An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Production is now underway at Toyota’s new $13.9 billion battery plant in North Carolina, the company’s first outside Japan. After the first batteries rolled off the production line at its new facility in Liberty, North Carolina, on Wednesday, Toyota said today marks a “pivotal moment” in the company’s history. The facility is Toyota’s 11th...
At least one space launch has been put on hold, as satellite operators and rocket companies manage the effects of the current geomagnetic storm hitting Earth.
Slashdot readers Tablizer and fjo3 share news that an AI-generated country song has topped the U.S. sales chart for the first time this week. ABC News reports: The new country tune, “Walk my Walk” by Breaking Rust, recently hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, reaching over 3 million streams on Spotify in less than a month. That success has garnered mixed reactions from...
Waymo is rolling out robotaxi rides that use freeways across Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix for the first time — “a critical expansion for the company that it says will reduce ride times by up to 50%,” reports TechCrunch. From the report: That stat could help attract a whole new group of users who need to travel between the many towns and suburbs within the greater San Francisco Bay...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Anthropic announced plans Wednesday to spend $50 billion on a U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out, starting with custom data centers in Texas and New York. The facilities, which will be designed to support the company’s rapid enterprise growth and its long-term research agenda, will be developed in partnership with Fluidstack....
Data also shows an average of nearly 400 newly reported cases of antibiotic-resistant infections a week last year
The number of deaths linked to superbugs that do not respond to frontline antibiotics increased by 17% in England last year, according to official figures that raise concerns about the ongoing increase in antimicrobial resistance.
The figures, released by the UK Health Security...
Longtime Slashdot reader hadleyburg writes: For a user with an Android phone and who’s happy to stick within the Google ecosystem, an Android tablet might seem like the more obvious choice over an iPad. Of course, iPads are a lot more popular, and asking about Android tablets is likely to invite advice about sticking with what everyone else has. The Slashdot community on the other hand — being...
Valve is ready to rejoin the VR hardware race with the Steam Frame, a lightweight standalone SteamOS headset that can run games locally or stream wirelessly from a PC using new “foveated streaming” tech. It’s set to launch in early 2026. Ars Technica reports: Powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor with 16 GB of RAM, the Steam Frame sports a 2160 x 2160 resolution display per eye at an “up to...
The Department of Homeland Security collected data on Chicago residents accused of gang ties to test if police files could feed an FBI watchlist. Months passed before anyone noticed it wasn’t deleted.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI asked a federal judge in New York on Wednesday to reverse an order that required it to turn over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT chat logs amid a copyright infringement lawsuit by the New York Times and other news outlets, saying it would expose users’ private conversations. The artificial intelligence company argued that turning over the...
OpenAI today released GPT-5.1, an update to its flagship model line. The update includes two versions: GPT-5.1 Instant, which OpenAI says adds adaptive reasoning capabilities and improved instruction following, and GPT-5.1 Thinking, which adjusts its processing time based on query complexity. The Thinking model responds roughly twice as fast on simple tasks and twice as slow on complex problems...
The provision, tucked into the spending bill that could end the US government shutdown, would ban intoxicating hemp-derived THC products, including gummies and drinks.
Valve has unveiled a new Steam Machine console, taking a second shot at living room gaming a decade after its 2015 Steam Machine initiative failed. The 6-inch cube runs Linux-based SteamOS but plays Windows games through Proton, a compatibility layer built on Wine that translates Microsoft graphical APIs. Valve spent over a decade working on SteamOS and ways to run Windows games on Linux after...
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft employs various schemes to stop Edge users from switching to Chrome, and the latest includes financial rewards for sticking with the browser. As spotted by Windows Latest, select users who search on Bing within Microsoft Edge for a link to download Google Chrome are now shown an offer to stay with the browser. It gives users 1,300 Microsoft Rewards...
Anthropic believes AI models will increasingly reach into the physical world. To understand where things are headed, it asked Claude to program a quadruped.
The University of California, San Diego has documented a steep decline in the academic preparation of its entering freshmen over the past five years, according to a report [PDF] released this month by the campus’s Senate-Administration Working Group on Admissions. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below middle-school level increased nearly thirtyfold, from...
Apple said Wednesday that European Union developers pocketed the savings from mandated commission reductions rather than lowering prices for consumers. The iPhone maker commissioned Analysis Group to study pricing behavior [PDF] after the Digital Markets Act forced Apple to cut its App Store fees from up to 30% to an average of 20%. The research examined 41 million transactions across 21,000...