materials it needs to build a PC, up from between 15 and 18 percent last quarter. And the company expects RAM’s contribution will rise through the year.…

Orbital datacenters are a pie-in-the-sky idea: Gartner - Analyst firm bemoans ‘peak insanity’ among those who think circling servers can replace down-to-earth server farms Analyst firm Gartner thinks talk of placing datacenters in space has reached “peak insanity,” because orbiting facilities can’t be run economically or satisfy demand for compute power on Earth.…

Workday CEO's AI talk can't shake off weaker sales forecast - Claims HR company can escape the SaaSpocalypse with its core expertise Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri has used the first quarterly earnings announcement since he returned to the big chair to reassure investors the company is building more capable agentic AI while keeping the fundamentals of the HR platform strong.…

Meta frees React to live in its own foundation - Organizations using the front-end JavaScript framework can expect vendor-neutral governance Meta has turned over control of React, React Native, and associated projects like JSX to the newly formed React Foundation, fulfilling a commitment made last October.…

New Scientist - Home

Rapamycin can add years to your life, or none at all – it’s a lottery - The drug rapamycin has been held up for its life-extending properties, but whether this treatment – or fasting – actually adds years to your life isn't guaranteed

Cannibalism may explain why some orcas stay in family groups - Fins washing up in the North Pacific suggest that orcas from one subspecies are snacking on other orcas, and researchers think that may explain their different social dynamics

How Ukraine became a drone factory and invented the future of war - Ukraine has responded to a war it didn’t start by creating an industry it doesn’t want, but could the nation's drone expertise help it rebuild? To learn more, New Scientist gained exclusive access to the research labs, factories and military training schools behind Ukraine’s drones

Landmark vitiligo cream targets immune cells that disrupt pigmentation - A cream that directly disrupts the underlying causes of the skin patches seen in the condition vitiligo will be made available on the NHS

Loophole found that makes quantum cloning possible - Duplicating the information held in quantum computers was thought to be impossible thanks to the no-cloning theorem, but researchers have now found a workaround

Hacker News

Sovereignty in a System Prompt - Comments

I'm helping my dog vibe code games - Comments

Cl-kawa: Scheme on Java on Common Lisp - Comments

Show HN: Moonshine Open-Weights STT models – higher accuracy than WhisperLargev3 - Comments

Mercury 2: Fast reasoning LLM powered by diffusion - Comments

Slashdot

Apple's Touch-Screen MacBook Pro To Have Dynamic Island, New Interface - Apple's forthcoming touch-screen MacBook Pro models -- the company's first-ever laptops to support touch input -- will feature the iPhone's Dynamic Island at the center top of their OLED displays and a new interface that dynamically adjusts between touch and point-and-click controls, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the plans. The 14-inch and 16-inch models, code-named K114 and K116, are slated for release toward the end of 2026 and won't be part of Apple's product announcements in the first week of March. The redesigned interface brings up a contextual menu surrounding a user's finger when they touch a button or control, and enlarges menu bar items when tapped, adapting the available controls based on whether the input is touch or click. Apple does not plan to position the machines as iPad replacements or describe them as touch-first; the physical design retains the full keyboard and large trackpad of the current MacBook Pro. Last year's Liquid Glass redesign in macOS Tahoe, which added more padding around icons and touch-optimized sliders in the control center, was partly groundwork for this shift. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Had a Big Battery Boom Last Year - The United States installed a record 57 gigawatt hours of new battery storage on its electric grids in 2025, a nearly 30% increase over the prior year that arrived even as the Trump administration cut tax credits for wind and solar in last summer's One Big Beautiful Bill. The figures come from a Solar Energy Industries Association report published Monday, which also projects the market will grow another 21% this year by adding 70 gigawatt hours in 2026 alone. Battery tax credits themselves survived the legislation largely intact, and the majority of last year's new installations were stand-alone systems not tied to specific solar projects. In Texas, solar met more than 15% of electricity demand throughout the summer and beat out coal for the first time, and the SEIA report predicts the state will overtake California this year in total deployed storage. Supply chain restrictions reinforced by the bill and project cancellations could slow the pipeline this year, the report cautions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First British Baby Born Using Transplanted Womb From Dead Donor - A 10-week-old boy named Hugo has become the first baby born in the UK from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor, after his mother Grace Bell -- who was born without a viable womb due to a condition called MRKH syndrome, which affects one in every 5,000 women -- underwent a 10-hour transplant operation at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford in June 2024. Hugo was born just before Christmas 2025, weighing nearly 7lbs, at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in west London, following IVF treatment and embryo transfer at The Lister Fertility Clinic. Bell's transplant is one of three completed so far as part of a UK clinical research trial that plans to carry out 10 such procedures from deceased donors, and Hugo is the first baby born from any of them. Earlier in 2025, a separate effort produced baby Amy, the first UK birth from a living womb donation -- her mother had received her older sister's womb in January 2023. Globally, more than 100 womb transplants have been performed, resulting in over 70 healthy births. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta AI Security Researcher Said an OpenClaw Agent Ran Amok on Her Inbox - Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue posted a now-viral account on X describing how an OpenClaw agent she had tasked with sorting through her overstuffed email inbox went rogue, deleting messages in what she called a "speed run" while ignoring her repeated commands from her phone to stop. "I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb," Yue wrote, sharing screenshots of the ignored stop prompts as proof. Yue said she had previously tested the agent on a smaller "toy" inbox where it performed well enough to earn her trust, so she let it loose on the real thing. She believes the larger volume of data triggered compaction -- a process where the context window grows too large and the agent begins summarizing and compressing its running instructions, potentially dropping ones the user considers critical. The agent may have reverted to its earlier toy-inbox behavior and skipped her last prompt telling it not to act. OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent designed to run as a personal assistant on local hardware. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New Datacentres Risk Doubling Great Britain's Electricity Use, Regulator Says - The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity -- 5GW more than the country's current peak demand. The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a "surge in demand" for connection applications between November 2024 and June last year, with a significant number coming from datacentres. This has exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts. Meanwhile, new renewable energy projects are not being connected to the grid at the pace they are being built to help meet the government's clean energy targets by the end of the decade. Ofgem said the work required to connect surging numbers of datacentres could mean delays for other projects that are "critical for decarbonisation and economic growth." Datacentres are the central nervous system of AI tools such as chatbots and image generators, playing a vital role in training and operating products such as ChatGPT and Gemini. Read more of this story at Slashdot.