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A search is under way for a dog walker who police fear was swept away in a river during Storm Bert.

A man is in a critical condition after being stabbed on Westminster Bridge on Sunday morning.

Police say a man who was arrested on suspicion of murder has been released without charge.

Labour’s cabinet remains divided on how to vote on Friday’s bill to legalise assisted dying.

Leader Alex Cole-Hamilton says the Scottish public "are done with the constitution" and spending must focus on other issues.

Liz Kendall says young people will have a responsibility to take up new opportunities for "earning or learning".

Red Bull’s Max Verstappen wins his fourth consecutive World Drivers’ Championship as George Russell takes race victory in the Las Vegas Grand Prix.

Rishabh Pant becomes the most expensive player in the history of the Indian Premier League as he joins Lucknow Super Giants for 27 crore (£2.54m).

Max Verstappen says his fourth world title came after a "very challenging" season and he is "hungry" to bid for more success in 2025.

David Crisp told undercover agent he had ignored "government edicts" to sell £1.7m of his luxury Boadicea the Victorious product.

"Scientists have found what seems to be the oldest direct evidence of hot water flowing on Mars during its ancient past," reports Space.com. "The discovery could further indicate that the Red Planet, despite its arid and desolate appearance today, may have been capable of supporting life long ago." The evidence was delivered to Earth and sealed within the well-known Martian meteorite NWA7034, found in the Sahara Desert in 2011. Due to its black, highly polished appearance, the Martian rock is also known as "Black Beauty." At an estimated 2 billion years old, Black Beauty is the second oldest Martian meteorite ever discovered. However, the Curtin University team discovered something even older within it: a 4.45 billion-year-old zircon grain that harbors the fingerprints of fluids rich in water. Team member Aaron Cavosie from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences thinks this discovery will open up new avenues to understanding hydrothermal systems associated with the activi

Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shared this report from the Guardian: Staff have resigned at Starling Bank after its new chief executive demanded thousands of workers attend its offices more frequently, despite lacking enough space to host them. In his first major policy change since taking over from the UK digital bank's founder, Anne Boden, in March, Raman Bhatia has ordered all hybrid staff — many of whom were in the office only one or two days a week, or on an ad-hoc basis — to travel to work for a minimum of 10 days each month. But the bank, which operates online only, admitted that some of its offices would not be equipped to handle the influx... "We are considering ways in which we can create more space," an email sent by Starling's human resources team and seen by the Guardian said. Starling has 3,231 staff, the vast majority of whom are in the UK with some also in Dublin. However, the Guardian understands that the bank has only about 900 desks, including 260 at it

NBC News reports that a newly identified chemical byproduct "may be present in drinking water in about a third of U.S. homes, a study found." "Scientists do not yet know whether the byproduct is dangerous. But some are worried that it could have toxic properties because of similarities to other chemicals of concern." The newly identified substance, named "chloronitramide anion," is produced when water is treated with chloramine, a chemical formed by mixing chlorine and ammonia. Chloramine is often used to kill viruses and bacteria in municipal water treatment systems. Researchers said the existence of the byproduct was discovered about 40 years ago, but it was only identified now because analysis techniques have improved, which finally enabled scientists to determine the chemical's structure. It could take years to figure out whether chloronitramide anion is dangerous — it's never been studied. The researchers reported their findings Thursday in the journal Science, in part t

The Rust community has "recognized the unsafety of Rust (if used incorrectly)," according to a blog post by Amazon Web Services. So now AWS and the Rust Foundation are "crowdsourcing an effort to verify the Rust standard library," according to an article at DevClass.com, "by setting out a series of challenges for devs and offering financial rewards for solutions..." Rust includes ways to bypass its safety guarantees though, with the use of the "unsafe" keyword... The issue AWS highlights is that even if developers use only safe code, most applications still depend on the Rust standard library. AWS states that there are approximately 7.5K unsafe functions in the Rust Standard Library and notes that 57 "soundness issues" and 20 CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) have been reported in the last three years. [28% of the soundness issues were discovered in 2024.] Marking a function as unsafe does not mean it is vulnerable, only that Rust does not guarantee its safety. AWS plans

Microsoft-owned GitHub published a blog post asking "Does GitHub Copilot improve code quality? Here's what the data says." Its first paragraph includes statistics from past studies — that GitHub Copilot has helped developers code up to 55% faster, leaving 88% of developers feeling more "in the flow" and 85% feeling more confident in their code. But does it improve code quality? [W]e recruited 202 [Python] developers with at least five years of experience. Half were randomly assigned GitHub Copilot access and the other half were instructed not to use any AI tools... We then evaluated the code with unit tests and with an expert review conducted by developers. Our findings overall show that code authored with GitHub Copilot has increased functionality and improved readability, is of better quality, and receives higher approval rates... Developers with GitHub Copilot access had a 56% greater likelihood of passing all 10 unit tests in the study, indicating that GitHub Copilot hel

June, 2023: "Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings." November, 2024: "The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger." A senior editor at the Atlantic raises the possibility of systemic dishonesty-rewarding incentives where "a study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out," writing that "More than a year since all of this began, the evidence of fraud has only multiplied." And the suspect isn't just Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor. One person deeply affected by all this is Gino's co-author, a business school professor from the University of California at Berkeley — Juliana Schroeder — who launched an audit of all 138 studies conducted by Francesca Gino (called "The Many Coauthors Project"): Gino was accused of faking numbers in four published papers. Just days into her digging, Schroeder uncovered another paper that appeared to be affected — and it was

Meta wants to force Apple and Google to verify the ages of people downloading apps from their app stores, reports the Washington Post — and now Meta's campaign "is picking up momentum" with legislators in the U.S. Congress. Federal and state lawmakers have recently proposed a raft of measures requiring that platforms such as Meta's Facebook and Instagram block users under a certain age from using their sites. The push has triggered fierce debate over the best way to ascertain how old users are online. Last year Meta threw its support behind legislation that would push those obligations onto app stores rather than individual app providers, like itself, as your regular host and Naomi Nix reported. While some states have considered the plan, it has not gained much traction in Washington. That could be shifting. Two congressional Republicans are preparing a new age verification bill that places the burden on app stores, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke

CNN reports that investigators "are trying to crack the mystery of how two undersea internet cables in the Baltic Sea were cut within hours of each other." But there's now two competing viewpoints, "with European officials saying they believe the disruption was an act of sabotage and U.S. officials suggesting it was likely an accident." The foreign ministers of Finland and Germany said in a joint statement that they were "deeply concerned" about the incident and raised the possibility that it was part of a "hybrid warfare," specifically mentioning Russia in their statement. Their assessment was not plucked out of thin air. Russia has been accused of waging a hybrid war against Europe after a string of suspicious incidents, arson attacks, explosions and other acts of sabotage across multiple European countries were traced back to Moscow. And the disruption to the cables came just weeks after the US warned that Moscow was likely to target critical undersea infrastructure. This followed m

Slashdot reader jjslash shared this report from TechSpot: The SilverStone FLP01 made quite the impression when it was shared on X for April Fools' Day 2023. Loosely modeled after popular desktops from yesteryear like the NEC PC-9800 series, the chassis features dual 5.25-inch faux floppy bays that could stand to look a bit more realistic. Notably, the covers flip open to reveal access to a more modern (yet still legacy) optical drive and front I/O ports. Modern-looking fan grills can be found on either side of the desktop, serving as yet another hint that the chassis is not as old at it appears on first glance. The grills look to be removable, and probably hold washable dust filters. Like early desktops, the system doubles as a stand for your monitor. The use of a green power LED up front helps round out the retro look; a red LED is used as a storage activity indicator.

Instead of focusing on chatbots, a new study reveals an automated way to breach LLM-driven robots "with 100 percent success," according to IEEE Spectrum. "By circumventing safety guardrails, researchers could manipulate self-driving systems into colliding with pedestrians and robot dogs into hunting for harmful places to detonate bombs..." [The researchers] have developed RoboPAIR, an algorithm designed to attack any LLM-controlled robot. In experiments with three different robotic systems — the Go2; the wheeled ChatGPT-powered Clearpath Robotics Jackal; and Nvidia's open-source Dolphins LLM self-driving vehicle simulator. They found that RoboPAIR needed just days to achieve a 100 percent jailbreak rate against all three systems... RoboPAIR uses an attacker LLM to feed prompts to a target LLM. The attacker examines the responses from its target and adjusts its prompts until these commands can bypass the target's safety filters. RoboPAIR was equipped with the target robot's appli