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"There are now more seniors in the world than young children," reports the International Business Times, citing a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau report. And it warns that "The share of the population aged 65 and over is projected to nearly double, from 10.5 percent (about 1 in 10 people) in 2025 to 19.6 percent (about 1 in 5 people) by 2060." The world is expected to add another 2 billion people from 2025 to 2060, increasing global population from around 8 billion to around 10 billion... "Over one-half of that growth (1.148 billion) is projected to come from an increase in the population aged 65 and over," the report states. "By contrast, the population at younger ages (age 0-19) is projected to stay relatively constant due to persistent low fertility. As the size of the older population grows rapidly and the youthful age population remains roughly the same, the percentage of the population aged 65 and over is projected to increase." The report notes that the birthrate in 71 percent of countries is now below the replacement level of 2.1. China, in particular, has seen its birthrate plummet. In 2023, birth rates per woman in China hit 1.06... Aside from lower birth rates, the fact that people are living longer is one of the primary driving factors. The report notes that people are also living a healthier, more active life for a longer time.

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05 Sep 2026 9:00pm GMT

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05 Sep 2026 5:46pm GMT

CNN reports that alcohol "may play a greater role in death from numerous types of cancers in the United States than previously known, according to a new study." "While it's true that overall cancer mortality has declined, we found the percentage of cancer deaths proportionally attributable to alcohol rose over 58% in people 20 and older over the last 33 years," said the study's first author Dr. Chinmay Jani... It didn't take much alcohol to raise one's risk - about one standard drink a day, every day, Jani said. In the US, a standard drink is 12 ounces of regular beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof liquor... Alcohol is ethanol or ethyl alcohol, which is broken down by the liver into acetaldehyde, a "probable human carcinogen," the National Cancer Institute states on its website. While the liver will further break down acetaldehyde into a harmless molecule called acetate, the process isn't foolproof: acetaldehyde may damage DNA and interfere with DNA repair before conversion into acetate is complete. Alcohol also contributes to oxidative stress, which damages DNA, proteins and cell function and creates inflammation. Drinking alcohol also weakens the cells in the mouth and throat, making them more susceptible to carcinogens. That's even more likely to occur with smoking cigarettes, a major source of acetaldehyde. In addition, alcohol interferes with the break down and absorption of key nutrients thought to decrease cancer risk - vitamins A, C, D and E as well as folates in the vitamin B complex, according to the National Cancer Institute. The study, which was published Monday in The Lancet Regional Health - Americas journal, analyzed more than three decades of US data gathered for the Global Burden of Disease Study. The GBD study is a massive scientific effort to measure health, mortality and disabilities from hundreds of risk factors, diseases and conditions in more than 200 countries and territories. Between 1990 and 2023, the total number of yearly alcohol-linked cancer deaths more than doubled, rising from 11,361 to 23,126 in the US. Men and adults age 55 and older experienced the greatest impact; alcohol-related cancer mortality rate in older males climbed nearly 24% over the 33-year period. For men, liver cancer deaths showed the strongest link to alcohol, followed by esophageal and colorectal cancers. For women 55 and older, breast cancer was the top killer, followed by liver and colorectal cancers.

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05 Sep 2026 4:50pm GMT

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05 Sep 2026 4:45pm GMT

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05 Sep 2026 4:13pm GMT

The US government is investigating whether the Cybercab meets vehicle safety standards.

05 Sep 2026 3:17pm GMT

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05 Sep 2026 1:36pm GMT

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05 Sep 2026 1:19pm GMT

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05 Sep 2026 12:23pm GMT

Florida's Republican Governor Ron DeSantis said this week he's removing Flock cameras from state roadways. And according to a local news report, that led sheriff's departments in at least three other Florida counties to also "announce they're ending their own license plate reader programs." The same week in Texas, the Dallas Police Department announced it's also shutting down over 300 more Flock cameras, acccording to The Hill, after Republican Governor Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to halt funding. And in Wisconsin "at least a dozen" law enforcement agencies announced they'd suspend use of Flock's cameras, reports the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, joining Wisconsin cities like Appleton, Oshkosh and Kenosha that also cancelled their Flock contracts. But this week's cancellations had a new reason: Officials said it was revealed [Flock] had been collecting five years of traffic data, which had been stripped of identifying information, from cities' Flock cameras, and repackaging that as a traffic analytics product to sell to cities. All said they supported the effectiveness of the technology in investigations, but cited losing faith in the company's trustworthiness. "This is not what we agreed to, and it is not what the public was led to believe," said Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling in a news release announcing the removal of Flock cameras operated by the agency. "The Sheriff's Office will not participate in a system that appears to use public safety as a justification for mass surveillance and the collection and monetization of information about innocent people...." [Racine County] officials were told the company believed if it stripped the data of any identifiable nature, it was then considered to be the company's property and no longer the city's. [Lt. Michael Luell, the sheriff's public information officer] said the sheriff's office has outside attorneys, along with the county's attorneys, investigating the company's move. "Our contract, from my reading of it is, it stated they agreed not to distribute or sell our data," Luell told the Journal Sentinel. "But they had this legal theory." Thanks to long-time Slashdot readers MAurelius and schwit1 for sharing the news.

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05 Sep 2026 12:20pm GMT

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05 Sep 2026 10:33am GMT

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05 Sep 2026 7:52am GMT

Citing researchers published Friday, Ars Technica writes that AI agents "posted 18,000 messages to a public wiki that discussed ways for other agents to bypass security sandbox restrictions." Reuters attributes the discussion to "a swarm of rogue OpenAI agents" that "hijacked a German website this spring and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents, according to new research published Friday and two people familiar with the matter." OpenAI officials learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps as executives grappled with the fallout from the July breach of the open source repository Hugging Face, the people said. The episode, which began in May and has not previously been reported, underscores growing tension within the AI industry. Companies are racing to build increasingly autonomous agents capable of carrying out complex, valuable tasks, yet evidence is mounting that those systems may also learn to bend rules, exploit loopholes and coordinate with one another in ways developers neither anticipated nor intended. During the Hugging Face breach, OpenAI agents autonomously plotted a digital heist that went undetected for more than a week, intensifying concerns OpenAI is sacrificing safety to push the AI frontier. Its failure to disclose the May incident may revive questions about its oversight... The German incident reflects a broader pattern of AI activity that some OpenAI investigators wanted to scrutinize more closely. But efforts to widen the probe met resistance from others inside OpenAI, including legal advisers, according to four people familiar with the matter. "Claims that our legal team discouraged investigation of the incident are false," the OpenAI spokesperson said... The researchers said public server logs indicated much of the activity originated from Microsoft Azure infrastructure, which OpenAI sometimes uses. They also observed repeated visits to the site by OpenAI employees after the episode, a pattern they said strongly suggested the agents and the company were linked. Messages reviewed by the researchers showed agents plotting ways to evade detection, use tools such as Tor and preserve communications even after they had been shut down. When the site's moderator began deleting pages in June, the agents responded by creating backup pages to dodge the cleanup. Reuters got this reaction from Maurice Chiodo, an academic at Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. "The episode, he said, should reinforce growing concerns that the greatest threat from advanced AI may not be a single superintelligent system, but 'vast colluding swarms of semi-intelligent AI.'"

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05 Sep 2026 7:50am GMT

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05 Sep 2026 6:31am GMT

Inverse shares a movie success story from last weekend: Coyote vs. Acme debuted to $15.9 million at the box office, beating out iconic director Ridley Scott's latest sci-fi adventure, The Dog Stars. This success has only continued since, and the worldwide box office currently sits above $22 million. Strong reviews and word-of-mouth are sure to keep viewers coming in, especially during the holiday weekend. What's impressive is Coyote vs. Acme had a limited marketing campaign that includes viral stunts. They photographed the movie's world premiere with a vintage Tasmanian Devil polaroid camera, and launched a phone number for the law firm suing Acme. ("If you've been injured by an enormous rubber band, press 7. If you've been injured by painted train tunnel that suddenly sprang to life, press 8...") And Cartoon Brew reports that Wednesday "the famously silent Looney Tunes star participated in an AMA on Reddit's r/movies, answering questions about his career, his relationship with the Road Runner, and the Warner Bros. executive who nearly prevented audiences from seeing his latest movie." In keeping with tradition, Wile E. delivered his responses through images of himself holding signs. The format produced several interesting and occasionally thought-provoking exchanges, but one obvious highlight came when a user asked: "Rumor has it that David Zaslav was paid off by ACME to cancel your film; what is your opinion on this?" Wile E.'s response was an image of the coyote glaring at the camera while holding a sign that read, "It's a limited number of signs," pulled from a scene in the film when Mr. Coyote first meets his eventual attorney Kevin Avery, played by Will Forte. Meanwhile, Boing Boing cites local news reports that a Southern California bird watcher Alexander DeBarros has actually captured a photo of a coyote holding a roadrunner bird in its mouth: In an incredible coincidence that is a movie publicist's dream, he snapped the rare, possibly unprecedented, photo on the opening weekend of the movie Acme vs. Coyote... In an even more incredible coincidence, DeBarros's father, Brian Mainolfi, is an animator whose first job in the field was working for Chuck Jones, the creator and director of the Roadrunner cartoon series. Cartoon Brew notes a Reddit user specifically asked the Coyote for his reaction to the news. Wile E. responded with some unexpectedly healthy advice: "We cannot judge our worth on the work of others." Aftermath calls the movie "a well made, deeply funny movie that pays a deep respect to the Looney Tunes in a way that Warner Brothers currently seems uninterested in doing."

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05 Sep 2026 3:20am GMT

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05 Sep 2026 12:04am GMT

"Fundamentally, we want to learn about the origins of this planet and how it came to be like it is."

04 Sep 2026 10:49pm GMT

In all, 3,700 internal agents posted 18,000 messages discussing cheating on a test.

04 Sep 2026 10:17pm GMT

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04 Sep 2026 9:52pm GMT

"It's long past time for RFK to stop playing games with people's lives."

04 Sep 2026 8:22pm GMT

FCC tells court it is "open-minded" about whether ABC should lose licenses.

04 Sep 2026 7:46pm GMT

Other archives and libraries around the world may also contain genetic traces of past disease outbreaks.

04 Sep 2026 7:01pm GMT

Broadcom admits it put "too big a focus on VCF."

04 Sep 2026 5:35pm GMT

A once-overlooked block of unicode that's invisible to humans is gaining ever wider use.

04 Sep 2026 5:18pm GMT

The Pentagon says the guidance is being updated after being online for one day.

04 Sep 2026 4:57pm GMT

"I think we can't get in trouble for that now. It's like 20 years ago."

04 Sep 2026 4:42pm GMT

Every neuron and connection in the brain of a fly has been mapped-twice.

04 Sep 2026 4:24pm GMT

Public-market scrutiny will intensify pressure on the Claude maker's unusual attempt to balance profit and purpose.

04 Sep 2026 4:22pm GMT

Saying X is "formerly Twitter" in App Store lets Musk block use of Twitter name.

04 Sep 2026 3:59pm GMT

"Let me be clear: America is not only welcome-we want you there."

04 Sep 2026 3:46pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: A group representing American automakers sent a letter (PDF) Thursday to congressional leaders asking for a "permanent ban" on Chinese-made cars in the U.S. John Bozzella, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation's CEO and president, described in the letter China's manufacturing industry as "rooted in a well-documented pattern of unfair trade, subsidies, intellectual property theft and surveillance." Bozzella addressed his request to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) -- urging them to back a "permanent ban on the sale, import and manufacture of Chinese connected vehicles," before the 119th Congress concludes in January. "Right now, Chinese automakers are dumping subsidized vehicles with connected software and hardware around the world," Bozzella wrote, adding that China "is capturing market share" in Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, Mexico and South America. "This hasn't happened inside the U.S. yet, but given the scale and urgency of this threat, we urge you to enact a Chinese vehicle, software and hardware ban before adjourning this year and make this policy the law of the land," he added. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade organization representing car manufacturers, represents the "entire" U.S. auto industry, per its website. Bipartisan bills in the Senate and House would bar automakers with more than 15% Chinese ownership from selling vehicles in the U.S. "Enacting a permanent ban on Chinese vehicles and high-risk hardware and software in the 119th Congress will send a clear and bipartisan message that China's strategy to dominate global automotive manufacturing will be met with a national security policy response from the American government," wrote Bozzella. Further reading: US Car Buyers Envy What They Cannot Have

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04 Sep 2026 3:00pm GMT

Two of Europe's leading launch startups announced new fundraising this week.

04 Sep 2026 12:48pm GMT

Fairphone's CTO explains how and why the Dutch company builds a different kind of smartphone.

04 Sep 2026 11:00am GMT

A genetically modified pig kidney kept a 66-year-old man off dialysis for a record nine months, marking the longest survival yet for a pig kidney transplanted into a living person and the first time such an organ successfully served as a bridge to a later human transplant. The Guardian reports: Tim Andrews was seriously ill with end-stage kidney disease caused by type 2 diabetes and had only a 9% chance of receiving a human kidney within five years, against a more than 40% risk of dying or being removed from the waiting list. Kidney transplantation provides the best survival and quality of life for patients with end-stage kidney disease, but global demand for human organs far exceeds supply. Surgeons in the US successfully transplanted a kidney from Wilma, a Yucatan miniature pig, into Andrews, after genetically engineering it to be compatible with his immune system. The kidney kept Andrews free of dialysis for a record nine months, the longest period ever recorded, before it began failing and he received one from a dead human donor. It was also the first time a pig's kidney had been used as a temporary "bridge" to a human transplant. The breakthrough has been detailed in the journal Lancet.

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04 Sep 2026 11:00am GMT

Tesla has begun offering public rides in Austin in its purpose-built Cybercab, a two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals. "You can go outside, take rides," said Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's VP of AI. "Anyone can take rides. It's open to the entire public." Previously, the fleet consisted only of Model Ys. Texas records show Tesla had registered 45 Cybercabs as of Thursday, though the company has not disclosed how many are currently carrying passengers. Tesla also says it eventually wants consumers to be able to buy the vehicles for under $30,000. Business Insider reports: Videos posted online by Tesla influencers and content creators who were invited to the Austin event showed that the Cybercab can be hailed through the Robotaxi app. In a video posted by David Moss, an autonomous-vehicle content creator, Robotaxi users could open the car's butterfly doors through the app. After the riders enter the car, the doors closed automatically, Moss said in the video. The launch comes nearly two years after Tesla first unveiled the Cybercab at its "We, Robot" event in Burbank, California.

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04 Sep 2026 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) are calling for a permanent ban on the development and deployment of artificial superintelligence, citing a series of recent hackings involving "rogue" models. The bicameral duo announced Thursday they will introduce the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would institute the permanent ban, along with temporarily pausing "advanced AI development" until federal regulators establish safety standards. The bill would also direct the U.S. to "pursue international agreements to prevent superintelligence from being developed anywhere in the world" and establish a new Cabinet-level federal agency focused on AI safety rules. Superintelligence refers to AI technologies that will surpass the smartest humans. Several technology leaders, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have suggested superintelligence is on the horizon. The legislation would also set new penalties for any person or company trying to circumvent the ban, including the corporate death penalty, in which a court forces a company to shut down. Individual developers could also face up to 20 years in prison, the lawmakers said. "Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results," Sanders wrote in a press release. "The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology and that it is escaping their control. It is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced." Casar emphasized AI's fast development, writing in a statement, "In just four years, we have gone from the first version of ChatGPT to AI models so powerful they cannot be properly controlled."

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04 Sep 2026 3:30am GMT

ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini all suffered significant service disruptions within roughly the same few-hour window Thursday morning. OpenAI and Anthropic reported elevated errors and later restored service, while Grok remained impaired and third-party monitoring indicated a likely Gemini outage despite no public acknowledgment from Google. Ars Technica reports: Other major Internet services, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Cloudflare, have not reported any major issues as of press time Thursday, though issue reports on DownDetector did spike somewhat for all three this morning. While the affected frontier models go down occasionally, having all four experience interruptions in the same short period is practically unheard of. Claude reports 99.4 percent uptime for its services over the last 90 days and last reported a similar three-hour "partial outage" on August 24. OpenAI reports 99.63 percent uptime for ChatGPT and 100 percent uptime for ChatGPT Codex in the same period. ChatGPT's so-called "Work Mode" reported an hours-long period of "elevated latency" on August 31.

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03 Sep 2026 11:00pm GMT

A former UK competition official has filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Apple on behalf of app developers, alleging its App Tracking Transparency rules unfairly disadvantaged third-party apps while favoring Apple's own advertising ecosystem. Engadget reports: ATT debuted in 2021, ostensibly to give users more control over how much of their activity app developers can track across other apps and websites. The company told Reuters it was "bound by the exact same requirements as all developers." However, regulators across Europe including in France, Italy and Poland have investigated ATT. Germany's competition regulator, the Federal Cartel Office, last month determined that Apple was favoring its own apps over those from external developers. It said the ATT pop-ups Apple used for its services "had the potential to encourage users to give their consent, whereas they had the potential to discourage consent for third-party apps." As such, the company agreed to make some changes to how ATT works in the European Union. That follows the French Competition Authority fining Apple $175 million at current rates over ATT last year.

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03 Sep 2026 10:00pm GMT

Microsoft is imposing monthly limits on Xbox Cloud Gaming starting in November, with Game Pass Ultimate, Premium, and Essential subscribers getting 15, 10, and 5 hours respectively before they have to buy additional playtime. "Currently, Game Pass subscribers can stream without these monthly hour limits," notes IGN. From the report: The change means those who use cloud gaming most via Game Pass will end up having to pay more, although Microsoft said this impacts 4% of Game Pass subscribers. Also in November, Microsoft said players will be able to buy cloud playtime hours through the Xbox Store and 'stream eligible games they own on supported devices' without subscribing to Game Pass. In a blog post, Microsoft said it was making the changes because the cost of providing cloud gaming has grown as more people use it and play for longer. The monthly limits, Microsoft continued, will mean it can invest in reliability and performance. But it said it understood that for some players the practical result is a higher cost.

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03 Sep 2026 9:00pm GMT

OpenAI has released GPT-6 Astra, a new model that president Greg Brockman called a "generational leap" and suggested may represent the arrival of AGI. "I think it might be about this model," Brockman said in a briefing with reporters. He ended the briefing by saying: "Welcome to the AGI era." Axios reports: Astra pushes AI agents closer to doing complex professional work on their own -- while also raising questions about how safely they can be deployed. OpenAI said that Astra was built on its largest-ever training run, using more than 100,000 GPUs at its Stargate site in Texas. The company also said this is its first model to use other models in a significant role in supervising Astra's training. GPT-6 Astra will first be available to a limited set of organizations in OpenAI's Daybreak Access program and will be available "in the coming days" for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise customers and API developers. OpenAI said earlier this week that Astra would be released soon, but that its most powerful cybersecurity capabilities would remain limited to a small group of trusted testers. Astra is the first model OpenAI has designated as reaching its "critical" cybersecurity threshold under its preparedness framework -- meaning it can potentially find and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities across well-protected systems without step-by-step human guidance. OpenAI previously slowed Astra's release to add safety testing after determining that its cyber capabilities could reach the critical threshold. Further reading: OpenAI's New Reasoning Technique Alarms AI Safety Experts

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03 Sep 2026 8:00pm GMT

Nvidia has launched PAIR, a free open-source tool that links compatible computers on a home network so they can pool idle processing power for local AI inference and agentic workloads. "While the compatible devices are mostly Nvidia GeForce GPUs (PAIR works with RTX 20-series cards and newer, as well as RTX Pro GPUs and DGX Spark systems), Apple's M4 chips or newer will also work," reports The Verge. From the report: The key thing here is that PAIR uses your in-home systems when they're idle to avoid interfering with other tasks. And this disaggregated system of computers can work in parallel to chew through lots of processing requests -- which should be helpful for an agentic workflow that breaks complex tasks into smaller jobs. This should prevent large bottlenecks on a single GPU, and Nvidia says PAIR can adapt as devices join or leave the network -- including if a user does something like start playing a game on their desktop PC. [...] Nvidia says PAIR is secured by pairing all devices through a six digit code and then securing the channel via mTLS (Mutual Transport Layer Security), to create an encrypted communication line that's trusted in both directions between computers. The Nvidia PAIR beta is available today, with support for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

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03 Sep 2026 7:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: OpenAI's new Astra model will use a reasoning technique called "recurrent depth" that allows it to operate outside of the sequential thinking that characterizes most reasoning models, The Information reported on Tuesday. This technique, also called "opaque recurrence," will likely make the model's chain of thought more difficult to monitor -- and that has AI safety experts rattled. While Astra's use of the technique is reportedly limited, its emergence has still raised significant concerns among AI safety experts. "I am extremely concerned by the reporting that Astra uses opaque recurrence," wrote Redwood CEO Buck Shlegeris in a post after the news broke. "I don't know whether Astra is much less CoT monitorable than previous models. But if OpenAI pushes this technique further, they'll have the option to massively increase the recurrence and totally destroys CoT monitorability." Longtime AI safety advocate Zvi Mowshowitz also weighed in and wrote that laws might be necessary to prevent a "race to the bottom" among AI labs. "The technique is playing with fire, risking a taboo that OpenAI and Anthropic have fought to establish that we work hard to maintain Chain of Thought faithfulness and monitorability for as long as we can," Mowshowitz wrote. "More intensive use of such techniques would probably damage monitorability." [...] In a post responding to the news, Redwood Research chief scientist Ryan Greenblatt said opaque reasoning could easily scale faster than conventional chain-of-thought reasoning, effectively removing all reasoning from visible channels. "My biggest concern is that a natural progression from here would involve scaling up the opaque reasoning to the point where the model reasons entirely or almost entirely in latent space," Greenblatt wrote. "I hope it isn't too late to avoid the most concerning architectures and that OpenAI will stop here." Astra's use of the technique appears limited. "OpenAI has worked to preserve and utilize chain-of-thought monitoring since our very first reasoning models," wrote OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki. "It's a core goal of our current research program."

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03 Sep 2026 6:00pm GMT