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Wrongly discarded lithium batteries, such as those in vapes, are causing more than 10 fires a week at U.K. recycling centers, according to figures shared with the Guardian: The Environment Services Association (ESA), the trade body for waste management companies, said its members had reported 1,518 fires in the year to March 2026. At least 541 of these fires were directly attributed to lithium ion batteries, the survey found. There were a further 216 battery fires in bin lorries [garbage trucks]. The ESA said the reported number of battery-related fires underestimated the scale of the problem, because in most incidents it was impossible to determine the cause of the blaze. A spokesperson said: "We know 40% of fires at recycling centres are caused by batteries, but we think the actual number is more like 70%." It estimates that annual cost of these fires has increased from £150m in 2021 to £1bn today... The ESA is calling for a £5 deposit scheme on the sale of all vapes to ensure that vape users have an incentive to return used devices to retailers for safe disposal... [Patrick Brighty, the head of recycling policy at the ESA, said] "Vapes are among the biggest culprits because they're cheap, abundant and typically have a short use-life." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

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It sounds like a theory that's full of holes. But it appears the secret to maintaining strong bones is… Jarlsberg cheese.

The new volume of the Oxford Dictionary Of English offered more than 350 ways of poking fun at someone. Compliments, on the other hand, totalled just 40.

Many a golf widow might tell you that long hours spent on the course lead to a chap being under par in bed... but now scientists say that the opposite is true.

The eight resident Canada geese were shot dead in the early hours at £2,664-a-year St George's Hill Lawn Tennis Club, in Weybridge, Surrey.

What is going on in Cheshire's police force. This bold body once made a boastful film about how they caught Lucy Letby. Now they have suddenly got rid of their Chief Constable, two years early.

Research shows that consuming these foods causes the body to produce a natural compound called urolithin A, which has been linked to anti-ageing.

The lesson plans are part of the Erasmus+ student exchange scheme, which is due to cost the UK £570million in its first year.

The clue is in the name... Punch and Judy - a knockabout puppet show in which the couple argue and hit each other with sticks to the delight of watching children.

Titled The Janitor, it stars Peaky Blinders actor Harry Kirton as a publicist who cleans up the elite's scandals.

Raymond Williams, 61, slashed the throat of Tania Williams with a craft knife after seeing her with another man during a night out in Norwich on January 17, 2026.

Ms Benedetti, now 39, married multi Grammy Award-winning American trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis, now 64, in 2021. They have a two-year-old daughter Elise - his fifth child.

President Donald Trump has turned against his once-ally, Tucker Carlson, calling the former Fox personality a 'loser' with a 'very low IQ.'

There's nothing wrong with heightened expectation. But it's so easy to be let down when the experience doesn't match the hype

When Monty Roberts died three weeks ago aged 91, he left a lasting legacy not only at the Royal stables - where he was a regular visitor for 35 years - but in horsemanship around the world.

Private members' club The Hurlingham has infuriated its loyal members by closing 'for the first time in its history' so that French luxury fashion brand Hermès could use it.

When I was campaigning in the run-up to the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, it became blatantly obvious to me that dark and sinister forces were at work.

Sienna Miller's sister Savannah, 47, welcomed her fourth child as she shared a sweet snap of her baby boy after a 'complicated' fertility journey.

"AI went from being very terrible to seemingly genuinely quite good at a professional level in a very short space of time..." says the Verge's AI reporter. But AI systems "are still truly, truly terrible at some areas of math... even the days of the week." If you look at academic math papers, a lot of the time you won't see numbers... So they're still terrible, but they're now also very good at this other part. As to why, at some point you reach a critical mass of what these systems can do. We saw it with writing, we've seen it with programming. They're very good at forging connections between different areas, applying old methods in new ways, those kinds of things. It appears that the newer models they're training have apparently reached that level where it clicks, and now it can do math... There are areas now where it seems to be producing work that is on par with good mathematicians, alongside other parts where yeah, it can't count. All caught up in that is whether it's going to rewrite employment structures or funding structures... One would hope [math researchers] would branch out into all of these new exciting areas or pose new questions. But AI won't do that, and that's the concern. And then that would leave the field quite sterile, and it will have all of these things that have been done, and maybe nothing left to pursue... [A] lot are scared that it's closing off the field. So by definition, those breakthroughs that lead to something surprising and new that you can say, "Oh, this works here," may not be happening anymore... There were some bleak responses from graduate students I saw in essays posted online. Where's their place in this as future researchers? Do they have a place in this? Is it as glorified AI proof checkers? That will be quite an unsatisfying career, I imagine. Or maybe not, I don't know. We will see. I think anything used properly will be a net boon. They also had an interesting response when asked if AI democratizes access to high-level mathematical proofs: A lot of the mathematicians I spoke to were almost quite weary of this, actually. They love the idea, in theory, of democratizing access. They're also quite fed up with AI-generated or -assisted papers that are flooding every publication imaginable, as well as the pre-print servers that they use in these fields. Some of those I spoke to said things like, "Oh, I got three emails this week alone with people being like, 'Hey, is this legit?'" Because they thought they'd solved something with ChatGPT or with Claude, and they also don't have the mathematical skills to check whether they've actually solved something. On the flip side, there are parts where they said, "Well, we've got a talented undergrad who's done something that a talented undergrad would probably have never managed, and here they are doing grad-level work and they've produced a paper that is legit." And in the bigger scheme of things, a few I spoke to said, "Well yeah, a lot of these are in the ivory tower. Having access to this kind of thing globally could really boost access to the kind of things here." On the flip side, the cost. These things cost a lot to run.

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Emergency services scrambled to the scene after the youngster plunged to the ground from a property in Spotland Tops, Rochdale, on Saturday afternoon.