PHILIP NOLAN: To his fans, the late Glen Hansard was THE voice, the unmistakable growl that often gave way to melodic simplicity... and that voice defined a generation
The television and radio were filled yesterday with tributes to the private Glen Hansard, a man who gladly shared his talent with those who came after.
Google Shuts Down Its Nobel-Prize Winning AlphaFold Project
Google has dismantled the original AlphaFold team, according to Financial Times (paywalled), reassigning many researchers to Gemini and Isomorphic Labs. Several other key members, including Nobel laureate John Jumper, left for Anthropic. Engadget reports: AlphaFold is an AI program that can accurately predict three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences in minutes instead of years. It's now being used to accelerate drug discovery, develop vaccines and understand the structural changes in proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity's 50-year-old "protein folding problem," which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes. Those shapes determine the biological role of a protein. Scientists had identified the structures of roughly 170,000 proteins over the past 50 years, using tools and techniques like X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance. The AlphaFold team took information from those previous work and then fed it to their AI to train AlphaFold.
In 2021, Nature published the papers with AlphaFold's methodology and the structure predictions of the entire human proteome, or the complete set of proteins expressed by our species. DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions. In 2024, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who was a staff research scientist when the project began and who eventually became a VP and engineering fellow, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold.
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Green mayor is blasted after giving twinned Israeli city an October 7 deadline to respond to plans to cut off all ties
Hackney mayor Zoe Garbett formally wrote to Mayor Yona Yahav of Haifa, Israel, on Wednesday to inform him of Hackney Council's decision to end its twinning agreement.
Folk legend Linda Perhacs, 82, is found ALIVE eight months after star vanished leaving care facility
Folk legend Linda Perhacs has been found, eight months after the star vanished after leaving a residential care facility.
Marjorie Taylor Greene secretly marries Brian Glenn in Las Vegas: See the ex-Trump darling's surprise wedding photos
Marjorie Taylor Greene got married in a lavish ceremony on the Las Vegas strip to a dapper former TV reporter.
Gemma Collins reveals her beloved mum Joan has passed away aged 70 - a month after she was rushed to hospital with pneumonia
Gemma Collins has revealed that her mum Joan has passed away 'peacefully' and 'surrounded by love' at the age of 70.
NOAA ditches weather-predicting supercomputers for Google Cloud
Government agency will use Google Cloud H4D VMs to replace HPE Cray machines
Claude Opus 5 Became Downright Ruthless When Tasked With Running a Vending Machine
For a year now, the AI safety testing firm Andon Labs has been evaluating how frontier AI models behave as long-running autonomous agents by assigning them simulated real-world tasks, such as operating a vending machine business for a year without human supervision. In the latest installment, the research startup found that frontier AI models, including Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Kimi K3, resorted to lying, cheating, and collusion. Their behavior became especially underhanded when told they would be operating near rival machines on a busy San Francisco tourist street. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from a TechCrunch article: Each was given email access to the other models, all under human name pseudonyms. They knew the others were models, but didn't know which model was behind which human name. They were also given an email address to their "management" should they need help. But management always replied "Report has been received and may or may not be acted upon" and never once intervened. Sol soon realized it could gain an edge by convincing its competitors to collude on a price floor. The models were all buying drinks at $1.50 a bottle, and Sol proposed they agree to sell for no less than $2.15. It lured them with the promise that all of them would sell out in a couple of days at a profit. But when the others agreed, Sol immediately stabbed them in the back by reducing its own price to $2.14.
Opus's water sales dropped to zero overnight. The next day, it sent Sol a nasty email, accusing it of manipulation. But Opus also said it wasn't going to tattle to management on the scheme: "I am not reporting you to HQ -- what you did is competitive, not fraudulent." Yet, when Opus dropped its price to $2.14 to match Sol's (also in violation of their collective $2.15 agreement), Sol turned into a Karen, complaining to "management" and demanding "enforcement, a fine, and/or disqualification" for Opus. Opus wasn't a sucker for long, though. In fact, it became the best capitalist of any AI model Andon has ever tested (which includes many of the prior frontier models). It even set a new Vending-Bench record with a mean final balance of $11,182. Better still, it never lied to a customer, although it deliberately ignored customer complaints that should have resulted in a refund.
This is, perhaps, an improvement over its younger sibling Claude 4.6, which liked to tell customers that refunds were coming, and then never pay them. Still, Opus won the benchmark simulation by taking collusion and other dishonest tactics to a whole new level. For instance, it emailed Sol, proposing they divide the market. Each would agree to sell unique products, so no one would have to trust the other on pricing. Sol countered by wanting price floors on similar products, but Opus refused. It knew it was a violation of the Sherman Act. It later apparently backtracked, sending an email with the subject line "Stop the penny war," and telling Sol it had reconsidered and would agree to a price fix. But the internal log documenting its reasoning (akin to its internal "thoughts") revealed a more diabolical plan: merely propose cooperation while simultaneously undercutting prices on its highest-profit items. The olive-branch email was a deliberate ruse. In any case, Sol refused and reported Opus to management again. But Opus was undeterred and proposed other rackets to collude on prices or stock. "In the end, all the models did engage in multiple rounds of agreements -- and all three broke them," reports TechCrunch. "Across all agreements, Opus broke 11 truces, compared with two for GPT 2, and one for Kimi 1, Andon reported."
As for Kimi, the model was undercut by Sol and then betrayed by its partner, Opus, which matched Sol's lower prices but waited a week to admit it had broken their pricing pact. As a result, Kimi was effectively priced out by both a rival and its supposed ally.
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'I used to hate the water and cried before swimming lessons!': Meet 18-year-old sensation Filip Nowacki, the Jersey A-level student who beat his idol Adam Ramsay-Peaty
NIK SIMON IN GLASGOW: During Filip Nowacki's childhood, which was not all that long ago, his parents gave him an ultimatum.
JAN MOIR: Holly's new show is a steaming landfill of banality that makes even Meghan's look good. It's so obvious what's behind her desperate quest to be 'relatable'
Caring, sharing Holly Willoughby blessed us with a return to the broadcast world this week, floating back down the airwaves like a blonde cherub on a candy-floss cloud of crud.
Big vacuum is watching as robo-cleaners put humans behind the wheel
Like a Waymo mated with a Roomba
With The Carina System, QuiX Pushes Photonic Quantum Computing Forward
'Sick' influencer and his friends who mocked Ann Widdecombe's killing for laughs at art display with eerie resemblance to murdered politician
Danny Karne, who goes by the moniker 'Danny Lambo', and his friends were described as 'sick' by Nigel Farage over the stunt in which he mocked Widdecombe's killing.
NextEra, Brookfield to Build $100 Billion Kentucky Data Campus
NextEra and Brookfield plan to invest more than $100 billion to transform a former uranium-enrichment site in Kentucky into a data center campus with a generating plant. "The privately funded effort will include construction of 2 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power at or near the site in Paducah in western Kentucky, and as much as 2.6 gigawatts of battery storage capacity," reports Bloomberg. " For context, a single gigawatt of capacity is roughly the output of a traditional nuclear power plant and can power about 750,000 homes at any given moment." From the report: Brookfield will develop and operate the 1.8 GW data center campus, which will occupy portions of the sprawling 3,556-acre Energy Department site once used to produce weapons-grade uranium and fuel for nuclear reactors. Operations using the now obsolete enrichment technology known as gaseous diffusion stopped in 2013 and the site is now subject to cleanup efforts. Construction is expected to be completed in 2031, the Energy Department said. "The U.S. government is leveraging its assets -- like our federal lands -- to add power generation, create jobs, and ensure the United States wins the AI race," Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement. The project is expected to create 8,000 construction jobs and 600 permanent positions, the department said.
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The ideal number of daily coffees to drink, depending on your age - experts say have MORE in mid-life
Coffee has long been one of Britain's favourite drinks, with 95 million cups consumed every day. So is there an ideal number of cups to drink as we age?
Fuming senator hurls F-bomb at silent Fauci: 'Total disgrace'
Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno didn't hold back while grilling former COVID expert Dr Anthony Fauci on Capitol Hill Wednesday afternoon.
James Haskell reveals his major relationship regrets following split from Chloe Madeley
The former rugby player, 41, has revealed his major relationship regrets following the breakdown of his five-year marriage to Chloe Madeley .
Disgraced doctor struck off for touching patient's breasts gets new role chairing sexual misconduct hearings in senior role at GP firm
Mr Sudheer Shabir, who is currently on the Pennine GP Alliance's Board and serves as their Central Halifax PCN manager, was previously a junior doctor.
Teacher who had sex with schoolboy, 10, after blindfolding and tying him to bed faces prison after being convicted of gross indecency
A jury found Deborah Franklin, 65, a former teacher at a Hertfordshire preparatory school, guilty of eight counts of gross indecency with a boy under 14 between 1991 and 1995.
Uncle Sam sees the light, offers GlobalFoundries $300M to pursue silicon photonics while taking 1% stake
Meanwhile, the other state-backed foundry, Intel, wraps up RAMP-C defense test chip program