Latest News
Last updated 08 May, 07:34 PM
BBC News
Tory MP Natalie Elphicke defects to Labour - The MP for Dover says the Conservatives "have become a byword for incompetence and division".
The inside story of Tory MP's defection to Labour - Keir Starmer's allies believe the Dover MP can help win Tory voters but some on the left are uneasy.
Harry and King at London events but will not meet - The Duke of Sussex will not meet his father or brother during a brief visit to London.
Battles in east Rafah as Israel reopens aid route - Israel says lorries are at Kerem Shalom crossing, but a UN agency says they have not entered Gaza.
Revenge porn video like 'house fire', reality star tells MPs - Georgia Harrison says the video makes her fearful for the future and starting a family.
The Register
SpiNNcloud Systems unveils Arm-based 'neuromorphic supercomputer' - Brain-inspired chip folks set to show off hardware at ISC next week SpiNNcloud Systems says it is making commercially available a hybrid AI high performance computer system based on an architecture pioneered by Steve Furber, one of the designers of the original Arm processor.…
Apple broke the law with anti-union tactics in NYC, labor watchdog barks - Interrogations, confiscating flyers, and prohibiting literature is no bueno, board says in final decision of 2022 case Apple tried to protest, but the complaints fell on deaf ears as the US National Labor Relations Board has finally decided the tech giant violated labor laws by interfering with union organizing activities at a New York City location.…
FYI... Renewable energy sources behind 30% of the world's electricity in 2023 - It ain't all sunshine and windmills – and guess who's in the lead? China Thirty percent of the world's electricity in 2023 was generated by renewable energy sources, according to a think tank.…
Transport watchdog's patience wears thin as Tesla Autopilot remedies may not be enough - Crashes continue even with recall fixes in place The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has written to Tesla as the automaker's electric cars keep crashing despite a recall to fix problems with the Autopilot software.…
CISA boss: Secure code is the 'only way to make ransomware a shocking anomaly' - And it would seriously inconvenience the Chinese and Russians, too RSAC There's a way to vastly reduce the scale and scope of ransomware attacks plaguing critical infrastructure, according to CISA director Jen Easterly: Make software secure by design.…
New Scientist - News
Global capacity to directly suck CO2 from air has just quadrupled - A new plant in Iceland operated by the firm Climeworks can remove up to 36,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air per year, more than quadrupling existing global capabilities
DeepMind AI can predict how drugs interact with proteins - The latest version of the AlphaFold AI can help biologists predict how proteins interact with each other and other molecules, which is a boon to pharmaceutical research
Psychedelic toxins from toads could treat depression and anxiety - A compound emitted by the Colorado river toad may reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression in a similar way to LSD and psilocybin, according to a study in mice
Ultrasonic coffee-maker produces the perfect cold brew in minutes - Cold-brewing coffee can reduce its bitter taste, but it normally takes up to 24 hours as the grounds slowly steep. A new method that involves pummelling the grounds with ultrasound can drastically speed up the process
Fusion reactors could create ingredients for a nuclear weapon in weeks - Concern over the risks of enabling nuclear weapons development is usually focused on nuclear fission reactors, but the potential harm from more advanced fusion reactors has been underappreciated
Hacker News
AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules - Comments
How to Use the Foreign Function API in Java 22 to Call C Libraries - Comments
TimesFM: Time Series Foundation Model for time-series forecasting - Comments
Show HN: I built a non-linear UI for ChatGPT - Comments
Development Notes from xkcd's "Machine" - Comments
Slashdot
Environmental Changes Are Fueling Human, Animal and Plant Diseases, Study Finds - Several large-scale, human-driven changes to the planet -- including climate change, the loss of biodiversity and the spread of invasive species -- are making infectious diseases more dangerous to people, animals and plants, according to a new study. From a report: Scientists have documented these effects before in more targeted studies that have focused on specific diseases and ecosystems. For instance, they have found that a warming climate may be helping malaria expand in Africa and that a decline in wildlife diversity may be boosting Lyme disease cases in North America. But the new research, a meta-analysis of nearly 1,000 previous studies, suggests that these patterns are relatively consistent around the globe and across the tree of life. "It's a big step forward in the science," said Colin Carlson, a biologist at Georgetown University, who was not an author of the new analysis. "This paper is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that I think has been published that shows how important it is health systems start getting ready to exist in a world with climate change, with biodiversity loss." In what is likely to come as a more surprising finding, the researchers also found that urbanization decreased the risk of infectious disease. The new analysis, which was published in Nature on Wednesday, focused on five "global change drivers" that are altering ecosystems across the planet: biodiversity change, climate change, chemical pollution, the introduction of nonnative species and habitat loss or change. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Researchers Warned Against Using AI To Peer Review Academic Papers - Researchers should not be using tools like ChatGPT to automatically peer review papers, warned organizers of top AI conferences and academic publishers worried about maintaining intellectual integrity. From a report: With recent advances in large language models, researchers have been increasingly using them to write peer reviews -- a time-honored academic tradition that examines new research and assesses its merits, showing a person's work has been vetted by other experts in the field. That's why asking ChatGPT to analyze manuscripts and critique the research, without having read the papers, would undermine the peer review process. To tackle the problem, AI and machine learning conferences are now thinking about updating their policies, as some guidelines don't explicitly ban the use of AI to process manuscripts, and the language can be fuzzy. The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) is considering setting up a committee to determine whether it should update its policies around using LLMs for peer review, a spokesperson told Semafor. At NeurIPS, researchers should not "share submissions with anyone without prior approval" for example, while the ethics code at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), whose annual confab kicked off Tuesday, states that "LLMs are not eligible for authorship." Representatives from NeurIPS and ICLR said "anyone" includes AI, and that authorship covers both papers and peer review comments. A spokesperson for Springer Nature, an academic publishing company best known for its top research journal Nature, said that experts are required to evaluate research and leaving it to AI is risky. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Stack Overflow is Feeding Programmers' Answers To AI, Whether They Like It or Not - Stack Overflow's new deal giving OpenAI access to its API as a source of data has users who've posted their questions and answers about coding problems in conversations with other humans rankled. From a report: Users say that when they attempt to alter their posts in protest, the site is retaliating by reversing the alterations and suspending the users who carried them out. A programmer named Ben posted a screenshot yesterday of the change history for a post seeking programming advice, which they'd updated to say that they had removed the question to protest the OpenAI deal. "The move steals the labour of everyone who contributed to Stack Overflow with no way to opt-out," read the updated post. The text was reverted less than an hour later. A moderator message Ben also included says that Stack Overflow posts become "part of the collective efforts" of other contributors once made and that they should only be removed "under extraordinary circumstances." The moderation team then said it was suspending his account for a week while it reached out "to avoid any further misunderstandings." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google DeepMind's 'Leap Forward' in AI Could Unlock Secrets of Biology - Researchers have hailed another "leap forward" for AI after Google DeepMind unveiled the latest version of its AlphaFold program, which can predict how proteins behave in the complex symphony of life. From a report: The breakthrough promises to shed fresh light on the biological machinery that underpins living organisms and drive breakthroughs in fields from antibiotics and cancer therapy to new materials and resilient crops. "It's a big milestone for us," said Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind and the spin-off, Isomorphic Labs, which co-developed AlphaFold3. "Biology is a dynamic system and you have to understand how properties of biology emerge through the interactions between different molecules." Earlier versions of AlphaFold focused on predicting the 3D structures of 200m proteins, the building blocks of life, from their chemical constituents. Knowing what shape a protein takes is crucial because it determines how the protein will function -- or malfunction -- inside a living organism. AlphaFold3 was trained on a global database of 3D molecular structures and goes a step further by predicting how proteins will interact with the other molecules and ions they encounter. When asked to make a prediction, the program starts with a cloud of atoms and steadily reshapes it into the most accurate predicted structure. Writing in Nature, the researchers describe how AlphaFold3 can predict how proteins interact with other proteins, ions, strands of genetic code, and smaller molecules, such as those developed for medicines. In tests, the program's accuracy varied from 62% to 76%. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Full Repairs To Damaged Red Sea Internet Cables Delayed by Yemen Political Splits - Full repairs to three submarine internet cables damaged in the Red Sea in February are being held up by disputes over who controls access to infrastructure in Yemeni waters. From a report: The Yemeni government has granted permits for the repair of two out of three cables, but refused the third because of a dispute with one of the cable's consortium members. Repairs to the Seacom and EIG cables have been approved, but the consortium that runs AAE-1, which includes telecommunications company TeleYemen, was not granted a permit by Yemen's internationally recognized government, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. Three out of more than a dozen cables that run through the Red Sea, a critical route for connecting Europe's internet infrastructure to Asia's, were knocked offline by the Houthi-sunk Rubymar vessel in late February. Although the telecommunications data that passes along the damaged cables was re-routed, the incident highlighted the vulnerability of critical subsea infrastructure and the challenges of making repairs in a conflict zone. The dispute over the third cable derives from the split political control of TeleYemen, the country's sole telecommunications provider, a reflection of the country's broader geopolitical divisions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.