Labour has pulled £1.3bn of investment in tech and AI projects promised by the Tories. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said the funding committed by the previous Conservative administration was not allocated in its budget and so will not proceed. It included £800m for the creation of a next-generation exascale supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh – ...
Olympic athletes have been taking to social media to reveal the high-tech swag they have been given for the Paris Olympics. Every athlete received a new Olympic-themed Samsung flip phone, the normal version of which is retailing online for £1,049. One Team GB athlete, however, has taken full advantage of the freebie. At the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, athletes were ...
Access to Instagram was blocked in Turkey on Friday, in the latest example of a clampdown on websites in the country. The bar on access was in response to Instagram removing posts from Turkish users expressing condolences over the killing of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh, it has been reported. The Information and Communication Technologies Authority, which regulates the internet ...
The mystery of why an ancient Egyptian mummy nicknamed the Screaming Woman had a pained expression on her face may have been solved. New analysis by scientists suggests she died “screaming from agony” around 3,000 years ago. The experts say she may then have experienced a rare event known as a cadaveric spasm at the moment of death, causing her ...
The discovery of a half-a-billion-year-old slug with spines has shed light on the origins of animals like oysters and octopuses, researchers have said. The new fossil, called Shishania aculeata, reveals that the earliest molluscs (animals that do not have a backbone) were flat, shell-less slugs covered in a protective spiny armour. Underneath, the animal was made up of a muscular ...
Dozens of workers at TikTok-owner ByteDance’s office in Singapore have fallen ill in a mass food poisoning incident. At least 60 people developed gastroenteritis symptoms – which include cramps, diarrhoea and vomiting – with 57 of them seeking hospital treatment. ByteDance told Sky News it is investigating the incident. Seventeen ambulances, fire engines, a mass decontamination vehicle and Singapore Civil Defence ...
US fast food giant Taco Bell is expanding the use of artificial intelligence to take orders at hundreds of its drive-thrus. The voice AI system – which interprets customers’ orders based on voice recognition – has been in development for more than two years. The Mexican-themed chain is already operating the system at more than 100 sites across 13 US ...
The firm at the centre of the global IT outage last month is being sued by some of its shareholders. Lawyers claim cyber security company CrowdStrike defrauded investors by concealing flaws with its software testing. It comes after a software update sent out by the firm caused more than eight million computers to crash on 19 July. The meltdown hit ...
Teenagers who have a problematic relationship with their smartphones are more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression and insomnia than those who do not, new research has found. Young people who said they had problematic smartphone use, a pattern of behaviours resembling addiction, were twice as likely to report symptoms of anxiety compared to those who did not, according to ...
A 3D model of Robert the Bruce has been unveiled to mark the 750th anniversary of the former king’s birth. The reconstruction was produced from a cast of his skull, with Historic Environment Scotland (HES) describing it as the “most realistic” ever made. Robert I, born on 11 July 1274, was King of Scots from 1306 to his death in ...