Latest News
Last updated 05 Feb, 08:55 PM
BBC News
Starmer apologises to Epstein victims for believing Mandelson's 'lies' - The PM says the depth of the pair's relationship was not known when he was appointed US ambassador.
Could this be the beginning of the end for Starmer? - Few Labour MPs are publicly calling for Sir Keir Starmer to go but this is very serious moment for the PM.
Man guilty of murdering girl, 9, playing in street - Lilia Valutyte was playing outside a shop in Boston, Lincolnshire, when she was stabbed to death.
Trump signals US support for Chagos handover deal - It comes after the US president suggested last month he could withdraw his support for the deal.
Louvre Museum crown left crushed but 'intact' after raid - The Paris museum issues the first pictures of the crown since the theft, saying it was left "badly deformed".
The Register
OpenAI chases business bucks with confusingly named Frontier platform - IPO, we’re halfway there: AI, livin’ on a prayer OpenAI, a maker of frontier models, has announced a platform called Frontier to help enterprises implement software agents. That's not confusing at all.…
Substack says intruder lifted emails, phone numbers in months-old breach - Contact details were accessed in an intrusion that went undetected for months, the blogging outfit says Newsletter platform Substack has admitted that an intruder swiped user contact details months before the company noticed, forcing it to warn writers and readers that their email addresses and other account metadata were accessed without permission.…
Asia-based government spies quietly broke into critical networks across 37 countries - And their toolkit includes a new, Linux kernel rootkit A state-aligned cyber group in Asia compromised government and critical infrastructure organizations across 37 countries in an ongoing espionage campaign, according to security researchers.…
Stash or splash? Lawmakers ask NASA to find alternatives for International Space Station - What about storing it in high orbit? US lawmakers have asked NASA to look into storing the International Space Station (ISS) in a higher orbit at the end of its operational life, instead of sending the structure hurtling into the ocean when the time comes.…
Anthropic apes OpenAI with cheeky chatbot commercials - The Claude maker wants you to know about ChatGPT’s ad plans AI companies are looking for new ways of burning cash other than by handing it to hyperscalers for model training. So now they're setting money on fire by buying Super Bowl ads that mock rivals.…
New Scientist - Home
Fast-charging quantum battery built inside a quantum computer - An experiment with superconducting qubits opens the door to determining whether quantum devices could be less energetically costly if they are powered by quantum batteries
Nasal spray could prevent infections from any flu strain - An antibody that has the power to neutralise any influenza strain could be widely administered in the form of a nasal spray if a flu pandemic emerges
Vegan toddlers can grow at the same rate as omnivores - Two-year-olds raised in vegan or vegetarian households don't necessarily have restricted growth, according to a study of 1.2 million children
How to live a meaningful life, according to science - The meaning of life has puzzled philosophers for millennia, but new research suggests it could be as simple as lending a helping hand
Why Elon Musk has misunderstood the point of Star Trek - As Elon Musk and Pete Hegseth talk about wanting to make Star Trek real, long-time fan Chanda Prescod-Weinstein says they've misconstrued the heart of the story
Hacker News
Claude Opus 4.6 - Comments
GPT-5.3-Codex - Comments
LinkedIn checks for 2953 browser extensions - Comments
We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler - Comments
Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions - Comments
Slashdot
Musk Predicts SpaceX Will Launch More AI Compute Per Year Than the Cumulative Total on Earth - Elon Musk told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe co-founder John Collison that space will become the most economically compelling location for AI data centers in less than 36 months, a prediction rooted not in some exotic technical breakthrough but in the basic math of electricity supply: chip output is growing exponentially, and electrical output outside China is essentially flat. Solar panels in orbit generate roughly five times the power they do on the ground because there is no day-night cycle, no cloud cover, no atmospheric loss, and no atmosphere-related energy reduction. The system economics are even more favorable because space-based operations eliminate the need for batteries entirely, making the effective cost roughly 10 times cheaper than terrestrial solar, Musk said. The terrestrial bottleneck is already real. Musk said powering 330,000 Nvidia GB300 chips -- once you account for networking hardware, storage, peak cooling on the hottest day of the year, and reserve margin for generator servicing -- requires roughly a gigawatt at the generation level. Gas turbines are sold out through 2030, and the limiting factor is the casting of turbine vanes and blades, a process handled by just three companies worldwide. Five years from now, Musk predicted, SpaceX will launch and operate more AI compute annually than the cumulative total on Earth, expecting at least a few hundred gigawatts per year in space. Patel estimated that 100 gigawatts alone would require on the order of 10,000 Starship launches per year, a figure Musk affirmed. SpaceX is gearing up for 10,000 launches a year, Musk said, and possibly 20,000 to 30,000. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Automattic and the Internet Archive Team Up To Fight Link Rot - Automattic and the Internet Archive have released a free, open-source WordPress plugin that automatically detects broken outbound links on a site and redirects visitors to archived Wayback Machine copies instead of serving them a 404 error. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer, which launched last fall and is available on WordPress.org, runs in the background scanning posts for dead links, checking for existing archived versions, and requesting new snapshots when none exist. It also archives a site's own posts whenever they are updated. If the original link comes back online, the plugin stops redirecting. Pew Research has found that 38% of the web has disappeared over the past decade, and WordPress powers more than 40% of websites online. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 4.6 as Its AI Tools Rattle Software Markets - Anthropic on Thursday released Claude Opus 4.6, its most capable model yet, at a moment when the company's AI tools have already spooked markets over fears that they are disrupting traditional software development and other sectors. The new model improves on Opus 4.5's coding abilities, the company said -- it plans more carefully, sustains longer agentic tasks, handles larger codebases more reliably, and catches its own mistakes through better debugging. It is also the first Opus-class model to feature a 1M token context window, currently in beta. On GDPval-AA, an independent benchmark measuring performance on knowledge-work tasks in finance, legal and other domains, Opus 4.6 outperformed OpenAI's GPT-5.2 by roughly 144 Elo points. Anthropic also introduced agent teams in Claude Code, allowing multiple agents to work in parallel on tasks like codebase reviews. Pricing remains at $5/$25 per million input/output tokens. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Western Digital Plots a Path To 140 TB Hard Drives Using Vertical Lasers and 14-Platter Designs - Western Digital this week laid out a roadmap that stretches its 3.5-inch hard drive platform to 14 platters and pairs it with a new vertical-emitting laser for heat-assisted magnetic recording, a combination the company says will push individual drive capacities beyond 140 TB in the 2030s. The vertical laser, developed over six years and already working in WD's labs, emits light straight down onto the disk rather than from the edge, delivering more thermal energy while occupying less vertical space -- enabling areal densities up to 10 TB per platter, up from today's 4 TB, and room for additional platters in the same enclosure. WD's first commercial HAMR drives arrive in late 2026 at 40-44 TB on an 11-platter design, ramping into volume production in 2027. A 12-platter platform follows in 2028 at 60 TB, and WD expects to hit 100 TB by around 2030. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Amazon Plans To Use AI To Speed Up TV and Film Production - Amazon plans to use AI to speed up the process for making movies and TV shows even as Hollywood fears that AI will cut jobs and permanently reshape the industry. From a report: At the Amazon MGM Studio, veteran entertainment executive Albert Cheng is leading a team charged with developing new AI tools that he said will cut costs and streamline the creative process. Amazon plans to launch a closed beta program in March, inviting industry partners to test its AI tools. The company expects to have results to share by May. [...] Amazon is leaning on its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, for help and plans to work with multiple large language model providers to give creators a wider array of options for pre- and post-production filmmaking. Read more of this story at Slashdot.