An anonymous reader shares a report: The prospect of Britain realigning its financial rules with the European Union has passed, and the country should avoid linking its regulations to any single jurisdiction, the ambassador for London's financial services sector told Reuters. Nearly a decade after Brexit, newly appointed Lady Mayor of London Susan Langley said that while maintaining dialogue with the EU remained important -- particularly on defence -- Britain should work with all nations that share its values and respect the rule of law. "We've still got huge alignment with Europe, cash flows between us are huge... Would we ever go back in terms of regulation? I think we've moved away from that," she said.

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A new study from Cornell and University of Toronto researchers has found that polyester microfibers shed from synthetic clothing during laundry can interfere with cherry tomato plant development [non-paywalled source] when these particles accumulate in agricultural soil. Plants grown in contaminated soil were 11% less likely to emerge, grew smaller and took several days longer to flower and ripen. Household laundry is a leading source of this contamination. Treated sewage sludge retains roughly 90% of microfibers from washers, and farmers in some countries apply this material to up to 75% of cropland as fertilizer. Some scientists have questioned the methodology. Willie Peijnenburg, a professor of environmental toxicology at Leiden University, told WaPo the microfiber concentration used was much higher than field observations. His research suggests plants primarily absorb microplastics through airborne particles entering leaf stomata rather than through soil.

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A researchers' propensity for risky projects is passed down to their doctoral students -- and stays with trainees after they leave the laboratory, according to an analysis of thousands of current and former PhD students and their mentors. From a report: Science involves taking risks, and some of the most impactful discoveries require taking big bets. However, scientists and policymakers have raised concerns that the current academic system's emphasis on short-term outcomes encourages researchers to play it safe. Studies have shown, for example, that risky research is less likely to be funded. Anders Brostrom, an economist studying science policy at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and his colleagues decided to examine the role of doctoral education in shaping risk-related behaviour -- an area that Brostrom says has been largely overlooked. "We often focus on thinking about how we can change the funding systems to make it more likely for people to take risks, but that's not the only lever we have," says Chiara Franzoni, an economist at the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy. This study is "refreshing" because "we've discussed policy interventions a lot, but we haven't discussed training," she adds. [...] The team found that students' risk-taking dispositions matched those of their supervisors. This link was stronger when students and their supervisors communicated frequently, and weaker when students were also mentored by scientists outside their lab.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A hit song has been excluded from Sweden's official chart after it emerged the "artist" behind it was an AI creation. I Know, You're Not Mine -- or Jag Vet, Du Ar Inte Min in Swedish -- by a singer called Jacub has been a streaming success in Sweden, topping the Spotify rankings. However, the Swedish music trade body has excluded the song from the official chart after learning it was AI-generated. "Jacub's track has been excluded from Sweden's official chart, Sverigetopplistan, which is compiled by IFPI Sweden. While the song appears on Spotify's own charts, it does not qualify for inclusion on the official chart under the current rules," said an IFPI Sweden spokesperson. Ludvig Werber, IFPI Sweden's chief executive, said: "Our rule is that if it is a song that is mainly AI-generated, it does not have the right to be on the top list."

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OpenAI said Friday that it will begin testing ads on ChatGPT in the coming weeks, as the $500 billion startup seeks new revenue streams to fund its continued expansion and compete against rivals Google and Anthropic. The company had previously resisted embedding ads into its chatbot, citing concerns that doing so could undermine the trustworthiness and objectivity of responses. The ads will appear at the bottom of ChatGPT answers on the free tier and the $8-per-month ChatGPT Go subscription in the U.S., showing only when relevant to the user's query. Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions will remain ad-free. OpenAI expects to generate "low billions" of dollars from advertising in 2026, FT reported, and more in subsequent years. The revenue is intended to help fund roughly $1.4 trillion in computing commitments over the next decade. The company said it will not show ads to users under 18 or near sensitive topics like health, mental health, or politics.

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Seattle was late to the light rail party -- the city rejected transit ballot measures in 1968 and 1971, missing out on federal funding that built Atlanta's MARTA, and didn't approve a plan including rail until 1996 -- but the Pacific Northwest city is now in the middle of a multibillion-dollar building boom that has produced the highest post-pandemic ridership recovery of any US light rail system. The Link system opened its first line in 2009, funded largely by voter-approved tax measures from 2008 and 2016. The north-south 1 Line now stretches 41 miles after a $3 billion extension to Lynnwood opened in June 2025 and a $2.5 billion leg to Federal Way debuted in December. Ridership is up 24% since 2019, and 3.4 million people rode Link trains in October 2025. Test trains have been running since September across the I-90 floating bridge over Lake Washington -- what Sound Transit claims is the world's first light rail on a floating structure -- preparing for a May 31 opening. The Crosslake Connection is part of the 2 Line, a 14-mile, $3.7 billion extension voters approved in 2008 that was originally slated to open in 2020. The expansion hasn't come without problems. Sound Transit faces a roughly $30 billion budget shortfall, and a planned Ballard extension has ballooned to $22 billion, double original estimates.

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Verizon is offering affected customers a $20 account credit following a nationwide network outage on Wednesday that left users across the US unable to connect, forcing phones into SOS mode for roughly ten hours before the carrier restored service around 10:15PM ET. Customers will receive a text message when the credit becomes available and can redeem it through the myVerizon app by clicking "Take action."

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said this week that his company's software engineering headcount has remained "mostly flat" over the past year as internal AI tools have delivered substantial productivity gains. Speaking on TBPN, Benioff said he has about 15,000 engineers who are "more productive than ever." The company has redirected its hiring efforts toward sales and customer engagement roles, hiring 20% more account executives this year as it pushes its Agentforce agentic AI service. Human salespeople remain essential for explaining the "intricacies and nuances" of agentic AI to skeptical enterprise customers, he argued. Other parts of the business have seen deeper cuts. In a separate appearance on The Logan Bartlett Show, Benioff said that Salesforce had reduced its customer support workforce by roughly 50%.

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AI still can't produce code as well as most junior programmers he's worked with, David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of 37 Signals, said on a recent podcast [video link], which is why he continues to write most of his code by hand. Hansson compared AI's current coding capabilities to "a flickering light bulb" -- total darkness punctuated by moments of clarity before going pitch black again. At his company, humans wrote 95% of the code for Fizzy, 37 Signals' Kanban-inspired organization product, he said. The team experimented with AI-powered features, but those ended up on the cutting room floor. "I'm not feeling that we're falling behind at 37 Signals in terms of our ability to produce, in terms of our ability to launch things or improve the products," Hansson said. Hansson said he remains skeptical of claims that businesses can fire half their programmers and still move faster. Despite his measured skepticism, Hansson said he marvels at the scale of bets the U.S. economy is placing on AI reaching AGI. "The entire American economy right now is one big bet that that's going to happen," he said.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: China is pulling the plug on a key advantage held by high-frequency traders, removing servers dedicated to those firms out of local exchanges' data centers, according to people familiar with the matter. Commodities futures exchanges in Shanghai and Guangzhou are among those that have ordered local brokers to shift servers for their clients out of data centers run by the bourses, according to the people, who said the move was led by regulators. The change doesn't only affect high-frequency firms but they are likely to feel the biggest impact. The Shanghai Futures Exchange has told brokers they need to get equipment for high-speed clients out by the end of next month, while other clients need to do so by April 30, the people said. The clampdown will hit China's army of domestic high-frequency firms but will also impact a swathe of global firms that are active in the country. Citadel Securities, Jane Street Group and Jump Trading are among the foreign firms whose access to servers is being affected, the people said, asking not to be named as the matter is private.

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Tom's Hardware: Extensive research into the pricing of some of the best hard drives on the market for large capacity, economical storage indicates that prices are beginning to increase sharply, with some of the most popular models on the market seeing increases upwards of 60%. According to research from ComputerBase, pricing analysis on 12 of the most popular mainstream drives on the market indicates an average price increase of 46% over the last 4 months. While the research and price checks on these drives track movement based on European prices (ComputerBase is a German outlet), Tom's Hardware checks on similar or identical SKUs in the U.S. indicate that the trends are indeed replicated, or perhaps worse, on the other side of the pond. CB reports that various drives like Seagate's IronWolf NAS line, Toshiba's Cloud Scale Capacity Drives, Western Digital's WD Red, and Seagate's BarraCuda lines are all showing price increases of between 23% and 66%. As noted, the average price increases clock in at 46% since September 2025.

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theodp writes: Code.org, the nonprofit backed by AI giants Microsoft, Google and Amazon and whose Hour of AI and free AI curriculum aim to make world's K-12 schoolchildren AI literate, points job seekers to its AI Use Policy in Hiring, which promises dire consequences for those who use AI during interviews or take home assignments without its OK. Explaining "What's Not Okay," Code.org writes: "While we support thoughtful use of AI, certain uses undermine fairness and honesty in the hiring process. We ask that candidates do not [...] use AI during interviews and take-home assignments without explicit consent from the interview team. Such use goes against our values of integrity and transparency and will result in disqualification from the hiring process." Interestingly, Code.org CEO Partovi last year faced some blowback from educators over his LinkedIn post that painted schools that police AI use by students as dinosaurs. Partovi wrote, "Schools of the past define AI use as 'cheating.' Schools of the future define AI skills as the new literacy. Every desk-job employer is looking to hire workers who are adept at AI. Employers want the students who are best at this new form of 'cheating.'"

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The National Transportation Safety Board said in a report this week that a UPS cargo plane that crashed in Louisville, Ky., last year, killing 15, had a structural flaw that the manufacturer Boeing had previously concluded would not affect flight safety. The New York Times: The N.T.S.B. has said that cracks in the assembly holding the left-side engine in place may have contributed to the November crash, though it has not officially cited a cause. The part had fractured in similar fashion on at least four other occasions, on three different airplanes, according to the report, which cited a service letter that Boeing issued in 2011 regarding the apparent flaw. In the service letter, which manufacturers issue to flag safety concerns or other problems to aircraft owners, Boeing said that fractures "would not result in a safety of flight condition," N.T.S.B. investigators wrote. The plane that crashed was an MD-11F jet, made by McDonnell Douglas, a company that Boeing acquired in the 1990s. It was taking off from Louisville and bound for Hawaii on Nov. 4 when a fire ignited on its left engine shortly after takeoff. The plane crashed into several buildings, including a petroleum recycling facility, on the outskirts of the Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport. The three crew members on board and 11 people on the ground were killed in the crash; a 12th person on the ground died of injuries sustained during the episode.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Raspberry Pi is launching a new add-on board capable of running generative AI models locally on the Raspberry Pi 5. Announced on Thursday, the $130 AI HAT+ 2 is an upgraded -- and more expensive -- version of the module launched last year, now offering 8GB of RAM and a Hailo 10H chip with 40 TOPS of AI performance. Once connected, the Raspberry Pi 5 will use the AI HAT+ 2 to handle AI-related workloads while leaving the main board's Arm CPU available to complete other tasks. Unlike the previous AI HAT+, which is focused on image-based AI processing, the AI HAT+ 2 comes with onboard RAM and can run small gen AI models like Llama 3.2 and DeepSeek-R1-Distill, along with a series of Qwen models. You can train and fine-tune AI models using the device as well.

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Go, the ancient board game that China, Japan and South Korea all claim as part of their cultural heritage, is struggling to expand its global footprint because the three nations that dominate it cannot agree on something as basic as a common rulebook. When Go was registered with the International Mind Sports Association alongside chess and bridge, organizers had to adopt the American Go Association's rules because the East Asian trio failed to reach consensus. In 2025, China's Ke Jie withdrew from a title match at a Seoul tournament after receiving repeated penalties for violating a rule that the South Korean Go association had introduced mid-tournament. China's Go association responded by barring foreign players, most of them South Korean, from its domestic competitions. It also doesn't help that the game's commercial appeal is fading. Japan's Nihon Ki-in, the country's main Go association, has started exploring a potential sale of its Tokyo headquarters. Young people across the region are gravitating toward chess, shogi, and video games instead.

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DesScorp writes: CNBC reports that new data from the National Student Clearinghouse indicates that enrollment growth in four year degree programs is slowing down, while growth in two year and certification programs is accelerating: Enrollments in undergraduate certificate and associate degree programs both grew by about 2% in fall 2025, while enrollment in bachelor's degree programs rose by less than 1%, the report found. Community colleges now enroll 752,000 students in undergraduate certificate programs -- a 28% jump from just four years ago. Overall, undergraduate enrollment growth was fueled by more students choosing to attend community college, the report found. "Community colleges led this year with a 3% increase, driven by continued rising interest in those shorter job-aligned certificate programs," said Matthew Holsapple, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center's senior director of research. For one thing, community college is significantly less expensive. At two-year public schools, tuition and fees averaged $4,150 for the 2025-2026 academic year, according to the College Board. Alternatively, at four-year public colleges, in-state tuition and fees averaged $11,950, and those costs at four-year private schools averaged $45,000. A further factor driving this new growth is that Pell Grants are now available for job-training courses like certifications.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees. Now those physical books, journals, and reports, and many of Microsoft's digital subscriptions to leading US newspapers, are disappearing in a shift described inside Microsoft as an "AI-powered learning experience." Microsoft started cutting back on its employee subscriptions to news and reports services in November, with some publishers receiving an automated email cancellation of a contract. [...] Strategic News Service (SNS), which has provided global reports to Microsoft's roughly 220,000 employees and executives for more than 20 years, is no longer part of Microsoft's subscription list.

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Many people who stop using weight loss drugs will return to their previous weight within two years, a new review of existing research has found. CNN adds: This rate of weight regain is significantly faster than that seen in those who have lost weight by changing other lifestyle factors, such as diet and exercise, rather than relying on GLP-1 medications, researchers from the University of Oxford report in a paper published Wednesday in The BMJ journal. GLP-1, which stands for glucagon-like peptide-1, is a hormone naturally made by the body that helps signal to the brain and the gut that it's full and doesn't need to eat any more. Weight loss drugs mimic the action of this hormone by increasing the secretion of insulin to lower blood sugar. They also slow the movement of food through the digestive tract, which helps people feel full more quickly and for longer, and they work in the brain to reduce appetite.

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Amazon wants a federal judge to reject Saks Global's bankruptcy financing plan, writing in court papers the beleaguered department store "burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in less than a year" and failed to hold up their agreement. From a report: When Saks acquired Neiman Marcus for $2.7 billion in December 2024, Amazon invested $475 million into the venture on the grounds the retailer would start selling its products on Amazon's website and the tech company would offer technology and logistics expertise. "That equity investment is now presumptively worthless," Amazon's attorneys wrote in a Wednesday filing, hours after Saks filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. "Saks continuously failed to meet its budgets, burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in less than a year, and ran up additional hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid invoices owed to its retail partners." As part of the deal, Saks launched a branded "Saks at Amazon" storefront on the e-commerce company's website featuring a range of luxury fashion and beauty items. It also agreed to pay a referral fee for Saks-branded goods sold on the platform, guaranteeing at least $900 million in payments to Amazon over eight years.

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American buses in cities like New York and San Francisco crawl along at about eight miles per hour -- barely faster than a brisk walk -- and one surprisingly simple fix could make them faster without requiring new infrastructure or controversial policy changes. The issue, according to a Works in Progress analysis, is that US bus stops sit far too close together. Mean spacing in American cities is roughly 313 meters, about five stops per mile, while older cities like Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco pack stops even tighter at 214, 223 and 248 meters respectively. European cities typically space stops at 300 to 450 meters. Each stop costs time: passengers boarding and exiting, acceleration and deceleration, buses kneeling for wheelchairs, missed traffic light cycles. Buses spend about 20% of their operating time just stopping and starting, and since labor accounts for the majority of transit operating costs, slower buses translate directly to higher expenses. Cities that have tried spacing stops further apart have seen results. San Francisco recorded a 4.4 to 14% increase in travel speeds by reducing from six stops per mile to two and a half. Vancouver's pilot removed a quarter of stops and cut average trip times by five minutes while saving about $500,000 annually on a single route. A McGill study found that even substantial stop consolidation reduced overall system coverage by just 1%.

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