“As the use of artificial intelligence spreads across companies worldwide, it is relieving workers of tedious old chores but creating new ones,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “Most people don’t realize the amount of time that they’re spending working on the tools to get the time savings that they’re professing,” said Paul Leonardi, Duca Family professor of technology management at UC Santa...
Microsoft dropped “massive” updates for six stock Windows apps, reports the “Microsoft enthusiast” site Neowin. Here’s some of their more interesting highlights for Clock, Media Player, Calculator, Voice Recorder, Photos, and Paint: The Photos app (version 2026.11060.2004.0): AI watermarking — “AI-generated or edited images can now carry a visible Copilot watermark. You choose Never, Always,...
Geochronologists say Antrim coastline’s basalt columns developed over 5.5m years – 8m less than thought
For centuries, the tale has been passed from generation to generation: how the Irish giant Finn McCool built the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland to fight Benandonner, his Scottish rival, by hurling chunks of the Antrim coastline into the sea.
UK’s Members of Parliament (MP) were “looking for proof that smartphones and social media are rotting children’s brains,” writes The Register — but they got “a less satisfying answer from neuroscientists on Wednesday: nobody can really prove it.” Appearing before the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee this week, three researchers spent much of the session explaining that concern and...
Steven Spielberg grants that his 1977 UFO film Close Encounters was “speculative,” writes the Associated Press, but “Disclosure Day, he insists, is the real deal.””It’s my first film that will be considered science fiction that I do not consider to be science fiction,” Spielberg said in a recent interview. “It’s much more reflective of the world as it is evolving and discoveries that are being...
“A year after spending over $14 billion to bring in Alexandr Wang and a group of his top Scale AI engineers to revamp its artificial intelligence efforts, Meta is at least back on the map in AI,” reports CNBC, “though it’s still far behind OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in the market.”Wang’s big accomplishment was the delivery of the Muse Spark AI model in April, marking Meta’s first jump into...
Phoronix reports:The AMD R600 Gallium3D driver saw 59 commits [last] Sunday to Mesa 26.2. Making this code restructuring and code cleaning all the more notable is that the improvements to this old AMD Radeon graphics driver was done in part by GitHub Copilot. Gert Wollny has been among the few open-source developers left working on the AMD R600g driver that covers from the Radeon HD 2000 series...
America’s Energy Department “wants to build a single national platform for doing science with AI,” reports Communications of the ACM:It is called the Genesis Mission, and the idea is to connect the country’s 17 national laboratories, their supercomputers, scientific datasets, and a growing layer of AI models and agents into one system researchers can access. The DOE has taken to calling it ‘a...
“Blizzard Entertainment is continuing its crusade against private World of Warcraft servers,” reports the gaming news site Aftermath: The company filed a new lawsuit on Friday in a California court against the makers of Project Ascension, alleging copyright infringement, Digital Millennium Copyright Act violations, and other claims. Blizzard Entertainment claims that Project Ascension is a...
Leadership hopeful to also say tax revenues from new North Sea oil and gasfields should be used to cut energy bills
Wes Streeting’s pitch to be the next Labour leader will include a plan to increase high-skilled immigration to the UK, arguing that Donald Trump is telling scientists and AI experts they are not welcome in the US.
In a speech this coming week, the former health secretary will also...
The price of bitcoin dropped 13% down to $64,394 just in June — but there’s more bad news, reports CNBC.” “Bitcoin has lost nearly half its value since reaching a record high above $123,000 in July 2025.”While previous bitcoin selloffs were often followed by large rebounds in price, the latest decline may prompt some investors to revisit why they own bitcoin in the first place, [says Daniel...
Poolbeg Pharma to test the treatment in NHS hospitals and says it is also developing a GLP-1 weight loss pill
A London-based startup is about to trial a drug at six NHS hospitals that could stop people on cancer immunotherapy getting a life-threatening side-effect.
Poolbeg Pharma said its oral drug POLB 001 could make treatment for blood cancer safer by preventing cytokine release syndrome...
President Donald Trump says a secret mission moved 100 million barrels of oil through the blocked Strait of Hormuz. That number is impossible to verify.
A U.F.C. fight on President Trump’s birthday will now double as a capstone for Paramount’s successful effort to secure Justice Department approval for a mega media merger.