A major international study looking at nearly 300,000 children has revealed a two-way link between the amount of time kids spend on screens and their emotional and social well-being.
Children who spent more time using devices like TVs, tablets, computers, and gaming consoles were at a higher risk of developing problems like aggression, anxiety, and low self-esteem later in life, the study found.
The connection also works in reverse: Children who were already struggling with social or emotional challenges tended to spend more time on all types of screens.
Time spent on gaming consoles was particularly linked to a greater chance of developing issues, according to the study, published Monday in the academic journal Psychological Bulletin.
Warfare has changed. The tactics are different. The technology is different. The ability to wage asymmetric warfare in your enemy’s camp has never been greater. Enemies can hit multiple strategic targets deep in our homeland – including parts of our nuclear deterrence capabilities. I sure as heck hope our military planners are paying attention.
Ukraine says it completed its biggest long-range attack of the war with Russia on Sunday, after using smuggled drones to launch a series of major strikes on 40 Russian warplanes at four military bases.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said 117 drones were used in the so-called “Spider’s Web” operation by the SBU security service, striking “34% of [Russia’s] strategic cruise missile carriers”.
SBU sources earlier told BBC News it took a year-and-a-half to organise the strikes, which involved drones hidden in wooden mobile cabins, with remotely operated roofs on trucks, brought near the airbases and then fired “at the right time”.
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Sources in the SBU earlier on Sunday told the BBC in a statement that four Russian airbases – two of which are thousands of miles from Ukraine – were hit:
Belaya in Irkutsk oblast (region), Siberia
Olenya in Murmansk oblast, Russia’s extreme north-west
Dyagilevo in central Ryazan oblast
Ivanovo in central Ivanovo oblast
The SBU sources said that among the hit Russian aircraft were strategic nuclear capable bombers called Tu-95 and Tu-22M3, as well as A-50 early warning warplanes.
Much like the Crimean War (the 1853 one, not the most recent one), the Ukranian War is proving to be a pivot point in the technological evolution of warfare. We will never fight another war like we have in the past.
In an ever-evolving conflict, soldiers have had to rapidly adapt to new threats posed by changing technology. And the latest threat comes from fibre optic drones. A spool of tens of kilometres of cable is fitted to the bottom of a drone and the physical fibre optic cord is attached to the controller held by the pilot.
“The video and control signal is transmitted to and from the drone through the cable, not through radio frequencies. This means it can’t be jammed by electronic interceptors,” says a soldier with the call sign Moderator, a drone engineer with the 68th Jaeger Brigade.
When drones began to be used in this war in a big way, both militaries fitted their vehicles with electronic warfare systems, which could neutralise drones. That protection has evaporated with the arrival of fibre optic drones, and in the deployment of these devices, Russia currently has the edge. Ukraine is trying to ramp up production.
“Russia started using fibre optic drones much before us, while we were still testing them. These drones can be used in places where we have to go lower than usual drones. We can even enter houses and look for targets inside,” says Venia, a drone pilot with the 68th Jaeger Brigade.
“We’ve started joking that maybe we should carry scissors to cut the cord,” says Serhii, the artillery man.
Fibre optic drones do have drawbacks – they are slower and the cable could get entangled in trees. But at the moment, their widespread use by Russia means that transporting soldiers to and from their positions can often be deadlier than the battlefield itself.
During the ongoing massive manhunt for 10 inmates who escaped from a New Orleans jail last week, authorities say the use of facial recognition cameras run by a private organization helped lead to the recapture of one of the fugitives — even as the police department has come under scrutiny by critics from civil rights organizations to conservative politicians over its use of the technology.
Earlier this week, New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick told ABC News that facial recognition cameras maintained by Project N.O.L.A. had been used in the New Orleans manhunt despite the fact that she recently ordered a pause in the automated alerts her officers had been receiving from the group, which operates independently of the police department.
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In a March 27, 2025 letter to Kash Patel, who was then acting director of the federal Bureau Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms Explosives, Biggs, the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance, and Davidson raised concerns over news reports indicating the ATF utilized facial recognition technology to identify gun owners. “The Subcommittee has concerns about ATF’s use of facial recognition and Al programs and the effects that its use has upon American citizens’ Second Amendment rights and rights to privacy,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter, requesting documents on policies and training in the use of facial recognition technology.
I’m with the content creators on this one. One could make the argument that having an AI model scoop up copyrighted material for training is okay as long as the model doesn’t actually copy it. In that sense it would not be any different than a person reading a book or listening to a song and using that knowledge to inform some future work. But there isn’t anything that prevents an AI model using the material in a way that violates the copyright. At the very least, it would seem that the tech companies should pay the content creators for their work or pay them if their work is used by the AI model in the future.
Late last year, the U.K. government kicked off a consultation on proposals that would give tech giants and AI labs like OpenAI a legally sound way of using copyrighted content to train their advanced foundational models.
Under the proposals, artists would have to opt out of having their copyright-protected works from being scraped by large language models. LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini rely on huge amounts of data to generate humanlike responses in the form of text, images, video and audio.
This led to concerns from the U.K.’s creative industries, as it would mean placing the onus on content creators to request not to have their data used for the training of AI models — which, they argue, would amount to giving their valuable work away.
Nuclear developer Elementl Power said Wednesday it’s signed an agreement with Google to develop three sites for advanced reactors. It’s the latest example of tech giants teaming up with the nuclear industry in an effort to meet the vast energy needs of data centers.
Google will commit early-stage development capital to the three projects, although the exact terms of the deal remain private. Each site will generate at least 600 megawatts of power capacity, and Google will have the option to buy the power once the sites are up and running. The proposed locations remain private, but Elementl said Google’s funding will be used for things like site permitting, securing interconnection rights to the transmission system, contract negotiations and other early-stage matters.
“Google is committed to catalyzing projects that strengthen the power grids where we operate, and advanced nuclear technology provides reliable, baseload, 24/7 energy,” said Amanda Peterson Corio, global head of data center energy at Google.
“Our collaboration with Elementl Power enhances our ability to move at the speed required to meet this moment of AI and American innovation,” she added.
Elementl Power, which was founded in 2022 as a nuclear power project developer, hasn’t yet built any sites.
Indian state power company NTPC is looking to build 30 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear power capacity over the next two decades, three times more than expected, at a cost of $62 billion, three sources said.
The country’s top power producer, which mainly runs coal-fired plants, is seeking land for its ambitious plan in a country where local resistance to such projects is high, said the sources, who have direct knowledge of the matter.
NTPC was targeting 10 GW of nuclear capacity but tripled the goal after the government this month announced plans to open up the sector to foreign and private investment, the sources said.
The U.S. Navy has instructed its members to avoid using artificial intelligence technology from China’s DeepSeek, CNBC has learned.
In a warning issued by email to “shipmates” on Friday, the Navy said DeepSeek’s AI was not to be used “in any capacity” due to “potential security and ethical concerns associated with the model’s origin and usage.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Navy confirmed the authenticity of the email and said it was in reference to the Department of the Navy’s Chief Information Officer’s generative AI policy.
The project, dubbed Stargate, was unveiled at the White House by Trump, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
The executives committed to invest an initial $100 billion and up to $500 billion over the next four years in the project, which will be set up as a separate company.
“What we want to do is we want to keep it in this country,” Trump said of AI, noting that China is a major competitor in the nascent industry.
Stargate’s first joint venture will be to construct data centers in Texas — an effort that is already underway, Ellison said in the Roosevelt Room.
OpenAI later said in an X post that the project “will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.”
Softbank’s Son will be the chairman of Stargate, while semiconductor company Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI will be “the key initial technology partners,” OpenAI said in the post.
A new US law banning TikTok has come into effect, hours after the popular app stopped working across the country.
Late on Saturday a message appearing on the TikTok for US users said a law banning TikTok had been enacted, meaning “you can’t use TikTok for now”.
The video-sharing app was banned over concerns about its links to the Chinese government. It was given until 19 January to be sold to an approved US buyer to avert the ban.
President Joe Biden had said he would leave the issue to his successor, Donald Trump. The president-elect has said he will “most likely” give TikTok a 90-day reprieve from a ban once he takes office on Monday.
China is a hostile nation that is infiltrating us on every front. TikTok is merely a visible one. The pandemic made me more pessimistic about my fellow American’s ability to process and respond to threats in a rational way. The reaction to the TikTok ban reinforces my pessimism.
President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a $20 billion foreign investment to build new data centers across the United States.
Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani, a Trump associate and founder of the property development company DAMAC Properties, is pledging “at least” that amount, the president-elect said at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.
“They may go double, or even somewhat more than double, that amount of money,” Trump said of Sajwani’s company.
The “first phase” of the plan will take place in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana, Trump said.
Sajwani suggested that the Republican’s election spurred him to commit to the investment.
In a number of sweeping changes that will significantly alter the way that posts, videos and other content are moderated online, Meta will adjust its content review policies on Facebook and Instagram, getting rid of fact checkers and replacing them with user-generated “community notes,” similar to Elon Musk’s X, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday.
The changes come just before President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office. Trump and other Republicans have lambasted Zuckerberg and Meta for what they view as censorship of right-wing voices.
“Fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the new policy Tuesday. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.”
Any system can be hacked. The fact that this exists is a risk to the privacy and security of all Americans. TBF, it poses the same risk even if it wasn’t hacked.
The third has been systems that telecommunications companies use in compliance with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which allows law enforcement and intelligence agencies with court orders to track people’s communications. CALEA systems can include classified court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which processes some U.S. intelligence court orders. The FBI official declined to say whether any classified material was accessed.
(CNN) — Top telecom executives met with US national security officials at the White House on Friday as concerns mount over a long-running Chinese cyber-espionage campaign that has targeted some of the most senior US political figures in the country.
The hackers burrowed deep into some major US telecom providers to spy on phone calls and text messages and have proved difficult to kick out of some networks, people briefed on the matter said.
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The hack is shaping up to be one of the biggest cyber and national security challenges facing the incoming Trump administration.
It is “by far” the “worst telecom hack in our nation’s history,” Sen. Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and chairman of the intelligence committee, told CNN.
But the full scope of the hack, who it affects and its impact on national security are still being investigated.
The FBI has notified fewer than 150 victims, most in the Washington, DC, area, according to Warner. But all of those victims have likely called or sent texts to numerous people, meaning the number of records accessed by the hackers is likely far greater. The hackers could listen to the calls of specific targets for certain periods of time, according to Warner.
US officials and private cyber experts are keeping a running tally of the number of telecom firms breached. US broadband and internet providers AT&T, Verizon and Lumen have all been targeted in the hacking effort, CNN previously reported.
A growing number of companies are bringing automation to agriculture. It could ease the sector’s deepening labor shortage, help farmers manage costs, and protect workers from extreme heat. Automation could also improve yields by bringing greater accuracy to planting, harvesting, and farm management, potentially mitigating some of the challenges of growing food in an ever-warmer world.
But many small farmers and producers across the country aren’t convinced. Barriers to adoption go beyond steep price tags to questions about whether the tools can do the jobs nearly as well as the workers they’d replace. Some of those same workers wonder what this trend might mean for them, and whether machines will lead to exploitation.
There are many lessons to be learned from the beeper and radio explosions in Lebanon. One of them is that it is possible – probable – that hostile foreign actors are willing and able to infiltrate tech on a widescale basis for evil intent.
The US is planning to ban certain hardware and software made in China and Russia from cars, trucks and buses in the US due to security risks.
Officials said they were worried that the technology in question, used for autonomous driving and to connect cars to other networks, could allow enemies to “remotely manipulate cars on American roads”.
There is currently minimal use of Chinese or Russia-made software in American cars.
Research shows 25% of web pages posted between 2013 and 2023 have vanished. A few organisations are racing to save the echoes of the web, but new risks threaten their very existence.
It’s possible, thanks to surviving fragments of papyrus, mosaics and wax tablets, to learn what Pompeiians ate for breakfast 2,000 years ago. Understand enough Medieval Latin, and you can learn how many livestock were reared at farms in Northumberland in 11th Century England – thanks to the Domesday Book, the oldest document held in the UK National Archives. Through letters and novels, the social lives of the Victorian era – and who they loved and hated – come into view.
But historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That’s because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally – and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world’s information as it’s produced these days.
It’s not just what gets lost. It’s how things get changed. We have already seen media outlets and others go back years to change the wording or content of old writings. Unless someone printed it out, there is no contemporary record to challenge it.
People who are writing wonderful things with great insight; technical documents that explain how things work; court records; etc… if they are exclusively in a digital format, they are subject to be lost or altered in an instant.
That’s not to say that physical writings can’t be lost too. They can, and have been, for millennia. But while they can be lost, it is not easy to change them.
All that to say, buy books. Print out your important stuff. The digital world is fragile.
Iran was behind the recent hack of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, US intelligence officials have confirmed.
The FBI and other federal agencies said in a joint statement that Iran had chosen to interfere in the US election “to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions”.
The Trump campaign pointed the finger at Iran on 10 August for hacking its internal messages. Iranian officials denied it.
Sources familiar with the investigation told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, that they suspect Iranian hackers also targeted the campaign of Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris.
Notice how the story is written… we confirm that Iran hacked Trump, but to give the appearance that Iran hates Harris just as much, we get unnamed “sources familiar with the investigation” saying that they “suspect” that Iran “targeted” Harris too. There is no evidence or named sources to back it up, but the FBI and media have to run cover for Harris.
This is the way. I hope that it leads to some real nuclear power development.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House on Wednesday plans to announce new measures to support the development of new U.S. nuclear power plants, a large potential source of carbon-free electricity the government says is needed to combat climate change.
The suite of actions, which weren’t previously reported, are aimed at helping the nuclear power industry combat rising security costs and competition from cheaper plants powered by natural gas, wind and solar.
Nuclear proponents say the technology is critical to providing large, uninterrupted supplies of emissions-free power to serve soaring electricity demand from data centers and electric vehicles and still meet President Joe Biden‘s goal of decarbonizing the U.S. economy by 2050.
