Latest News
Last updated 19 Feb, 09:11 PM
BBC News
Epstein files could be just tip of the iceberg for Andrew investigation - It is likely we have only seen the tip of the iceberg compared to what the police have seen.
An unprecedented moment for the UK - and a former prince - Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is the first senior royal to be arrested in modern history.
Read King and police statements in full - King releases statement after Thames Valley Police says a man is in custody and officers are searching addresses in Berkshire and Norfolk.
What happens next after Andrew's arrest? - What we know about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office.
He told police his XL bullies were friendly – days later his mother-in-law was mauled to death - Ashley Warren is the first person in England and Wales to be prosecuted under XL bully laws.
The Register
NASA points fingers at Boeing and chaotic culture for Starliner debacle - Plenty of blame to go around, says Isaacman NASA has released the findings from its investigation of the ill-fated crewed Boeing Starliner mission of 2024, and while it still isn't sure of the root technical causes, it's admitted that trusting Boeing to do a thorough job appears to have been a mistake. …
Google germinates Gemini 3.1 Pro in ongoing AI model race - AI model said to show improved reasoning capabilities If you want an even better AI model, there could be reason to celebrate. Google, on Thursday, announced the release of Gemini 3.1 Pro, characterizing the model's arrival as "a step forward in core reasoning."…
Spending watchdog tells National Science Foundation CIO to up game on tech procurement - Wants SLAs, revamped contracts for cloud ops The US Congress’ spending watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, has pressed the National Science Foundation’s CIO to improve how the agency plans, manages, and procures technology.…
Crims hit a $20M jackpot via malware-stuffed ATMs - FBI warns these cyber-physical attacks are on the rise Thieves stole more than $20 million from compromised ATMs last year using a malware-assisted technique that the FBI says is on the uptick across the United States.…
Don't believe the hyperscalers! AI can't cure the climate crisis - From AI conflation to thin evidence, a new report calls many climate claims greenwashing Some AI advocates claim that bots hold the secret to mitigating climate change. But research shows that the reality is far different, as new datacenters cause power utilities to burn even more fossil fuels to meet their insatiable demand for energy.…
New Scientist - Home
New fossils may settle debate over mysterious sail-backed spinosaurs - Spinosaurs have sometimes been portrayed as swimmers or divers, but a new species of these dinosaurs bolsters the idea that they were more like gigantic herons
We’ve glimpsed before the big bang and it’s not what we expected - The big bang wasn’t the start of everything, but it has been impossible to see what came before. Now a new kind of cosmology is lifting the veil on the beginning of time
Atmospheric pollution caused by space junk could be a huge problem - After a Falcon 9 rocket stage burned up in the atmosphere, vaporised lithium and other metals drifted over Europe. This growing type of pollution could destroy ozone and form climate-warming clouds
Why it's high time we stopped anthropomorphising ants - We have long drawn parallels between ants and humans. Now we are comparing the insects to computers. It is time to stop using ants as analogues for ourselves and our machines, says Annalee Newitz
Is our galaxy’s black hole actually made of dark matter? - An exotic type of dark matter could explain some of the characteristics of our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, but many cosmologists are leery of the idea
Hacker News
Gemini 3.1 Pro - Comments
Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal - Comments
Micropayments as a reality check for news sites - Comments
Archaeologists find possible first direct evidence of Hannibal's war elephants - Comments
A terminal weather app with ASCII animations driven by real-time weather data - Comments
Slashdot
Microsoft's New 10,000-Year Data Storage Medium: Glass - Microsoft Research has published a paper in Nature detailing Project Silica, a working demonstration that uses femtosecond lasers to etch data into small slabs of glass at a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter and a maximum capacity of 4.84 terabytes per slab. The slabs themselves are 12 cm by 12 cm and just 2 mm thick, and Microsoft's accelerated aging experiments suggest the data etched into them would remain stable for over 10,000 years at room temperature, requiring zero energy to preserve. The system writes data by firing laser pulses lasting just 10^-15 seconds to create tiny features called voxels inside the glass, each capable of storing more than one bit, and reads it back using phase contrast microscopy paired with a convolutional neural network trained to interpret the images. Writing remains the main bottleneck -- four lasers operating simultaneously achieve 66 megabits per second, meaning a full slab would take over 150 hours to write, though the team believes adding more lasers is feasible. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Europe's Labor Laws Are Strangling Its Ability To Innovate, New Analysis Argues - A new essay in Works in Progress Magazine argues that Europe's failure to produce a Tesla or a Waymo stems not from insufficient research spending or high taxes -- problems California shares in abundance -- but from labor laws that make it devastatingly expensive for companies to unwind failed bets. According to estimates, corporate restructuring costs the equivalent of 31 months of salary per employee in Germany, 38 in France, and 62 in Spain, compared to seven in the United States. The downstream effects are visible across Europe's flagship industries. When Audi closed its Brussels factory after cancelling the E-Tron SUV in 2024, severance ran to $718 million -- over $235,000 per employee and more than the cost of writing off the plant's physical assets. Volkswagen spent $50 billion on its electric vehicle lineup, failed to develop competitive software internally, and ultimately paid up to $5 billion for access to American startup Rivian's technology. Between 2012 and 2016, 79% of all startup acquisitions tracked by Crunchbase took place in the US. The essay points to Denmark, Austria and Switzerland as countries that have found a middle path -- generous unemployment insurance and portable severance accounts that protect workers without penalizing employers for taking risks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bafta To Reward 'Human Creativity' as Film and TV Grapples With AI - Bafta has brought in "human achievement" as a guiding principle for its annual awards as the film and television industry grapples with the rapid adoption of AI tools in many parts of production. From a report: In an interview with the FT, Bafta chair Sara Putt, who is nearing the end of her three-year tenure, said artificial intelligence would change how people worked "but at the base of everything in this industry is human creativity." However, while AI has been banned in Bafta's performance awards -- meaning, for example, that AI-generated avatars cannot be put forward for leading actress or actor -- it is not prohibited in other categories. Putt said AI tools were increasingly useful in production but added: "We've actually added [human creativity] as a criteria this year... Those very human skills of communication and collaboration are not going anywhere anytime soon." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
LLM-Generated Passwords Look Strong but Crack in Hours, Researchers Find - AI security firm Irregular has found that passwords generated by major large language models -- Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini -- appear complex but follow predictable patterns that make them crackable in hours, even on decades-old hardware. When researchers prompted Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 fifty times in separate conversations, only 30 of the returned passwords were unique, and 18 of the duplicates were the exact same string. The estimated entropy of LLM-generated 16-character passwords came in around 20 to 27 bits, far below the 98 to 120 bits expected of truly random passwords. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A Half-Century of US Labor Data Shows Steady Retreat From Evening and Night Work - Despite the popular notion that the modern economy runs around the clock, a new NBER working paper analyzing fifty years of U.S. labor data from 1973 to 2023 finds that Americans have been steadily and consistently moving away from evening and night work toward traditional daytime hours [PDF]. The share of the workforce on the job at 11PM, for instance, fell by over 25% from its 1970s level. Economists Jeff Biddle and Daniel Hamermesh argue the primary driver is rising real incomes -- night work is essentially an inferior good that workers avoid as they earn more. The wage premium employers must pay for undesirable hours has grown by about three percentage points over the period. One sector bucked the trend: retail, where the rise of big-box chains, 24-hour Walmart supercenters and overnight distribution center restocking pushed more employees into late-night and early-morning shifts. The Covid-era surge in telework, rather than spreading work across the day, actually accelerated the concentration into prime hours -- especially among college-educated workers. France showed a similar pattern of daytime compression over 1966-2010, but the U.K. did not, likely because rapid de-unionization there eliminated the union wage premiums that had made night work comparatively attractive. Read more of this story at Slashdot.