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A new study suggests multilingualism may slow brain aging, with bilingual people showing brains that appear about six years younger than monolingual speakers and people who speak four languages showing brains that appear up to 13 years younger. Researchers say earlier language learning and higher proficiency appear to strengthen the effect. The Guardian reports: Our brains are made up of billions of nerve cells that communicate with one another. But as we get older, the connectivity in our brai…

CISA is reportedly using Anthropic's Mythos model to scan government code repositories for security vulnerabilities, with sources saying the audits have already found numerous bugs. Reuters reports: The scanning is being done by CISA's Attack Surface Evaluation team, according to one of the sources. The team is a group within CISA that conducts digital security assessments and hacking exercises across government. Two of the sources said the audits had already uncovered a large number of vulnera…

GitHub is offering a limited run of 1,000 CD-ROM copies of public repositories as a pro-physical-media jab at Sony's plan to stop producing PlayStation game discs in 2028. Tom's Hardware reports: The coding and collaboration platform, owned by Microsoft, states that "In light of recent developments in physical media, GitHub is proud to announce that you can now obtain your public repo on CD-ROM." Moreover, it appeals to the human side of computing, adding the emotive line "Keep it. Lend it to f…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The number of students admitted to Ph.D. programs this fall dropped 15 percent from the previous year, according to data from over 50 top research universities, raising fears that the nation's capacity to produce new science could be diminished. The decline is driven, in part, by a chaotic and unpredictable federal funding environment under the Trump administration, as federal cuts are promised and then reversed, and budgets remain un…

locater16 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: One morning in 2019, Adebayo Alonge was in a Cape Town hotel room, preparing to demonstrate his startup's AI answer to a serious problem in African health care: counterfeit medication, which kills thousands of people across the continent every year. The RxScanner is a handheld spectrometer that scans a pill with infrared light, then sends the item's molecular profile to an AI model equipped with a pharmaceutical database. In seconds, the AI identifi…

The Supreme Court allowed Texas to enforce a law requiring app stores to verify users' ages and obtain parental consent before minors can download apps. Tech industry groups argue the law broadly restricts young people's access to digital speech, but the court let a 5th Circuit order stand without explanation or noted dissents. CNN notes that the Supreme Court's decision "doesn't resolve the case but rather will allow Texas to enforce the law while the litigation continues to play out." From th…

SK Hynix is launching a Nasdaq listing expected to raise about $28 billion, giving US investors easier access to one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI memory-chip boom. Reuters reports: The company will sell 17.79 million new shares in the depository receipt listing on the Nasdaq. Ten ADRs will represent one common share and the stock will be sold in a price range that is due to be revealed on Monday, based on SK Hynix's Seoul trading price. SK Hynix's share price was down 4% at 2,327,000 …

The long-running SCO/IBM Unix and Linux ownership dispute has resurfaced yet again, this time through SCO successor Xinuos, which is trying to pursue old license and copyright claims tied to Project Monterey. "The core issue seems to be whether Xinuos even has the right to litigate the matter, or if some ancient legalese in the original agreements means the window for legal argument has long since expired," reports The Register. From the report: [T]he roots of the case are the 1998 alliance bet…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anthropic quickly removed a tracker secretly monitoring Claude Code users in China after a security researcher exposed the hidden code and condemned the spyware-like tracking as a "serious breach of user trust." Last week, a web developer known as "Thereallo" was researching privacy issues in Claude Code and was shocked to find that the AI firm was using "prompt steganography" to hide code that tracks Chinese users "in plain sight." This co…

Microsoft is laying off about 4,800 employees, including 1,600 from Xbox, as it restructures around AI investments and tries to reset its struggling gaming business. "Our business is changing because the world around it is changing. The way technology is built, deployed, and used is transforming faster than at any point in my time here," said Amy Coleman, EVP and chief people officer at Microsoft. "Our customers' needs are shifting, the business models that serve them are shifting, and that mea…

Nintendo will stop selling the original Switch in Europe in mid-February 2027, nearly 10 years after the console's launch. In its place, the company will release updated versions of the Switch 2 and several controllers with user-replaceable batteries to comply with new EU regulations. The Verge reports: The news comes as Nintendo is making a bunch of changes to the rest of its lineup due to EU regulations requiring user-replaceable batteries. Starting this summer, the company says it will start…

Americans now spend an average of 35 minutes a day socializing, down from 45 minutes two decades ago, according to American Time Use Survey data. The decline spans all age groups but is sharpest among 15- to 24-year-olds, whose daily socializing has fallen from about an hour to 35 minutes. Axios reports: Sociologists and psychologists point to several trends driving this phenomenon, which Substack writer Derek Thompson dubbed "The Anti-Social Century" in the Atlantic last year. We're all on our…

Australia plans to double fines for social media platforms that fail to keep under-16s off restricted services, after regulators found 70% of children with accounts remained active three months after the ban took effect. The government says the changes will also give the eSafety Commissioner more power to demand information from platforms and age-assurance providers as teens continue finding ways around the law. Euronews reports: The government said Sunday it would introduce draft legislation t…

Google was ordered to pay almost $2 billion this week to Pricerunner, reports Bloomberg: The Patent and Market Court in Stockholm, which issued the judgment on Wednesday, dismissed most parts of the claim in which Pricerunner sought 80 billion Swedish kronor, or roughly $8.2 billion, in the wake of a European Union antitrust crackdown... The Swedish price-comparison website argued that Google has been abusing its dominant position as a search engine by favoring its own comparison shopping servi…

"A year ago, the message from many business leaders was that AI was going to wipe out jobs," remembers the Wall Street Journal.But "For the past month or so, tech CEOs have been striking a more optimistic tone." In late May, OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman — who has long predicted that AI will lead to seismic shifts in the workforce — said during a conference, "We've been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications." Soon after, he told …