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Nicola Peltz is continuing to ignore the furore surrounding her husband Brooklyn Beckham's trolling advert.

Keir Starmer said the dramatic incident south of the Isle of Wight yesterday morning 'shouldn't have happened'.

The singer danced on the beach with her friends to ring in her 35th birthday as she continued to brush over Perrie Edwards branding her 'difficult'.

Rupert Grint, who played Ron Weasley in JK Rowling's hit series, had enraged neighbours with his plans to build 15 new houses on his estate at Kimpton Grange near Hitchin.

A developer wants to transform garages into a two-storey maisonette and a bungalow

Queen Camilla has a surprising new friend. I hear that she's become increasingly close to Geri Halliwell Horner, the former Spice Girl.

The former Top Gear and Grand Tour host shared the news in the final two episodes of the fifth season of Clarkson's Farm, which were released overnight.

Supermarket giant has turned to third-party support as court sets date to hear licensing dispute

Lee Andrews claims he was captured at gunpoint after being suspected of espionage as he finally addresses his disappearance.

Toy Story 5 has been lauded as a 'welcome return to form' by critics, as the 31-year-old franchise returns this week with a sequel fit for the digital age.

Interiors expert Jordana Ashkenazi has warned that homeowners should not be fooled into thinking they can splatter any colour on their new walls.

He made history as the first westerner to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama himself, according to his official website.

Local residents are worried the new homes planned on nearby farmland will cause the village to 'grind to a halt'

UC Davis researchers say an implanted brain-computer interface has allowed Casey Harrell, an ALS patient who cannot speak, to synthesize sentences from brain activity with 99% accuracy in controlled tests and about 92% accuracy in everyday use. The Register reports that the system has remained usable at home since 2023, helping Harrell communicate naturally, control a computer, and return to full-time work without researchers needing to supervise each session. The Register reports: A team of scientists from the University of California, Davis, published a paper Monday detailing a years-long study of a brain computer interface (BCI) system implanted in a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), which destroys motor neurons and causes loss of motor control and eventual paralysis. According to the team, their patient, Casey Harrell, has been living with BCI implants since 2023 that are still working today, giving him the ability not only to control a computer cursor with his thoughts, but also to speak. [...] Davis neurosurgeon David Brandman, co-principal investigator and co-senior author of the paper published Monday, as well as the surgeon who placed Harrell's implant, described the results his team published as the crossing of a threshold in BCI technology: Not only has Harrell's implant been working well with daily use since 2023, but it's also incredibly accurate. In controlled tests, the system managed to synthesize sentences from Harrell's brain activity with 99 percent accuracy; outside of the lab in daily use, Harrell still assessed it as being accurate 92 percent of the time. "The key thing to me is that it's enabling everyday communication for a guy who wants to talk but can't," Brandman told The Register in an interview. "Despite being paralyzed [Harrell] has gone back to work full time and has meaningful conversations with his daughter who's never heard the sound of his voice." Prior work in the BCI space, Brandman told us, has either required researchers to be in a patient's home whenever they're using the tech, or for the patient to come to the researchers. That's not the case here, with the system allowing Harrell's home care team to hook him up to the system themselves, enabling him to use the device for more than 3,800 hours in the past few years. Based on the time the study was filed (It published Monday but went into peer review in July 2025) that would mean Harrell was using the device for more than five hours a day, on average. "It is a life that is more full of dynamic action and with friends and family, with colleagues, and it is something that allows me to communicate more in my natural way of communicating than any other technology that I have experienced," Harrell told UC Davis via his BCI system.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A scam asking residents to pay parking fines via SMS has prompted warnings from Epping Forest District Council.

A scam asking residents to pay parking fines via SMS has prompted warnings from Epping Forest District Council.

There is a savvy way around the high cost of jet fuel that can take you from the UK to Bali, Australia, Hong Kong and beyond. We share how...

The offence of murder could be watered down in the biggest shake-up in decades, under plans by the Law Commission.

Fear and even grief are natural reactions to machines that do your job. The next reactions – acceptance and innovation – are more useful

There's a language out there called "Progress Advanced Business Language" (or "Open Edge Advanced Business Language"). Just hearing that string of words in a sequence tells you you're in for it. It's a verbose, "English-like" programming language. But we're not here to pick on the language.

A long time ago, Mirjam had the "pleasure" of working in a Progress ABL environment. At some point, one of the developers had needed to find a date six months prior to the current date. It didn't need to be accurate, and thus said developer littered the code with comments reminding everyone that it didn't need to be that accurate. They arguably spent more time defending the choice to be inaccurate than it would have taken to write code that would have been accurate.

Mirjam doesn't have the code anymore, so what we have here is a mix of her remembered pseudocode, Progress syntax, and my attempts to clarify all of it. Let's not worry too much about the language, and instead focus on the logic:

ASSIGN v-date = TODAY. /* Calculates the current week/year */ RUN week.p(INPUT v-date, OUTPUT v-weeknumber, OUTPUT v-year). IF v-weeknumber > 26 THEN ASSIGN v-weeknumber = v-weeknumber - 26. ELSE ASSIGN v-weeknumber = 52 - 26 - v-weeknumber v-year = v-year - 1. /* Turn the result of that calculation back into a date */ RUN week2.p(INPUT v-weeknumber, INPUT v-year, OUTPUT v-resultdate).

This code gets the current date. It then breaks that into week number of the date (1-52), and the year of the date. Then, if the week number is greater than 26, it subtracts 26 from it, giving us a date half a year ago, ish. If the current weak number is less than or equal to 26, we do 52 - 26 - v-weeknumber, and decrement the year. Which yes, is a fairly round about way to handle the rollover- 52 - 26 happens to be… 26.

It's worth noting, that as primitive looking as this syntax is, Progress ABL does have an ADD_INTERVAL function, which lets you do date arithmetic, without all this nonsense. In fact, Mirjam went ahead and replaced all of this with a single line.

That said, as a little bonus WTF, Progress does have some weird date quirks, for example, you can construct a date from an integer. Which has a very unsurprising (but also, weirdly surprising) range of possible values:

The value of the expression cannot be a date value before 12/31/-32768 or after 12/31/32767.

At least that covers a range that includes both the discovery of agriculture and the eventual rediscovery of agriculture after the event that enters into legend as "The Fall".

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