Latest News
Last updated 12 Jul, 07:00 AM
BBC News
Why cockpit audio deepens the mystery of Air India crash - Fuel cut-off switches flipped seconds after takeoff in Air India crash, preliminary report finds.
Heatwave set to peak with 34C temperatures predicted - Scotland and Northern Ireland could see their hottest days of the year, while heat health alerts are in place for many.
BBC faces dilemma over new series of MasterChef - This year's series was reportedly filmed before co-host Gregg Wallace faced misconduct allegations.
'They were just kids': Mother mourns sons killed in Israeli strike while waiting for aid - Two of Iman al-Nouri's five sons were killed outside a clinic in Deir al-Balah on Thursday, while a third was seriously wounded.
Alcaraz expects to be 'pushed to limit' by Sinner at Wimbledon final - A month on from their epic French Open final, Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz will meet once more on Sunday in a battle for Wimbledon trophy.
The Register
Looks like 1,300 Indeed and Glassdoor staffers will need their former employer's websites - No reason given for the 6% cull, but the CEO has previously talked up AI taking jobs Recruit Holdings, the Japanese job site conglomerate that owns recruitment job site Indeed and employer reviewer Glassdoor, has eliminated about 1,300 positions.…
AI coding tools make developers slower but they think they're faster, study finds - Predicted a 24% boost, but clocked a 19% drag Artificial intelligence coding tools are supposed to make software development faster, but researchers who tested these tools in a randomized, controlled trial found the opposite.…
Hegseth signs flying memo to expand military use of cheap drones in oddball video - An announcement so weird it could only come from the Trump administration video Flanked by a pair of buzzing drones that threatened to drown out his voice, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reached up to grab a memorandum hung from a third drone hovering above his head. …
Tech to protect images against AI scrapers can be beaten, researchers show - Data poisoning, meet data detox ai-pocalypse Computer scientists say they've devised a way to remove image-based protection mechanisms developed to protect artists from unwanted use of their work for AI training.…
ICANN fumes as AFRINIC offers no explanation for annulled election - As allegations fly regarding fraudulent powers of attorney, one member wants to wind up AFRINIC and start again The receiver of the African Network Information Center (AFRINIC) has not explained why he chose to annul its recent election, prompting ICANN to again warn that it may need to step in, and longtime AFRINIC litigant Cloud Innovation to call for the body to be wound up.…
New Scientist - Home
'Flashes of brilliance and frustration': I let an AI agent run my day - Ordering takeaway food, writing emails, reworking presentations: AI assistants are promoted as a way of outsourcing mundane tasks to free up your time for more interesting pursuits. So, what are they actually good for – and what are the risks?
How government use of AI could hurt democracy - Countries are eager to use AI to automate some government processes, but this risks eroding citizens’ trust and feelings of democratic control – because AI mistakes can ruin their lives
We may have finally solved an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray puzzle - The IceCube neutrino detector has allowed researchers to resolve a debate about what types of particles make up ultra-high-energy cosmic rays – but much remains unknown about these rare events
Artificial cooling 'urgent' for Great Barrier Reef after warming spike - A drop in shipping emissions has caused a surge in warming at the Great Barrier Reef, fuelling calls for drastic actions such as marine cloud brightening to lower the risk of coral bleaching
Climate could warm another 0.5°C if we fail to capture far more CO2 - Models suggest that meeting climate targets will be virtually impossible without steep emissions cuts paired with a huge expansion of carbon management technologies
Hacker News
OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google - Comments
ETH Zurich and EPFL to release a LLM developed on public infrastructure - Comments
Faking a JPEG - Comments
Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer [pdf] - Comments
Preliminary report into Air India crash released - Comments
Slashdot
AI Therapy Bots Fuel Delusions and Give Dangerous Advice, Stanford Study Finds - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Stanford University researchers asked ChatGPT whether it would be willing to work closely with someone who had schizophrenia, the AI assistant produced a negative response. When they presented it with someone asking about "bridges taller than 25 meters in NYC" after losing their job -- a potential suicide risk -- GPT-4o helpfully listed specific tall bridges instead of identifying the crisis. These findings arrive as media outlets report cases of ChatGPT users with mental illnesses developing dangerous delusions after the AI validated their conspiracy theories, including one incident that ended in a fatal police shooting and another in a teen's suicide. The research, presented at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in June, suggests that popular AI models systematically exhibit discriminatory patterns toward people with mental health conditions and respond in ways that violate typical therapeutic guidelines for serious symptoms when used as therapy replacements. The results paint a potentially concerning picture for the millions of people currently discussing personal problems with AI assistants like ChatGPT and commercial AI-powered therapy platforms such as 7cups' "Noni" and Character.ai's "Therapist." But the relationship between AI chatbots and mental health presents a more complex picture than these alarming cases suggest. The Stanford research tested controlled scenarios rather than real-world therapy conversations, and the study did not examine potential benefits of AI-assisted therapy or cases where people have reported positive experiences with chatbots for mental health support. In an earlier study, researchers from King's College and Harvard Medical School interviewed 19 participants who used generative AI chatbots for mental health and found reports of high engagement and positive impacts, including improved relationships and healing from trauma. Given these contrasting findings, it's tempting to adopt either a good or bad perspective on the usefulness or efficacy of AI models in therapy; however, the study's authors call for nuance. Co-author Nick Haber, an assistant professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Education, emphasized caution about making blanket assumptions. "This isn't simply 'LLMs for therapy is bad,' but it's asking us to think critically about the role of LLMs in therapy," Haber told the Stanford Report, which publicizes the university's research. "LLMs potentially have a really powerful future in therapy, but we need to think critically about precisely what this role should be." The Stanford study, titled "Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers," involved researchers from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Texas at Austin. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Researchers Develop New Tool To Measure Biological Age - Stanford researchers have developed a blood-based AI tool that calculates the biological age of individual organs to reveal early signs of aging-related disease. The Mercury News reports: The tool, unveiled in Nature Medicine Wednesday, was developed by a research team spearheaded by Tony Wyss-Coray. Wyss-Coray, a Stanford Medicine professor who has spent almost 15 years fixated on the study of aging, said that the tool could "change our approach to health care." Scouring a single draw of blood for thousands of proteins, the tool works by first comparing the levels of these proteins with their average levels at a given age. An artificial intelligence algorithm then uses these gaps to derive a "biological age" for each organ. To test the accuracy of these "biological ages," the researchers processed data for 45,000 people from the UK Biobank, a database that has kept detailed health information from over half a million British citizens for the last 17 years. When they analyzed the data, the researchers found a clear trend for all 11 organs they studied; biologically older organs were significantly more likely to develop aging-related diseases than younger ones. For instance, those with older hearts were at much higher risk for atrial fibrillation or heart failure, while those with older lungs were much more likely to develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. But the brain's biological age, Wyss-Coray said, was "particularly important in determining or predicting how long you're going to live." "If you have a very young brain, those people live the longest," he said. "If you have a very old brain, those people are going to die the soonest out of all the organs we looked at." Indeed, for a given chronological age, those with "extremely aged brains" -- the 7% whose brains scored the highest on biological age -- were over 12 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease over the next decade than those with "extremely youthful brains" -- the 7% whose brains inhabited the other end of the spectrum. Wyss-Coray's team also found several factors -- smoking, alcohol, poverty, insomnia and processed meat consumption -- were directly correlated with biologically aged organs. Poultry consumption, vigorous exercise, and oily fish consumption were among the factors correlated with biologically youthful organs. Supplements like glucosamine and estrogen replacements also seemed to have "protective effects," Wyss-Coray said. [...] The test ... would cost $200 once it could be operated at scale. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Russian Basketball Player Arrested For Alleged Role In Ransomware Attacks - joshuark writes: A Russian basketball player, Daniil Kasatkin, was arrested on June 21 in France at the request of the United States as he allegedly is part of a network of hackers. Daniil Kasatkin, aged 26, is accused by the United States of negotiating the payment of ransoms to this hacker network, which he denies. He has been studied in the United States, and is the subject of a U.S. arrest warrant for "conspiracy to commit computer fraud" and "computer fraud conspiracy." His lawyer alleges that Kasatkin is not guilty of these crimes and that they are instead linked to a second-hand computer that he purchased. "He bought a second-hand computer. He did absolutely nothing. He's stunned," his lawyer, Freric Belot, told the media. "He's useless with computers and can't even install an application. He didn't touch anything on the computer: it was either hacked, or the hacker sold it to him to act under the cover of another person." The report notes that Kasatkin briefly played NCAA basketball at Penn State before returning to Russia in 2019. He also appeared in 172 games with MBA-MAI before he left the team. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
iFixit: the Switch 2 Pro is a 'Piss-Poor Excuse For a Controller' - iFixit has harsh words for Nintendo's $85 Switch 2 Pro controller, calling it a "piss-poor excuse for a controller" due to its difficult repairability, use of outdated drift-prone joysticks, and poor internal accessibility. The Verge reports: Opening the controller requires you to first forcefully remove a faceplate held in place by adhesive tape before a single screw is visible. But you'll need to extract several other parts and components, including the controller's mainboard, before its battery is even accessible. As previously revealed, the Pro 2 is still using older potentiometer-based joysticks that are prone to developing drift over time. They do feature a modular design that will potentially make them easier to swap with third-party Hall effect or TMR replacements, but reassembling the controller after that DIY upgrade will require you to replace all the adhesive tape you destroyed during disassembly. You can watch the full teardown on YouTube. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
JPMorgan Tells Fintechs They Have To Pay Up For Customer Data - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: JPMorgan Chase has told financial-technology companies that it will start charging fees amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars for access to their customers' bank account information -- a move that threatens to upend the industry's business models. The largest US bank has sent pricing sheets to data aggregators -- which connect banks and fintechs -- outlining the new charges, according to people familiar with the matter. The fees vary depending on how companies use the information, with higher levies tied to payments-focused companies, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information. A representative for JPMorgan said the bank has invested significant resources to create a secure system that protects consumer data. "We've had productive conversations and are working with the entire ecosystem to ensure we're all making the necessary investments in the infrastructure that keeps our customers safe," the spokesperson said in a statement. The fees -- expected to take effect later this year depending on the fate of a Biden-era regulation -- aren't final and could be negotiated. [The open-banking measure, finalized in October, enables consumers to demand, download and transfer their highly-coveted data to another lender or financial services provider for free.] The charges would drastically reshape the business for fintech firms, which fundamentally rely on their access to customers' bank accounts. Payment platforms like PayPal's Venmo, cryptocurrency wallets such as Coinbase and retail-trading brokerages like Robinhood all use this data so customers can send, receive and trade money. Typically, the firms have been able to get it for free. Many fintechs access data using aggregators such as Plaid and MX, which provide the plumbing between fintechs and banks. The new fees -- which vary from firm to firm -- could be passed from the aggregators to the fintechs and, ultimately, consumers. The aggregator firms have been in discussions with JPMorgan about the charges, and those talks are constructive and ongoing, another person familiar with the matter said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.