Latest News

Last updated 17 Feb, 09:09 PM

BBC News

Police assessing Stansted Airport private flights over Epstein ties - Essex Police says it is assessing information in relation to private flights into and out of the airport.

Cabinet secretary frontrunner faced multiple bullying complaints - Claims emerge after the Cabinet Office said there was only one complaint about Antonia Romeo's conduct which was dismissed after an inquiry.

How Jesse Jackson paved way for Barack Obama - and helped change US - The US civil rights activist's influence spread from the churches of the Deep South to the White House.

'The search is soul-destroying': Young jobseekers on the struggle to find work - People aged between 16 and 24 are bearing the brunt of a weak employment market, figures show.

Dual nationals face scramble for British passports as new rules come into force - Entry requirements to the UK for dual nationals are being overhauled as part of sweeping changes to the immigration system.

The Register

AI gets all the good stuff, including Micron's speedy 28 GB/s PCIe 6.0 SSD - Consumers have a long wait ahead of them before they can bring that kind of performance home It's time for a new generation of faster flash storage, but not on your laptop or desktop. Micron's first PCIe 6.0 SSDs have entered mass production and promise eye-watering transfer rates of up to 28 GB/s. However, unless you're building flash storage arrays for AI, you won't have a use for them.…

AI bit barns grow climate emergency by turning up the gas - Companies talk renewables while firing up gas turbines as fast as they can Bit barns need a lot of power to operate and, as hyperscalers look for ways to generate it, they are adding more dirty energy in the form of new gas turbines. One estimate says that these new power sources could add another 44 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, equivalent to the annual emissions of 10 million private cars.…

Scientists show it's possible to solve problems in your dreams by playing the right sounds - Could the same method one day power sleep-time ads? It's like the movie Inception, but without Leonardo DiCaprio, unless you imagine him. Researchers used carefully timed sound cues to nudge dream content, and in some cases, boost next-morning problem solving. Could dreamtime product placement come next?…

React survey shows TanStack gains, doubts over server components - Not everyone's convinced React belongs on the server as well as in the browser Devographics has published its State of React survey, with over 3,700 developers speaking out about what they love and hate in the fractured React ecosystem.…

European Parliament bars lawmakers from using AI tools - Who knows where that helpful email summary is being generated? The European Parliament has reportedly turned off AI features on lawmakers' devices amid concerns about content going where it shouldn't.…

New Scientist - Home

The untold story of our remarkable hands and how they made us human - The evolution of human hands is one of the most important – and overlooked – stories of our origin. Now, new fossil evidence is revealing their pivotal role

Giant viruses may be more alive than we thought - A giant virus encodes part of the protein-making toolkit of cells that gives it greater control over its amoeba host, raising questions about how it evolved and how such beings relate to living organisms

Dream hacking helps people solve complex problems in their sleep - Hearing a sound while working on a complex puzzle, and then hearing it again during sleep, helped lucid dreamers better tackle the problem the next day

The mystery of nuclear 'magic numbers' has finally been resolved - A mathematical equivalent of a microscope with variable resolution has shed light on why some atoms are exceptionally stable, a riddle that has persisted in nuclear physics for decades

Psychedelic reduces depression symptoms after just one dose - The psychedelic DMT has been linked to improved mental health outcomes before, but now, scientists have shown it reduces depression symptoms more than a placebo when given alongside therapeutic support

Hacker News

Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway - Comments

Claude Sonnet 4.6 - Comments

Using go fix to modernize Go code - Comments

Gentoo on Codeberg - Comments

Meta to retire messenger desktop app and messenger.com in April 2026 - Comments

Slashdot

The Small English Town Swept Up in the Global AI Arms Race - Residents of Potters Bar, a small town just north of London, are trying to block what would be one of Europe's largest data centers from being built on 85 acres of rolling farmland that separates their community from the neighboring village of South Mimms. Multinational operator Equinix acquired the land last October after the local council granted planning permission in January 2025, and the company intends to break ground this year on a development it estimates will cost more than $5 billion. The UK government's decision to classify data centers as "critical national infrastructure" and a new "gray belt" land designation that loosens building restrictions on underperforming greenbelt parcels helped clear the path for approval -- even though objections from locals outweighed signatures of support by nearly two-to-one during the public consultation. A protest group of more than 1,000 residents has since appealed to a third-party ombudsman and the UK's Office of Environmental Protection, but has so far failed to overturn the decision. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's AI Chief Says All White-Collar Desk Work Will Be Automated Within 18 Months - Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman expects "human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks" from AI, and believes most work involving "sitting down at a computer" -- accounting, legal, marketing, project management -- will be fully automated within the next year or 18 months. He pointed to exponential growth in computational power and predicted that creating a new AI model will soon be as easy as "creating a podcast or writing a blog." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Britain Lost 14,000 Pubs, a Quarter, in 13 Years - Britain has lost more than 14,000 pubs since 2009, a decline from roughly 54,000 registered public houses and bars to under 40,000 by 2022, according to a new analysis of UK business register data by data analyst Lauren Leek. The North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands lost 25 to 30% of their stock; London saw the smallest decline. Leek trained a random forest model on 49,840 pubs and found spatial isolation -- how far a pub stood from its nearest neighbour -- was the single strongest predictor of closure. Median nearest-neighbour distance for surviving pubs is roughly 280 metres; for closed pubs, 640 metres. Each closure pushes remaining pubs further into isolation, a dynamic Leek calls a "spatial death spiral." Much of that isolation traces to ownership. Stonegate, Britain's largest pub company and a holding of PE firm TDR Capital, carries over $4 billion in debt from its 2019 leveraged acquisition of Ei Group. PE-backed and overseas-owned companies now control roughly a quarter to a third of all British pubs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A YouTuber's $3M Movie Nearly Beat Disney's $40M Thriller at the Box Office - Mark Fischbach, the YouTube creator known as Markiplier who has spent nearly 15 years building an audience of more than 38 million subscribers by playing indie-horror video games on camera, has pulled off something that most independent filmmakers never manage -- a self-financed, self-distributed debut feature that has grossed more than $30 million domestically against a $3 million budget. Iron Lung, a 127-minute sci-fi adaptation of a video game Fischbach wrote, directed, starred in, and edited himself, opened to $18.3 million in its first weekend and has since doubled that figure worldwide in just two weeks, nearly matching the $19.1 million debut of Send Help, a $40 million thriller from Disney-owned 20th Century Studios. Fischbach declined deals from traditional distributors and instead spent months booking theaters privately, encouraging fans to reserve tickets online; when prospective viewers found the film wasn't screening in their city, they called local cinemas to request it, eventually landing Iron Lung on more than 3,000 screens across North America -- all without a single paid media campaign. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blind Listening Test Finds Audiophiles Unable To Distinguish Copper Cable From a Banana or Wet Mud - An anonymous reader shares a report: A moderator on diyAudio set up an experiment to determine whether listeners could differentiate between audio run through pro audio copper wire, a banana, and wet mud. Spoiler alert: the results indicated that users were unable to accurately distinguish between these different 'interfaces.' Pano, the moderator who built the experiment, invited other members on the forum to listen to various sound clips with four different versions: one taken from the original CD file, with the three others recorded through 180cm of pro audio copper wire, via 20cm of wet mud, through 120cm of old microphone cable soldered to US pennies, and via a 13cm banana, and 120cm of the same setup as earlier. Initial test results showed that it's extremely difficult for listeners to correctly pick out which audio track used which wiring setup. "The amazing thing is how much alike these files sound. The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't," Pano said. "All of the re-recordings should be obvious, but they aren't." Read more of this story at Slashdot.