An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The heads of UK physics departments say their subject is facing a national crisis as one in four warns that their university departments are in danger of closing because of funding pressures. In an anonymous survey of department heads by the Institute of Physics (IoP), 26% said they faced potential ...

Paramount has acquired The Free Press, Bari Weiss's Substack-born media outlet, for $150 million and appointed Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. The move effectively places a conservative-leaning Substack writer at the helm of a legacy news network, following the FCC's approval of the Skydance-Paramount merger, which required CBS to feature a broader ...

AstraZeneca has licensed Algen Biotechnologies' AI-powered gene-editing platform, AlgenBrain, to develop immune-related therapies in a deal worth up to $555 million. Reuters reports: AstraZeneca will get exclusive rights to develop and sell approved therapies, if any, that target immune system-related disorders in exchange for upfront and milestone payments ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The Redis security team has released patches for a maximum severity vulnerability that could allow attackers to gain remote code execution on thousands of vulnerable instances. Redis (short for Remote Dictionary Server) is an open-source data structure store used in approximately 75% of cloud ...

California biotech entrepreneur and former magician Serhat Gumrukcu has been found guilty of orchestrating the 2018 murder of his business rival Gregory Davis, who had threatened to expose Gumrukcu's fraudulent dealings. He faces sentencing in November. SFGATE reports: Seven years ago, Turkish national Serhat Gumrukcu, 42, of Los Angeles, was negotiating a ...

Bloomberg reports (paywalled) that Apple's hardware chief John Ternus is the frontrunner to replace Tim Cook as CEO, as Cook nears retirement and prepares to transition into a board chairman role. The Economic Times reports: Cook is turning 65 next month. Chief operating officer John Williams -- once heir apparent -- has handed over the reins of day-to-day ...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: OpenAI is introducing a way to work with apps right inside ChatGPT. The idea is that, from within a conversation with the chatbot, you can essentially tag in apps to help you complete a task while ChatGPT offers context and advice. [...] Apps available inside ChatGPT starting today will include ...

Police arrested 33-year-old Joseph Mayuyo after a series of online threats forced TikTok to evacuate its Culver City headquarters. TechCrunch reports: A press release from the Culver City Police Department says that TikTok employees reported receiving multiple threats, across various social media platforms, from 33-year-old Hawthorne resident Joseph Mayuyo. ...

Porsche's wireless charging system will not be available on the Macan Electric and Taycan because the inductive charging plate cannot physically fit between the front suspension on those models. Dr. Maximilian Muller, Porsche's high voltage engineering lead, told The Drive during a visit to the company's Leipzig facility that the Cayenne Electric's larger ...

BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has revealed the codename for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS: Resolute Raccoon. The announcement came today on X through the official @ubuntu account, continuing the tradition of pairing an adjective with an animal for each release. As an LTS version, it will be supported for five years and serve as the foundation for servers, desktops, and ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Pay-advance apps are marketed as a way to help workers living paycheck to paycheck pay for unexpected expenses, but workers are often using the apps to manage basic expenses like groceries, rent and other needs, a new report found. The tools, consumer advocates say, can carry costs akin to those of traditional payday ...

Microsoft said in a statement Monday it remains committed to developing first-party Xbox consoles. The reassurance came after rumors circulated suggesting the gaming division might abandon hardware manufacturing. The speculation gained traction following a 50% price increase for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and retailers including Costco removing Xbox products ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Tucked in the foothills of Tennessee's Smoky Mountains is a factory that has figured out a way to manufacture in America that's cheaper, quicker and better. It's the home of a famous American writing implement: the Sharpie marker. Pen barrels whirl along automated assembly lines that rapidly fill them with ink. At least ...

An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Monday that ChatGPT has reached 800 million weekly active users, marking an increase of adoption among consumers, developers, enterprises, and governments. ChatGPT's impressive growth comes as OpenAI is on a race to secure as many AI chips and build as much AI infrastructure as possible. In ...

Deforestation is draining color from butterfly populations in Brazil. Researchers studying butterflies in the state of EspÃrito Santo found 31 species in natural forests but only 21 in eucalyptus plantations. The plantation communities were dominated by brown-colored species. Roberto GarcÃa-Roa, part of the research project, said the colors on butterfly ...

European labor regulations enacted nearly a century ago now impose costs on companies that discourage investment in disruptive technologies. An American firm shedding workers incurs costs equivalent to seven months of wages per employee. In Germany the figure reaches 31 months. In France it reaches 38 months. The expense extends beyond severance pay and ...

Deloitte will partially refund payment for an Australian government report that contained multiple errors after admitting it was partly produced by AI [non-paywalled source]. From a report: The Big Four accountancy and consultancy firm will repay the final instalment of its government contract after conceding that some footnotes and references it contained ...

Fortune tested the AI Friend necklace for two weeks and found it struggled to perform its basic function. The $129 pendant missed conversations entirely during the author's breakup call and could only offer vague questions about "fragments" when she tried to ask for advice. The device lagged seven to ten seconds behind her speech and frequently ...

OpenAI and AMD announced a multibillion-dollar partnership on Monday for AI data centers running on AMD processors. OpenAI committed to purchasing 6 gigawatts worth of AMD's MI450 chips starting next year through direct purchases or through its cloud computing partners. AMD chief Lisa Su said the deal will result in tens of billions of dollars in new ...

Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their discoveries about how the immune system regulates itself. The three researchers split 11 million Swedish kroner ($1.17 million). Their work identified regulatory T cells and the FOXP3 gene that controls them. Dr. Sakaguchi spent more ...

Vibe coding tools "are transforming the job experience for many tech workers," writes the Los Angeles Times. But Gartner analyst Philip Walsh said the research firm's position is that AI won't replace software engineers and will actually create a need for more. "There's so much software that isn't created today because we can't prioritize it," Walsh said. ...

Steve Jobs died 14 years ago. But the blog Cult of Mac remembers that "Jobs himself was not sentimental." When he left Apple in the mid-1980s, he didn't even clear out his office. That meant personal mementos like his first Apple stock certificate, which had hung on his office wall, got tossed in the trash. Shortly after returning to Apple in the late ...

The director of a tour operation remembers two tourists arriving in a rural town in Peru determined to hike alone in the mountains to a sacred canyon recommended by their AI chatbot. But the canyon didn't exists — and a high-altitude hike could be dangerous (especially where cellphone coverage is also spotty). They're part of a BBC report on travellers ...

If we could remove the 50 most concerning pieces of space debris in low-Earth orbit, there'd be a 50% reduction in the overall debris-generating potential, reports Ars Technica. That's according to Darren McKnight, lead author of a paper presented Friday at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney, which calculated the objects most likely to ...

"Recent attacks show that hackers keep using the same tricks to sneak bad code into popular software registries," writes long-time Slashdot reader selinux geek, suggesting that "the real problem is how these registries are built, making these attacks likely to keep happening." After all, npm wasn't the only software library hit by a supply chain attack, ...