Latest News

Last updated 14 Mar, 05:37 PM

BBC News

We expect government help in a crisis. Will Reeves intervene on energy bills this time? - After Covid furlough and Truss’s bailout, can the UK expect another government crisis rescue, asks Laura Kuenssberg.

Harry and Meghan accuse royal author of 'deranged conspiracy' - Extracts from a new book about the Royals claim the Queen said Meghan had "brainwashed" Prince Harry.

Why do Glasgow's historic buildings keep catching fire? - The fire that devastated a building on Union Street is the latest in a series of blazes to strike the city's historic sites.

Claudia Winkleman's new chat show splits critics - Jeff Goldblum, Vanessa Williams, Jennifer Saunders and Tom Allen starred in the inaugural episode.

Hamas urges key ally Iran to halt attacks on Gulf states - The Palestinian group also affirms Tehran's right to defend itself from "aggression" by the US and Israel.

The Register

Inside the datacenter where the day starts with topping up cerebrospinal fluid - Biological computing is messy and gassy – It’s now cloudy, too At the start of the working day at Cortical Labs’ datacenter in Melbourne, Australia, technicians top up the resident computers with a liquid modelled on the cerebrospinal fluid that surrounds the human brain.…

Claude charts a new course with charts, of course - Conversations with Anthropic's models may now be accompanied by interactive apps Seeing is believing, or so it was said up until AI required questioning everything. But even when braced to resist the slop roulette of online interaction, pictures are worth a thousand tokens.…

GitHub infuriates students by removing some models from free Copilot plan - Coding education may become a bit more challenging, but the economics lesson is free You don't get what you don't pay for! Microsoft's GitHub is dialing back on expenses by removing several costly premium models from its free GitHub Copilot Student plan.…

AFRINIC accuses litigant of trying to ‘paralyse’ it - A 'web of litigation' The African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) has accused one its members of trying to "paralyse" the organization.…

'Are you freaking crazy?' Bot harasses woman, gets led away by cops - An incident in Macau A 70-year old woman in China loudly shouted at a robot to leave her alone, but the bot instead stood its ground and did a “raise the roof” move when the woman called it “freaking crazy.”…

New Scientist - Home

Why are we so obsessed with protein? A new book looks for answers - Samantha King and Gavin Weedon's new book Protein digs deep into the nutrient's role in our health. But can it tell you how much you should be eating? Alexandra Thompson explores

A smartphone app can help men last longer in bed - In a randomised trial, men who experience premature ejaculation benefitted from using an app to learn techniques for extending intercourse

Frailty sets in far earlier than you’d expect, but you can reverse it - We’re learning that frailty can quietly arrive decades before old age, with some people in their 30s or 40s unknowingly in a pre-frail state. There are surprising ways to stay strong – and it’s not all about weight training

Our extinct Australopithecus relatives may have had difficult births - Simulations of Australopithecus hominins’ anatomy suggest that when they gave birth, they may have exerted tremendous pressure on their pelvic floors, putting them at risk of tearing

The 3 things you need to know about passwords, from a security expert - There are a few simple things you can do to make your digital life much more secure, says cybersecurity expert Jake Moore - follow these tips to tighten up your passwords

Hacker News

What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable - Comments

Montana passes Right to Compute act (2025) - Comments

1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 - Comments

Baochip-1x: What it is, why I'm doing it now and how it came about - Comments

An Ode to Bzip - Comments

Slashdot

How a Species Evolved Fast Enough to Save Itself from Extinction - California saw its worst drought in 10,000 years between 2012 and 2015, remembers the Washington Post. And yet genetic analyses of California's scarlet monkeyflower "found that many rapidly evolved... allowing them to cope with water scarcity and rebound from decline." "The fact that certain organisms are able to adapt just because of genetics that are already present is a great source of hope," said Daniel Anstett, a plant biologist at Cornell University and lead author on a new study on the issue. "It's one more arrow in the quiver of different ways that populations might be able to survive the massive climate change we're inflicting on the planet." The recovery of [Sequoia National Park's] scarlet monkeyflowers offers rare, real-world evidence of what scientists call "evolutionary rescue," according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science. It suggests that some species may be able to evolve quickly enough to keep up with the accelerating consequences of human-caused warming — essentially saving themselves from extinction. This discovery could help people decide how to distribute limited conservation funds by pinpointing which species have enough genetic diversity to be resilient, ecologists Mark Urban and Laurinne Balstad, who were not involved in the study, wrote in a separate analysis published by Science. "The challenge going forward is to identify when evolutionary rescue is possible, when it is not, and how to rescue those species that cannot rescue themselves," Urban and Balstad wrote. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI's Productivity Boost? Just 16 Minutes Per Week, Claims Study - "A new study suggests the productivity boost from AI may be far smaller than executives claim," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli: According to research cited in Foxit's State of Document Intelligence report, while 89% of executives and 79% of end users say AI tools make them feel more productive, the actual time savings shrink dramatically once people account for reviewing and validating AI-generated output. The survey of 1,000 desk-based workers and 400 executives in the United States and United Kingdom found executives believe AI saves them about 4.6 hours per week, but they spend roughly 4 hours and 20 minutes verifying those results. End users reported a similar pattern, estimating 3.6 hours saved but 3 hours and 50 minutes spent reviewing AI work. Once that "verification burden" is factored in, executives gain just 16 minutes per week, while end users actually lose about 14 minutes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. State Bans on Lab-Grown Meats Challenged in Court - Last June Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said in a statement that Texans "have a God-given right to know what's on their plate, and for millions of Texans, it better come from a pasture, not a lab. It's plain cowboy logic that we must safeguard our real, authentic meat industry from synthetic alternatives." But California company Wildtype sells lab-grown salmon — and is suing Texas over its ban on cell-cultivated meat, the Austin Chronicle reported this week. The company's founder says lab-grown salmon eliminates the mercury, microplastic, and antibiotic contamination commonly found in seafood. And one chef in Austin, Texas says lab-grown salmon is "awesome" and "something new"-- at the only Texas restaurant that was serving it last summer: Just two months after the salmon hit the menu, Texas banned the sale of cell-cultivated meat... A lawsuit from Wildtype and one other FDA-approved cultivated meat company [argues] it's anti-capitalism and unconstitutional... This law "was not enacted to protect the health and safety of Texas consumers — indeed, it allows the continued distribution of cultivated meat to consumers so long as it is not sold. Instead, SB 261 was enacted to stifle the growth of the cultivated meat industry to protect Texas' conventional agricultural industry from innovative competition that is exclusively based outside of Texas...." [according to the lawsuit]. It was filed in September, immediately after the ban took effect, and cell-cultivated companies are awaiting judgment. That Texas ban would last two years, notes U.S. News and World Reports, adding that Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Nebraska have also passed bans, some temporary "on the manufacturing, sale or distribution of cell-cultured meat." Meanwhile, a new five-year moratorium on lab-grown meat was signed this week by the governor of South Dakota "after rejecting a permanent ban last month," reports South Dakota Searchlight: The new law bars the sale, manufacture or distribution of "cell-cultured protein" products from July 1 this year through June 30, 2031. Violations are punishable by up to 30 days in jail, a fine of up to $500, or both. "But supporters of lab-grown meat are not going down without a fight," adds U.S. News and World Reports, with another lawsuit also filed challenging a ban in Florida: When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the ban in Florida, he described it as "fighting back against the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals." He added that his administration "will save our beef." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta Plans Sweeping Layoffs As AI Costs Mount - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers. No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalized, the people said. Top executives have recently signaled the plans to other senior leaders at Meta and told them to begin planning how to pare back, two of the people said. If Meta settles on the 20% figure, the layoffs will be the company's most significant since a restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023 that it dubbed the "year of efficiency." It employed nearly 79,000 people as of December 31, according to its latest filing. The speculation follows a recent report from The New York Times claiming that Meta has delayed the release of its next major AI model after falling behind competing systems from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two Long-Lost Episodes of 'Doctor Who' Found - Longtime Slashdot reader tsuliga writes: Two new episodes of Doctor Who that were previously lost have been found. The original Doctor Who episodes were wiped or deleted by the BBC because they were not aware of the future use of re-runs of these shows. Ninety-five of the 253 episodes from the program's first six years are currently missing. How many more episodes are out there waiting to be rediscovered? "The main broadcasters in the UK in the 1960s, 70s, up to the 80s really, junked quite a lot of content," said Justin Smith, a cinema professor at England's De Montfort University and film archivist. "In some ways finding missing 'Doctor Whos' is the holy grail" of classic TV discoveries, Smith said. The two episodes were "The Nightmare Begins" and "Devil's Planet," both of which aired during the show's third series in 1965. It features William Hartnell as the Doctor in a story involving archvillains the Daleks -- pepperpot-shaped metal aggressors whose favorite word is "Exterminate!" Smith said that for fans of the show, "it's got it all, it really has. It is intergalactic, it's got some great performances. It stands up really, really well." Read more of this story at Slashdot.