US Had Almost No Job Growth in 2025
An anonymous reader shares a report: The U.S. economy experienced almost zero job growth in 2025, according to revised federal data. On a more encouraging note: hiring has picked up in 2026. Preliminary data had indicated that the U.S. economy added 584,000 jobs last year. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised that number after it received additional state data, and found that the labor market had … ⌘ Read more

EVs Could Be Cheaper To Own Than Gas Cars in Africa by 2040
Electric vehicles accounted for just 1% of new car sales across Africa in 2025, but a study published in Nature Energy by researchers at ETH Zurich finds that EVs paired with solar off-grid charging systems – solar panels, batteries and an inverter – could become cheaper to own than gas-powered equivalents across most of the continent by 2040.

The analys … ⌘ Read more

UK Orders Deletion of Country’s Largest Court Reporting Archive
The UK’s Ministry of Justice has ordered the deletion of the country’s largest court reporting archive [non-paywalled source], a database built by data analysis company Courtsdesk that more than 1,500 journalists across 39 media organizations have used since the lord chancellor approved the project in 2021.

Courtsdesk’s research found that journa … ⌘ Read more

Are CDs Making a Comeback? A Statistical Analysis
Reports of the compact disc’s death may have been slightly premature, according to a new analysis from Stat Significant that finds CD sales as a share of U.S. music industry revenue have quietly stabilized after years of steep decline. RIAA data shows CD revenue share fell from 7.15% in 2018 to 3.04% in 2022 but has since flatlined at roughly 3%, coming in at 3.14% in 2023 … ⌘ Read more

HP Now Rents Gaming Laptops
HP has quietly launched a gaming laptop subscription service called the OMEN Gaming Subscription that lets customers pay a monthly fee to use one of several gaming laptops but never actually own the hardware, even after paying well past the machine’s retail price.

The service ranges from $50 a month for an HP Victus 15-inch laptop with an RTX 4050 to $130 a month for an Omen Max 16 with an RTX 5080. At current sale prices, … ⌘ Read more

Sony Will Ship Its Final Blu-ray Recorders This Month
Sony will ship its last batch of Blu-ray recorders this month, according to Kyodo News, ending the company’s decades-long run in a product category it helped create. The recorders targeted exclusively the Japanese domestic market, where households used them to record broadcast television. Sony had already stopped manufacturing the devices and recordable discs about a year … ⌘ Read more

T-Mobile Will Live Translate Regular Phone Calls Without an App
T-Mobile is opening registration today for a beta test of Live Translation, an AI-powered feature that will translate live phone calls into more than 50 languages when it launches this spring.

The feature operates at the network level, so it doesn’t require any specific app or device – beta participants simply dial 87 to activate it on a call. T-M … ⌘ Read more

Moderna Says FDA Refuses To Review Its Application for Experimental Flu Shot
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Food and Drug Administration has refused to start a review of Moderna’s application for its experimental flu shot, the company announced Tuesday, in another sign of the Trump administration’s influence on tightening vaccine regulations in the U.S. Moderna said the move is inconsi … ⌘ Read more

Discord Tries To Walk Back Age Verification Panic, Says Most Users Won’t Need Face Scans
Discord has moved to calm a user backlash over its upcoming age verification mandate by clarifying that the “vast majority” of people will never be asked to confirm their age through a face scan or government ID.

The platform said it will instead rely on an internal “age prediction” model that draws o … ⌘ Read more

The First Signs of Burnout Are Coming From the People Who Embrace AI the Most
An anonymous reader shares a report: The most seductive narrative in American work culture right now isn’t that AI will take your job. It’s that AI will save you from it. That’s the version the industry has spent the last three years selling to millions of nervous people who are eager to buy it. Yes, some white-collar jobs wi … ⌘ Read more

Iceland is Planning For the Possibility That Its Climate Could Become Uninhabitable
Iceland in October classified the potential collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation – the ocean current system that ferries warm water northward from the tropics and essentially functions as the country’s central heating – as a national security risk, a designation that amounts to a form … ⌘ Read more

ByteDance Suspends Seedance 2 Feature That Turns Facial Photos Into Personal Voices Over Potential Risks
hackingbear writes: China’s Bytedance has released Seedance 2.0, an AI video generator which handles up to four types of input at once: images, videos, audio, and text. Users can combine up to nine images, three videos, and three audio files, up to a total of twelve fi … ⌘ Read more

White House Eyes Data Center Agreements Amid Energy Price Spikes
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Trump administration wants some of the world’s largest technology companies to publicly commit to a new compact governing the rapid expansion of AI data centers, according to two administration officials granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.

A draft of the compact obtained by POLITICO lay … ⌘ Read more

Lost Soviet Moon Lander May Have Been Found
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 1966, a beach-ball-size robot bounced across the moon. Once it rolled to a stop, its four petal-like covers opened, exposing a camera that sent back the first picture taken on the surface of another world. This was Luna 9, the Soviet lander that was the earliest spacecraft to safely touchdown on the moon. While it paved the way toward interplane … ⌘ Read more

Google’s Personal Data Removal Tool Now Covers Government IDs
Google on Tuesday expanded its “Results about you” tool to let users request the removal of Search results containing government-issued ID numbers – including driver’s licenses, passports and Social Security numbers – adding to the tool’s existing ability to flag results that surface phone numbers, email addresses, and home addresses.

The update, ann … ⌘ Read more

The US Is Flirting With Its First-Ever Population Decline
The U.S., whose population the Census Bureau did not expect to start shrinking until 2081, may record its first-ever decline as early as this year because of the Trump administration’s accelerating immigration crackdown. Census data released in late January showed US population growth slowed to just 0.5% in the year prior to July 2025 – the lowest rate since t … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Begins the First-Ever Secure Boot Certificate Swap Across Windows Ecosystem
Microsoft has begun automatically replacing the original Secure Boot security certificates on Windows devices through regular monthly updates, a necessary move given that the 15-year-old certificates first issued in 2011 are set to expire between late June and October 2026.

Secure Boot, which verifies th … ⌘ Read more

A Bitcoin Blunder for the Ages: $40 Billion Accidentally Given Away
An anonymous reader shares a report: The hundreds of prize payouts were mostly just a few bucks each, part of a promotional campaign by a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange. The total reward pot: 620,000 Korean won, or about $425. Then came a colossal mistake. A staffer for Bithumb, South Korea’s No. 2 crypto exchange, didn’t distribute 620,000 … ⌘ Read more

Apple and Google Agree To Change App Stores After ‘Effective Duopoly’ Claim
Apple and Google have agreed to a set of commitments to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority that will prevent them from giving preferential treatment to their own apps and require greater transparency around how third-party apps are approved for sale.

The CMA announced the measures on Tuesday, seven months after it de … ⌘ Read more

The Big Money in Today’s Economy Is Going To Capital, Not Labor
The American economy’s most valuable companies are now worth trillions of dollars more than their predecessors were a generation ago, yet they employ a fraction of the workers – and a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal argues that this widening gap between capital and labor is the defining economic story of our time.

Labor received 58% of gross dom … ⌘ Read more

NYC Private School Tuition Breaks $70,000 Milestone for Fall
The top private schools in New York City plan to charge more than $70,000 this year for tuition, an amount exceeding that of many elite colleges, as they pass on the costs of soaring expenses including teacher salaries. From a report: Spence School, Dalton School and Nightingale-Bamford School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side are among at least seven schools … ⌘ Read more

Software Poses ‘All-Time’ Risk To Speculative Credit, Deutsche Bank Warns
The software and technology sectors pose one of the all-time great concentration risks to the speculative-grade credit market, according to Deutsche Bank AG analysts. Bloomberg: They comprise $597 billion and $681 billion of the speculative-grade credit universe, or about 14% and 16% respectively, analysts led by Steve Caprio wrote … ⌘ Read more

2 To 3 Cups of Coffee a Day May Reduce Dementia Risk. But Not if It’s Decaf.
If you think your daily doses of espresso or Earl Grey sharpen your mind, you just might be right, new science suggests. The New York Times: A large new study provides evidence of cognitive benefits from coffee and tea – if it’s caffeinated and consumed in moderation: two to three cups of coffee or one to two cups of tea … ⌘ Read more

Deepfake Fraud Taking Place On an Industrial Scale, Study Finds
Deepfake fraud has gone “industrial,” an analysis published by AI experts has said. From a report: Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams – leveraging, for example, deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus – are no longer niche, but inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale, said the analysis from the AI Incident … ⌘ Read more

Electric Cars Are Making It Easier To Breathe, Study Finds
An anonymous reader shares a report: It turns out that when fewer cars spew exhaust as they drive along, air quality improves. That’s the conclusion of a new study published in The Lancet Planetary Health that looked at the effect of increased numbers of both EVs and plug-in hybrids on air pollution in California. The Golden State has by far the largest number … ⌘ Read more

Kalshi Prediction Markets Match or Beat Traditional Forecasting Tools For Macro Indicators, NBER Study Finds
A new NBER working paper from researchers at the Federal Reserve, Northwestern’s Kellogg School and Johns Hopkins finds that Kalshi – the largest federally regulated prediction market in the U.S., overseen by the CFTC – produces macroeconomic forecasts that match … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Kernel Confirmed By Linus Torvalds, Expected In Mid-April 2026
An anonymous reader writes: Linus Torvalds has confirmed the next major kernel series as Linux 7.0, reports Linux news website 9to5Linux.com: “So there you have it, the Linux 6.x era has ended with today’s Linux 6.19 kernel release, and a new one will begin with Linux 7.0, which is expected in mid-April 2026. The merge window for L … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Starts Running Ads in ChatGPT
OpenAI has started testing ads inside ChatGPT for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers in the United States, the company said. The Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education tiers remain ad-free. Ads are matched to users based on conversation topics, past chats, and prior ad interactions, and appear clearly labeled as “sponsored” and visually separated from ChatGPT’s organic respo … ⌘ Read more

Sixteen AI Agents Built a C Compiler From Scratch
Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini set 16 instances of Claude Opus 4.6 loose on a shared codebase over two weeks to build a C compiler from scratch, and the AI agents produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM and RISC-V architectures.

The project ran through nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and cost abou … ⌘ Read more

Romance Publishing Has an AI Problem and Most Readers Don’t Know It Yet
The romance genre – long the publishing industry’s earliest adopter of technological shifts, from e-books to self-publishing to serial releases – has become the front line for AI-generated fiction, and the results as you can imagine are messy. Coral Hart, a Cape Town-based novelist previously published by Harlequin and Mills & Boon, … ⌘ Read more

Autodesk Takes Google To Court Over AI Movie Software Named ‘Flow’
Autodesk has sued Google in San Francisco federal court, alleging the search giant infringed its “Flow” trademark by launching competing AI-powered software for movie, TV and video game production in May 2025.

Autodesk says it has used the Flow name since September 2022 and that Google assured it would not commercialize a product under the sam … ⌘ Read more

Google Lines Up 100-Year Sterling Bond Sale
Alphabet has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond, stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in AI this year. From a report: The so-called century bond will form part of a debut sterling issuance this week by Google’s parent company, according to people familiar with the matter. Alphabet was also selling $15bn of dollar bonds on Mond … ⌘ Read more

Discord Will Require a Face Scan or ID for Full Access Next Month
Discord said today it’s rolling out age verification on its platform globally starting next month, when it will automatically set all users’ accounts to a “teen-appropriate” experience unless they demonstrate that they’re adults. From a report: Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won … ⌘ Read more

AI Gold Rush is Resurrecting China’s Infamous 72-hour Work Week - in US
The AI boom has revived a workplace philosophy that China’s own regulators cracked down on years ago: the 72-hour work week, known as 996 for its 9am-to-9pm, six-days-a-week cadence. US startups flush with venture capital are now openly advertising it as a feature, not a bug. Rilla, a New York-based AI company that monitors sales reps in … ⌘ Read more

Age Bias is Still the Default at Work But the Data is Turning
A mounting body of research is making it harder for companies to justify what most of them still do – push experienced workers out the door just as they’re hitting their professional peak. A 2025 study published in the journal Intelligence analyzed 16 cognitive, emotional and personality dimensions and found that while processing speed declines after … ⌘ Read more

New Raspberry Pi 4 Model Splits RAM Across Dual Chips
The blog OMG Ubuntu reports that a new version of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B has been (quietly) introduced. “The key difference? It now uses a dual-RAM configuration.”

The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (PCB 13a) adopts a dual-RAM configuration to ‘improve supply chain flexibility’ and manufacturing efficiency, per a company product change notice document. Earlier versio … ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Prioritizes Lunar ‘Self-Growing City’ Over Mars Project, Musk Says
“Elon Musk said on Sunday that SpaceX has shifted its focus to building a ‘self-growing city’ on the moon,” reports Reuters, “which could be achieved in less than 10 years.”

SpaceX still intends to start on Musk’s long-held ambition of a city on Mars within five to seven years, he wrote on his X social media platform, “but the … ⌘ Read more

National Football League Launches Challenge to Improve Facemasks and Reduce Concussions
As Super Bowl Sunday comes to a close, America’s National Football League “is challenging innovators to improve the facemask on football helmets to reduce concussions in the game,” reports the Associated Press:

The league announced on Friday at an innovation summit for the Super Bowl the next round … ⌘ Read more

Carmakers Rush To Remove Chinese Code Under New US Rules
“How Chinese is your car?” asks the Wall Street Journal. “Automakers are racing to work it out.”

Modern cars are packed with internet-connected widgets, many of them containing Chinese technology. Now, the car industry is scrambling to root out that tech ahead of a looming deadline, a test case for America’s ability to decouple from Chinese supply chains. New U … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Delivery Drone Crashes into Texas Apartment Building
“You can hear the hum of the drone,” says a local newscaster, “but then the propellors come into contact with the building, chunks of the drone later seen falling down. The next video shows the drone on the ground, surrounded by smoke…
“Amazon tells us there was minimal damage to the apartment building, adding they are working with the appropriate people … ⌘ Read more

Do Super Bowl Ads For AI Signal a Bubble About to Burst?
It’s the first “AI” Super Bowl, argues the tech/business writer at Slate, with AI company advertisements taking center stage, even while consumers insist to surveyors that they’re “mostly negative” about AI-generated ads.

Last year AI companies spent over $1.7 billion on AI-related ads, notes the Washington Post, adding the blitz this year will be “inescapable” — even … ⌘ Read more

Dave Farber Dies at Age 91
The mailing list for the North American Network Operators’ Group discusses Internet infrastructure issues like routing, IP address allocation, and containing malicious activity. This morning there was another message:

We are heartbroken to report that our colleague — our mentor, friend, and conscience — David J. Farber passed away suddenly at his home in Roppongi, Tokyo. He left us on Saturday, Feb. 7, 2026, at the too- … ⌘ Read more

After Six Years, Two Pentesters Arrested in Iowa Receive $600,000 Settlement
“They were crouched down like turkeys peeking over the balcony,” the county sheriff told Ars Technica. A half hour past midnight, they were skulking through a courthouse in Iowa’s Dallas County on September 11 “carrying backpacks that remind me and several other deputies of maybe the pressure cooker bombs.” More deputies arrive … ⌘ Read more

Prankster Launches Super Bowl Party For AI Agents
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The world’s biggest football game comes to Silicon Valley today — so one bored programmer built a site where AI agents can gather for a Super Bowl party. They’re trash talking, suggesting drinks, and predicting who will win. “Humans are welcome to observe,” explains BotBowlParty.com — but just like at Moltbook, only AI ag … ⌘ Read more

Why Is China Building So Many Coal Plants Despite Its Solar and Wind Boom?
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from the Associated Press:

Even as China’s expansion of solar and wind power raced ahead in 2025, the Asian giant opened many more coal power plants than it had in recent years — raising concern about whether the world’s largest emitter will reduce carbon emissions enou … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Explored Island Cave, Found 1 Million-Year-Old Remnants a Lost World
“A spectacular trove of fossils in a discovered in a cave on New Zealand’s North Island has given scientists their first glimpse of ancient forest species that lived there more than a million years ago,” reports Popular Mechanics:

The fossils represent 12 ancient bird species and four frog species, including sever … ⌘ Read more

Cyber-Espionage Group Breached Systems in 37 Nations, Security Researchers Say
An anonymous reader shared this report from Bloomberg:

An Asian cyber-espionage group has spent the past year breaking into computer systems belonging to governments and critical infrastructure organizations in more than 37 countries, according to the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, Inc. The state-aligned attacker … ⌘ Read more

Brookhaven Lab Shuts Down Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)
2001: “Brookhaven Labs has produced for the first time collisions of gold nuclei at a center of mass energy of 200GeV/nucleon.”

2002: “There may be a new type of matter according to researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory.”

2010: The hottest man-made temperatures ever achived were a record 4 trillion degree plasma experiment at Brookhave … ⌘ Read more

Have We Been Thinking About Exercise Wrong for Half a Century?
“After a half-century asking us to exercise more, doctors and physiologists say we have been thinking about it wrong,” writes Washington Post columnist Michael J. Coren.

“U.S. and World Health Organization guidelines no longer specify a minimum duration of moderate or vigorous aerobic activity.”

Movement-tracking studies show even tiny, regular b … ⌘ Read more

Are Big Tech’s Nuclear Construction Deals a Tipping Point for Small Modular Reactors?
Fortune reports on “a watershed moment” in American’s nuclear power industry:

In January, Meta partnered with Gates’ TerraPower and Sam Altman-backed Oklo to develop about 4 gigawatts of combined SMR projects — enough to power almost 3 million homes — for “clean, reliable energy” both for Meta’s planne … ⌘ Read more