FDA Reverses Decision and Agrees To Review Moderna’s Flu Vaccine
The Food and Drug Administration has reversed its decision on Moderna’s flu vaccine and has agreed to review it for possible approval, Moderna announced on Wednesday. From a report: Last week, the agency rejected Moderna’s application for review of a new flu vaccine, saying the company’s research design was flawed. But in subsequent discussions … ⌘ Read more
India Tells University To Leave AI Summit After Presenting Chinese Robot as Its Own
An anonymous reader shares a report: An Indian university has been asked to vacate its stall at the country’s flagship AI summit after a staff member was caught presenting a commercially available robotic dog made in China as its own creation, two government sources said.
“You need to meet Orion. This has been de … ⌘ Read more
Thousands of CEOs Just Admitted AI Had No Impact On Employment Or Productivity
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: In 1987, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow made a stark observation about the stalling evolution of the Information Age: Following the advent of transistors, microprocessors, integrated circuits, and memory chips of the 1960s, economists and companies expected t … ⌘ Read more
Single Dose of DMT Rapidly Reduces Symptoms of Major Depression
In a small double-blind clinical trial, a single intravenous dose of DMT produced rapid and clinically meaningful reductions in symptoms of major depressive disorder within a week, with effects lasting up to three months in some patients. “Unlike psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide ( LSD), whose effects can last for hours, intravenous DMT h … ⌘ Read more
Air Pollution Emerges As a Direct Risk Factor For Alzheimer’s Disease
Longtime Slashdot reader walterbyrd shares a report from ABC News: In a study of nearly 28 million older Americans, long-term exposure to fine particle air pollution raised the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. That link held even after researchers accounted for common conditions like high blood pressure, stroke and depression. Fine particl … ⌘ Read more
Bayer Agrees To $7.25 Billion Proposed Settlement Over Thousands of Roundup Cancer Lawsuits
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Agrochemical maker Bayer and attorneys for cancer patients announced a proposed $7.25 billion settlement Tuesday to resolve thousands of U.S. lawsuits alleging the company failed to warn people that its popular weedkiller Roundup coul … ⌘ Read more
Claude Sonnet 4.6 Model Brings ‘Much-Improved Coding Skills’, Upgraded Free Tier
Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 4.6, the first upgrade to its mid-tier AI model since version 4.5 arrived in September 2025. The new model features a “1M token context window” and delivers a “full upgrade of the model’s skills across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge wor … ⌘ Read more
Apple Is Reportedly Planning To Launch AI-Powered Glasses, a Pendant, and AirPods
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman (paywalled), Apple is reportedly developing AI-powered smart glasses, a wearable pendant, and camera-equipped AirPods that connect to the iPhone and use “visual context” to let Siri perform real-world actions. The Verge reports: Apple is reportedly aiming to start production … ⌘ Read more
Discord Rival Maxes Out Hosting Capacity As Players Flee Age-Verification Crackdown
Following backlash over Discord’s global rollout of strict age-verification checks, users are flocking to rival platform TeamSpeak and overwhelming its servers. According to PC Gamer, the Discord alternative said its hosting capacity has been maxed out in a number of regions including the U.S. From the report … ⌘ Read more
NPR’s Radio Host David Greene Says Google’s NotebookLM Tool Stole His Voice
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: David Greene had never heard of NotebookLM, Google’s buzzy artificial intelligence tool that spins up podcasts on demand, until a former colleague emailed him to ask if he’d lent it his voice. “So… I’m probably the 148th person to ask this, but did you license your … ⌘ Read more
Idea Raised For Nicer DRM Panic Screen Integration On Fedora Linux
A proposal within the Fedora Linux community suggests improving the kernel’s DRM Panic screen to a more user-friendly, BSOD-style experience. Phoronix reports: Open-source developer Jose Exposito proposed today a nicer experience for DRM Panic integration on Fedora. Rather than using DRM Panic with just the kernel log contents being encoded … ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.6 Released
Longtime Slashdot reader jrepin writes: KDE Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile too) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.6.
In this new major release, Spectacle can recognize texts from screenshots, a new on-screen keyboard and new login manager a … ⌘ Read more
Most VMware Users Still ‘Actively Reducing Their VMware Footprint,’ Survey Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: More than two years after Broadcom took over VMware, the virtualization company’s customers are still grappling with higher prices, uncertainty, and the challenges of reducing vendor lock-in. Today, CloudBolt Software released a report, “The Mass Exodus That Never … ⌘ Read more
US Lawyers Fire Up Privacy Class Action Accusing Lenovo of Bulk Data Transfers To China
A US law firm has accused Lenovo of violating Justice Department strictures about the bulk transfer of data to foreign adversaries, namely China. From a report: The case filed by Almeida Law Group on behalf of San Francisco-based “Spencer Christy, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situ … ⌘ Read more
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 … ⌘ Read more
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 ex … ⌘ Read more
There was an endless coming and going of sun, clouds and rain. Not to forget about the wind. I called it quits a bit earlier and went into the woods.
Towards the end I was completeley surrounded by rain curtains in all directions. This looked super cool. I thought I might make it home just in time without having to use my umbrella, but the rain clouds were way quicker than I anticipated. Just after the rain hit me, I met an acquaintance who just started his walk. The wind picked up hard and rain hammered down, mixed with snow. Holding the umbrella was a workout. Shortly after I returned, the rain stopped again.
I didn’t notice the kestrel sitting on the tree when I took the last photo. That was a nice surprise when I sorted through the nearly 300 pics.
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 … ⌘ Read more
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 … ⌘ Read more
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 accu … ⌘ Read more
Micron’s PCIe 6.0 SSD Hits Mass Production at 28 GB/s
Micron has begun mass production of the 9650 series, the industry’s first PCIe 6.0 SSD, capable of sequential read speeds up to 28 GB/s and random read performance of 5.5 million IOPS – roughly double the throughput of the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives available today.
The drive targets AI and data center workloads and ships in E1.S and E3.S form factors across two varia … ⌘ Read more
99% of Adults Over 40 Have Shoulder ‘Abnormalities’ on an MRI, Study Finds
Up to a third of people worldwide have shoulder pain; it’s one of the most common musculoskeletal complaints. But medical imaging might not reveal the problem – in fact, it could even cloud it. From a report: In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, 99 percent of adults over 40 were found to have at least one … ⌘ Read more
China Once Stole Foreign Ideas. Now It Wants To Protect Its Own
China’s courts are now handling more than 550,000 intellectual-property cases a year – making it the world’s most litigious country for IP disputes – as the nation’s own companies, once notorious for copying foreign designs and technology, find themselves on the defensive against a domestic counterfeiting epidemic fueled by excess factory capacity.
Th … ⌘ Read more
Mazda Finally Admits Its Infotainment System Is the Worst
Mazda, the automaker that for years defended its scroll-wheel infotainment system as a safer alternative to touchscreens, is abandoning the approach entirely in the 2026 CX-5 in favor of a 15.6-inch touchscreen and zero physical buttons.
The current lineup – the CX-50 Hybrid, CX-70 and CX-90 – still relies on a console-mounted scroll wheel and dedicated act … ⌘ Read more
‘Software Isn’t Dead, But Its Cosy Business Model Might Be’
The software industry’s decades-old habit of charging companies a flat fee for every employee who uses a product is running into a fundamental problem: AI agents don’t sit in chairs, and they don’t need licences.
As autonomous agents take on tasks that human workers once handled, the per-seat pricing model that made SaaS revenue so predictable is giving way t … ⌘ Read more
Valve’s Steam Deck OLED Will Be ‘Intermittently’ Out of Stock Because of the RAM Crisis
Valve has updated the Steam Deck website to say that the Steam Deck OLED may be out of stock “intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages.” From a report: The PC gaming handheld has been out of stock in the US and other parts of the world for a few days, and thanks to this update, we … ⌘ Read more
Sony Tech Can Identify Original Music in AI-Generated Songs
Sony Group has developed a technology that can identify the underlying music used in tunes generated by AI, making it possible for songwriters to seek compensation from AI developers if their music was used. From a report: Sony Group’s technology analyzes which musicians’ songs were used in learning and generating music. It can quantify the contri … ⌘ Read more
EU Parliament Blocks AI Features Over Cyber, Privacy Fears
An anonymous reader shares a report: The European Parliament has disabled AI features on the work devices of lawmakers and their staff over cybersecurity and data protection concerns, according to an internal email seen by POLITICO. The chamber emailed its members on Monday to say it had disabled “built-in artificial intelligence features” on corporate tablets … ⌘ Read more
Secondhand Laptop Market Goes ‘Mainstream’ Amid Memory Crunch
Sales of refurbished PCs are on the up amid shortages of key components, including memory chips, that are making brand new devices more expensive. From a report: Stats compiled by market watcher Context show sales of refurbished PCs via distribution climbed 7 percent in calendar Q4 across five of the biggest European markets – Italy, the UK, Germany, Spai … ⌘ Read more
The Music Industry Enters Its Less-Is-More Era
The music industry’s long romance with an ever-expanding catalog of songs appears to be souring, as streaming platforms and rights holders confront a daily deluge that now includes 60,000 wholly AI-generated tracks uploaded to Deezer alone – roughly 39% of the French service’s daily intake, a statistic the company shared during Grammys week last month.
Streaming services … ⌘ Read more
Samsung Ad Confirms Rumors of a Useful S26 ‘Privacy Display’
Samsung has all but confirmed that its upcoming Galaxy S26 will feature a built-in privacy display, releasing an ad that demonstrates a “Zero-peeking privacy” toggle capable of blacking out on-screen content for anyone peering over the user’s shoulder.
The underlying technology is reportedly Samsung Display’s Flex Magic Pixel OLED panel, first shown at MWC … ⌘ Read more
Western Digital is Sold Out of Hard Drives for 2026
Western Digital’s entire hard drive manufacturing capacity for calendar year 2026 is now fully spoken for, CEO Irving Tan disclosed during the company’s second-quarter earnings call, a stark sign of how aggressively hyperscalers are locking down storage supply to feed their AI infrastructure buildouts.
The company has firm purchase orders from its top seven customers … ⌘ Read more
Anthropic’s CEO Says AI and Software Engineers Are in ‘Centaur Phase’ - But It Won’t Last Long
Human software engineers and AI are currently in a “centaur phase” – a reference to the mythical half-human, half-horse creature, where the combination outperforms either working alone – but the window may be “very brief,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on a podcast. He drew on ches … ⌘ Read more
India’s Toxic Air Crisis Is Reaching a Breaking Point
New Delhi’s air quality index averaged 349 in December and 307 in January – levels the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies as hazardous – and the months-long smog season that forces more than 30 million residents to endure respiratory illness has this year sparked something new: public protest. Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at India Gate on November … ⌘ Read more
Instagram Boss Says 16 Hours of Daily Use Is Not Addiction
Instagram head Adam Mosseri told a Los Angeles courtroom last week that a teenager’s 16-hour single-day session on the platform was “problematic use” but not an addiction, a distinction he drew repeatedly during testimony in a landmark trial over social media’s harm to minors.
Mosseri, who has led Instagram for eight years, is the first high-profile tech ex … ⌘ Read more
KPMG Partner Fined Over Using AI To Pass AI Test
A partner at KPMG Australia has been fined $7,000 by the Big Four firm after using AI tools to cheat on an internal training course about using AI. From a report: The unnamed partner was forced to redo the test after uploading training materials into an AI platform to help answer questions on the use of the fast-evolving technology.
More than two dozen staff have been … ⌘ Read more
Ireland Launches World’s First Permanent Basic Income Scheme For Artists, Paying $385 a Week
Ireland has announced what it says is the world’s first permanent basic income program for artists, a scheme that will pay 2,000 selected artists $385 per week for three years, funded by an $21.66 million allocation from Budget 2026. The program follows a 2022 pilot – the Irish government’s first l … ⌘ Read more
New EU Rules To Stop the Destruction of Unsold Clothes and Shoes
The European Commission has adopted new measures under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) to prevent the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear. From a report: The rules will help cut waste, reduce environmental damage and create a level playing field for companies embracing sustainable business mod … ⌘ Read more
Pentagon Threatens Anthropic Punishment
An anonymous reader shares a report: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is “close” to cutting business ties with Anthropic and designating the AI company a “supply chain risk” – meaning anyone who wants to do business with the U.S. military has to cut ties with the company, a senior Pentagon official told Axios.
The senior official said: “It will be an enormous pain in the ass to disentangle, and … ⌘ Read more
Sony May Push Next PlayStation To 2028 or 2029 as AI-fueled Memory Chip Shortage Upends Plans
Sony is considering delaying the debut of its next PlayStation console to 2028 or even 2029 as a global shortage of memory chips – driven by the AI industry’s rapidly growing appetite for the same DRAM that goes into gaming hardware, smartphones, and laptops – squeezes supply and sends p … ⌘ Read more
Where’s The Evidence That AI Increases Productivity?
IT productivity researcher Erik Brynjolfsson writes in the Financial Times that he’s finally found evidence AI is impacting America’s economy. This week America’s Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a 403,000 drop in 2025’s payroll growth — while real GDP “remained robust, including a 3.7% growth rate in the fourth quarter.”
This decoupling — maintaining high output with sig … ⌘ Read more
‘I Tried Running Linux On an Apple Silicon Mac and Regretted It’
Installing Linux on a MacBook Air “turned out to be a very underwhelming experience,” according to the tech news site MakeUseOf:
The thing about Apple silicon Macs is that it’s not as simple as downloading an AArch64 ISO of your favorite distro and installing it. Yes, the M-series chips are ARM-based, but that doesn’t automatically make the whole … ⌘ Read more
Will Tech Giants Just Use AI Interactions to Create More Effective Ads?
Google never asked its users before adding AI Overviews to its search results and AI-generated email summaries to Gmail, notes the New York Times. And Meta didn’t ask before making “Meta AI” an unremovable part of its tool in Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.
“The insistence on AI everywhere — with little or no option to turn it off — r … ⌘ Read more
Ars Technica’s AI Reporter Apologizes For Mistakenly Publishing Fake AI-Generated Quotes
Sunday Ars Technica apologized for making Scott Shambaugh’s week a little weirder. Last week Shambaugh learned an AI agent published a “hit piece” about him after he’d rejected the AI agent’s pull request. (And that incident was covered by Ars Technica.)
But then Shambaugh realized their article att … ⌘ Read more
Rivian’s Stock Spikes 27% After Reporting $144 Million Profit in 2025
Rivian’s stock skyrocketed 27% Friday after the electric car maker “shocked the market with strong earnings results,” reports the Los Angeles Times, “proving itself an outlier in the EV market, which has been struggling with the end of government subsidies and cooling consumer excitement.”
They add that Rivian’s strong earnings results su … ⌘ Read more
India’s New Social Media Rules: Remove Unlawful Content in Three Hours, Detect Illegal AI Content Automatically
Bloomberg reports:
India tightened rules governing social media content and platforms, particularly targeting artificially generated and manipulated material, in a bid to crack down on the rapid spread of misinformation and deepfakes. The government on Tu … ⌘ Read more
Sam Bankman-Fried Requests New Trial in FTX Crypto Fraud Case
While serving his 25-year prison sentence, “convicted former cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried on Tuesday requested a new federal trial,” reports Courthouse News, “based on what he says is newly discovered evidence concerning his company’s solvency and its ability to repay all FTX customers for what prosecutors portrayed as the looting of $8 billio … ⌘ Read more
‘Babylon 5’ Episodes Start Appearing (Free) on YouTube
Cord Cutters News reports:
In a move that has delighted fans of classic science fiction, Warner Bros. Discovery has begun uploading full episodes of the iconic series Babylon 5 to YouTube, providing free access to the show just as it departs from the ad-supported streaming platform Tubi… Viewers noticed notifications on Tubi indicating that all five seasons w … ⌘ Read more
DNA Mutations Discovered In the Children of Chernobyl Workers
Researchers performed genome sequencing scans on 130 people whose fathers were Chernobyl cleanup workers. Comparing the scans to control groups, they found evidence for the first time for “a transgenerational effect” from the father’s prolonged exposure to low-dose ionizing radiation.
ScienceAlert reports:
Rather than picking out new DNA mutation … ⌘ Read more
Oldest Active Linux Distro Slackware Finally Releases Version 15.0
Created in 1993, Slackware is considered the oldest Linux distro that’s still actively maintained. And more than three decades later… there’s a new release! (And there’s also a Slackware Live Edition that can run from a DVD or USB stick…)
.
Slackware’s latest version was released way back in 2016, notes the blog It’s FOSS:
The major hi … ⌘ Read more