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Climate scientists trying to predict how much hotter the planet will get have long grappled with a surprisingly stubborn problem -- clouds, which both reflect sunlight and trap heat, account for more than half the variation between climate predictions and are the main reason warming projections for the next 50 years range from 2 to 6 degrees Celsius. Two research groups are now racing to close that gap using AI, though they disagree sharply on method. Tapio Schneider at Caltech built CLIMA, a model that uses machine learning to optimize cloud parameters within traditional physics equations; it will be unveiled at a conference in Japan in March. Chris Bretherton at the Allen Institute for AI took a different path -- his ACE2 neural network, released in 2024, learns from 50 years of atmospheric data and largely bypasses physics equations altogether.

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A study published last week in PNAS found that people who regularly cause problems or make life difficult -- whom the researchers call "hasslers" -- are associated with measurably faster biological aging in those around them, at a rate of roughly 1.5% per additional hassler and about nine months of additional biological age relative to same-age peers. The research drew on DNA methylation-based epigenetic clocks and ego-centric network data from a state-representative probability sample of 2,345 adults in Indiana, aged 18 to 103. Nearly 29% of respondents reported at least one hassler in their close network. The biological toll varied by relationship type: hasslers who were family members showed the strongest and most consistent associations with accelerated aging, while spouse hasslers showed no significant effect on either epigenetic measure. The damage also went beyond aging clocks -- each additional hassler was associated with greater depression and anxiety severity, higher BMI, increased inflammation, and higher multimorbidity. When benchmarked against smoking, a major behavioral risk factor for aging, the hassler effect corresponded to roughly 13 to 17% of smoking's estimated impact on the same aging clocks.

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Goal is to run software locally and stream only to owners' computers

If the sour taste has still not left your mouth after Ring's Super Bowl ad, there is a $10,000 prize for anyone who can find a security flaw in the company's cameras.…

Complaints pile up from users after months of conversations disappear. Google insists it’s just a temporary bug

Over the past few days, complaints have stacked up from people who say months of conversations with Google's AI chatbot have simply vanished, with Reg readers noting the disappearances seemed to coincide with the rollout of Gemini 3.1.…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is pushing back on growing concerns about AI's environmental footprint, dismissing claims about ChatGPT's water consumption as "totally fake" and arguing that the fairer way to measure AI's energy use is to compare it against humans. In an interview with Indian Express, Altman acknowledged that evaporative cooling in data centers once made water usage a real concern but said that is no longer the case, calling internet claims of 17 gallons of water per query "completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality." On energy, he conceded it is "fair" to worry about total consumption given how heavily the world now relies on AI, and called for a rapid shift toward nuclear, wind and solar power. He took particular issue with comparisons that pit the cost of training a model against a single human inference, noting it "takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat" before a person gets smart -- and that on a per-query basis, AI has "probably already caught up on an energy efficiency basis."

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Stations urged to mark milestone with pro-America content

The head of the Federal Communications Commission has called on broadcasters to start the day with the Star Spangled Banner or the Pledge of Allegiance to celebrate the US's 250th birthday.…

The narrative that AI spending has been singlehandedly propping up the U.S. economy -- a claim that captivated Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington over the past year -- is facing serious pushback from economists [non-paywalled source] at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, all of whom now calculate that the AI buildup's direct contribution to growth was dramatically overstated and possibly close to zero. The debate hinges on how GDP accounts for imported components: roughly three-quarters of AI data center costs go toward computer chips and gear largely manufactured in Asia, and that spending gets subtracted from domestic output because it boosts foreign economies. Joseph Politano of the Apricitas Economics newsletter pegs AI's actual contribution at about 0.2 percentage points of the 2.2 percent U.S. growth in 2025, and even Hannah Rubinton at the St. Louis Fed -- whose own analysis attributed 39 percent of growth to AI-related business spending through the first nine months of the year -- acknowledges that figure is probably the ceiling. "It's not like AI is propping up the economy," Rubinton said.

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Business Secretary praises Doug Gurr's pro-growth agenda

Britain's competition regulator has tapped former Amazon UK chief Doug Gurr as preferred candidate for chair – a notable appointment given the watchdog's active investigations into major cloud providers.…

OpenAI CEO takes really, really long view on energy efficiency

AI is being unfairly targeted over its energy use, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims, as the naysayers ignore the vast amount of resources humans have consumed over millennia – not least to avoid being eating by predators.…

"In August 2025, TypeScript surpassed both Python and JavaScript to become the most-used language on GitHub for the first time ever..." writes GitHub's senior developer advocate. They point to this as proof that "AI isn't just speeding up coding. It's reshaping which languages, frameworks, and tools developers choose in the first place." Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week. Those early exposures reset the baseline for what "easy" means. When AI handles boilerplate and error-prone syntax, the penalty for choosing powerful but complex languages disappears. Developers stop avoiding tools with high overhead and start picking based on utility instead. The language adoption data shows this behavioral shift: — TypeScript grew 66% year-over-year — JavaScript grew 24% — Shell scripting usage in AI-generated projects jumped 206% That last one matters. We didn't suddenly love Bash. AI absorbed the friction that made shell scripting painful. So now we use the right tool for the job without the usual cost. "When a task or process goes smoothly, your brain remembers," they point out. "Convenience captures attention. Reduced friction becomes a preference — and preferences at scale can shift ecosystems." "AI performs better with strongly typed languages. Strongly typed languages give AI much clearer constraints..." "Standardize before you scale. Document patterns. Publish template repositories. Make your architectural decisions explicit. AI tools will mirror whatever structures they see." "Test AI-generated code harder, not less."

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Quartet accused of attacking public institutions, claiming the government was responsible for 2024 tragedy

Spanish police say four self-proclaimed members of Anonymous are in custody after allegedly carrying out several cyberattacks on public authorities in the wake of the 2024 DANA floods.…

Off-the-shelf tools helped Russian-speaking cybercrime group run riot

Cybercriminals armed with off-the-shelf generative AI tools compromised more than 600 internet-exposed FortiGate firewalls across 55 countries in just over a month, according to a new incident report from AWS.…

A week off for vacation? The nerve of some people

Opinion If you want to see the definition of "workaholic," you can't do better than to look at your typical senior open source developer or maintainer. I should know, I'm a workaholic too. I know my kind.…

Analog curio nestled between fax and typewriter - this is a very different definition of 'legacy support'

Bork!Bork!Bork! There are occasions when flicking a power switch can send a user into a world of bork-related pain, so it is sometimes worth taking a step back and reconsidering one's life choices.…

The only good password is no password at all

Passwords turn 65 this year. They became a feature of computer users' lives in 1961, with MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS). Before then, sysops were real sysops. All jobs went through them, one at a time, and access by others was forbidden by laws written on blocks of stone.…

"A surprisingly ravenous black hole from the dawn of the universe is breaking two big rules," reports Live Science. "It's not only exceeding the 'speed limit' of black hole growth but also generating extreme X-ray and radio wave emissions — two features that are not predicted to coexist..." "How is this rule-breaking behavior even possible? In a paper published Jan. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal, an international team of researchers observed ID830 in multiple wavelengths to find an answer...." As they attract gas and dust, this material accumulates in a swirling accretion disk. Gravity pulls the material from the disk into the black hole, but the infalling material generates radiation pressure that pushes outward and prevents more stuff from falling in. As a result, black holes are muzzled by a self-regulating process called the Eddington limit... Its X-ray brightness suggests that ID830 is accreting mass at about 13 times the Eddington limit, due to a sudden burst of inflowing gas that may have occurred as ID830 shredded and engulfed a celestial body that wandered too close. "For a supermassive black hole (SMBH) as massive as ID830, this would require not a normal (main-sequence) star, but a more massive giant star or a huge gas cloud," study co-author Sakiko Obuchi, an observational astronomer at Waseda University in Tokyo, told Live Science via email. Such super-Eddington phases may be incredibly brief, as "this transitional phase is expected to last for roughly 300 years," Obuchi added. ID830 also simultaneously displays radio and X-ray emissions. These two features are not expected to coexist, especially because super-Eddington accretion is thought to suppress such emissions. "This unexpected combination hints at physical mechanisms not yet fully captured by current models of extreme accretion and jet launching," the researchers said in a statement. So while ID830 is launching massive radio jets, its X-ray emissions appear to originate from a structure called a corona, produced as intense magnetic fields from the accretion disk create a thin but turbulent billion-degree cloud of turbocharged particles. These particles orbit the black hole at nearly the speed of light, in what NASA calls "one of the most extreme physical environments in the universe." Altogether, ID830's rule-breaking behaviors suggest that it is in a rare transitional phase of excessive consumption — and excretion. This incredible feeding burst has energized both its jets and its corona, making ID830 shine brightly across multiple wavelengths as it spews out excess radiation. Additionally, based on UV-brightness analysis, quasars like ID830 may be unexpectedly common, the researchers said. Models predict that only around 10% of quasars have spectacular radio jets, but these energetic objects could be significantly more abundant in the early universe than previously suggested. Most importantly, ID830 also shows how SMBHs can regulate galaxy growth in the early universe. As a black hole gobbles matter at the super-Eddington limit, the energy from its resultant emissions can heat and disperse matter throughout the interstellar medium — the gas between stars — to suppress star formation. As a result, ancient SMBHs like ID830 may have grown massive at the expense of their host galaxies.

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Rogue user showed them an excellent prank, which they put into production

Who, Me? Welcome to another installment of Who, Me? It's The Register's Monday column in which you confess to crises you caused, and the course corrections that cured the chaos.…

Upgrade allows robot to travel ‘potentially unlimited distances’ without phoning home for help

NASA has revealed it repurposed the processor the Perseverance rover used to communicate with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, to help the rolling robot navigate the Red Planet autonomously “for potentially unlimited distances.”…

When one company asked job applicants to submit a video where they answer a question, most of the 300 responses were "eerily similar," reports the Washington Post (with a company executive saying it was "abundantly clear" they'd used AI.) Job seekers are turning to AI to help them land jobs more quickly in a tough labor market.... Employers say that's having an unintended consequence: Many applications are looking and sounding the same... It's easy to spot when candidates over-rely on AI, some employers said. Oftentimes, executive summaries will look eerily similar to each other, odd phrases that people wouldn't normally use in conversation creep into descriptions, fancy vocabulary appears, and someone with entry-level experience uses language that indicates they are much more senior, they added. It's worse when they use auto-apply AI tools, which will find jobs, fill out applications and submit résumés on the candidate's behalf, some employers said. Those tend to misinterpret some of the application questions and fill in the wrong information in inappropriate spots. If these applications were evaluated alone, employers say they'd have a harder time identifying AI usage. But when hundreds of applications all have the same issue, they said, AI's role in it becomes obvious. The article acknowledges that some employers could be using AI tools to screen resumes too. One job-seeker in Texas even says he'll stop submitting an AI-written résumé when the recruiter stops using AI to evaluate them. "You're saying, 'You shouldn't be doing this' when I know a good chunk of them do this!" Obligatory XKCD.

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PLUS: China’s sword-wielding humanoid robots; Australian court swamped by AI filings; Vietnam’s 25km overwater drone delivery; And more!

Asia In Brief Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani has said the advent of AI means organizations no longer have any excuse to retain their legacy systems.…