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Troops have been told to stop flying drones that weigh more than 250g (9oz) - the weight of a cucumber - over their comrades while training on Salisbury Plain.

The Tory leader is lining up a set of proposals, including on sentencing and social media, after criticism she has been too slow to develop policies.

Tim Davie has been written to by Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television, in the wake of a string of controversies about contributors to BBC Arabic.

DAN CARDEN: Thursday's local elections mean that it is now life or death for this Labour government - and for the Labour Party.

Celebrations and parties were almost unheard of for the youngster, born in 1935, who had little memory of anything other than the daily trials of living through the Second World War.

"Researchers have created the first laboratory analog of the 'black hole bomb'," reports ScienceAlert, "a theoretical concept developed by physicists in the 1970s..." There's no black hole involved; their experiment just simulates the "electromagnetic analogue" of the theoretical concept — the "exponential runaway amplification of spontaneously generated electromagnetic modes." Or, as ScienceAlert puts it, "It doesn't, just to set your mind at ease, pose any danger. It consists of a rotating aluminum cylinder, placed inside layers of coils that generate magnetic fields that rotate around it, at controllable speeds." As Roger Penrose proposed in 1971, the powerful rotational energy of a spinning black hole could be used to amplify the energy of nearby particles. Then, physicist Yakov Zel'Dovich figured out that you didn't need a black hole to see this phenomenon in action. An axially symmetrical body rotating in a resonance chamber, he figured, could produce the same energy transfer and amplification, albeit on a much smaller scale. Later work by other physicists found that, if you enclose the entire apparatus in a mirror, a positive feedback loop is generated, amplifying the energy until it explodes from the system. This concept was named the black hole bomb, and a team of physicists led by Marion Cromb of the University of Southampton in the UK now claim to have brought it to life. A paper describing their experiment has been uploaded to preprint server arXiv... [W]hat the team's experiment does is simulate it, using magnetic fields as a proxy for the particles, with the coils around the system acting as the reflector to produce the feedback loop. When they ran the experiment, they found that, when the cylinder is rotating faster than, and in the same direction as, the magnetic field, the magnetic field is amplified, compared to when there is no cylinder. When the cylinder rotates more slowly than the magnetic field, however, the magnetic field is dampened. This is a really interesting result, because it demonstrates a very clear amplification effect, based on the theories described decades ago... Because we can't probe black holes directly, analogs such as this are an excellent way to understand their properties... [T]he experiment could represent a significant step towards better understanding the physics of the most gravitationally extreme objects in the Universe. "The exponential amplification from noise supports theoretical investigations into black hole instabilities," the researchers write, "and is promising for the development of future experiments to observe quantum friction in the form of the Zeldovich effect seeded by the quantum vacuum..."

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Anyone out in central London early yesterday morning got an exclusive look at the pageantry of the Armed Forces as bands rehearsed for this week's VE Day procession.

A few years ago, Keir Starmer declared his mission was to transform Labour into the 'political wing of the British people'.

It's no secret that Stella McCartney's eponymous fashion brand has been haemorrhaging money in recent years.

When the world's cardinals met in Rome last Monday for the first of their crucial pre-conclave discussions, they raised 'the issue of clerical abuse', according to a Vatican spokesman.

Assaults are rife on the digital 'avatars' used by women and children in the online world, which, it is claimed, can leave them with trauma similar to real ordeals.

The picture, drawn by the young Prince of Wales when he was a pupil at Cheam school, was given by him as a gift to his matron Stella Jack in 1957.

More than one in five over-65s are now taking antidepressants - more than double the number of 20 years ago.

Speaking in the wake of Nigel Farage's 'Reform‑quake', Dan Carden, the MP for Liverpool Walton, said: 'People have had enough.'

Owen Cooper's acting career is off to a flourishing start after his impressive performance in Netflix 's Adolescence has landed him a part in Sam Fender 's new music video.

Ryan Reynolds is keeping mum on the status of his friendship with Travis Kelce. The actor ignored questions about why the Super Bowl champ unfollowed him on Instagram.

Campaigners say Government could make policy changes to help struggling town centres.

This week, leading money educator Vanessa Stoykov helps a mum who is recently retired and wants to enjoy her life - but also feels guilty about her children's inheritance.

What is happening is nothing on the scale of the disaster that swept across the world as a result of the pandemic and the shut-down in response to that.

Long-time Slashdot reader piojo writes: Tim Friede, Wisconsin man, has been injecting himself with snake venom for 18 years to gain protection from his pet snakes. The antibodies he developed have formed two components of a three-part antivenom, which gives partial or total protection against 18 of 19 species of venomous snakes that were tested. Notably, the antivenom is ineffective against vipers. From Australia's public broadcaster ABC: The team's results have been published today in the journal Cell... The new antivenom described in the study is very different to traditional antivenoms, according to Peter Kwong, a biochemist at Columbia University and one of the study's authors. The scientists call their new antivenom "unparallel," according to the BBC, though the snake enthusiast (a former truck mechanic) had "initially wanted to build up his immunity to protect himself when handling snakes, documenting his exploits on YouTube." The team is trying to refine the antibodies further and see if adding a fourth component could lead to total protection against elapid snake venom... "Tim's antibodies are really quite extraordinary — he taught his immune system to get this very, very broad recognition," said Professor Peter Kwong [one of the researchers at Columbia University]. In a video interview, CNN shows footage of the man inducing snake bites (calling it "a classic do-not-try-this-at-home moment"). "I have a lot of notes in Excel files," he tells CNN, "where I hit these particular windows to where I know I can boost up before a bite." "I don't just take the bite, because that can kill you. I properly boost up, and methodically take notes, and weigh the venomes out very specifically..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.