The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Tuesday set their symbolic Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight -- the closest the timepiece has ever been to the theoretical point of annihilation since scientists created it during the Cold War in 1947.

The clock now stands four seconds nearer than last year's setting, and this marks the third time in four years that the Bulletin has moved it closer to midnight. The Chicago-based nonprofit pointed to aggressive behavior by nuclear powers Russia, China and the United States, fraying nuclear arms control frameworks, ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, unregulated AI integration into military systems, and climate change.

"In terms of nuclear risks, nothing in 2025 trended in the right direction," said Alexandra Bell, the Bulletin's president and CEO. The last remaining nuclear arms pact between the US and Russia, the New START treaty, expires on February 5.

Amazon is closing all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores in a shift to focus on its online same-day delivery service and new big-box retail stores. From a report: The e-commerce giant said Tuesday that some of its shuttered Amazon-branded brick-and-mortar stores would be converted into Whole Foods Market locations. Amazon said its branded stores failed to deliver the right economic model and distinctive customer experience necessary for large-scale expansion.

Amazon's same-day delivery service for groceries is currently available in more than 5,000 U.S. cities and towns. The company said it plans to expand the service to more communities in 2026 but didn't specify where. Amazon said it planned to open over 100 new Whole Foods Market stores over the next few years.

OpenAI launched a dedicated team in October called OpenAI for Science, led by vice president Kevin Weil, that aims to make scientists more productive -- but Weil admitted in an interview with MIT Technology Review that the LLM cannot yet produce novel discoveries and says that's not currently the mission.

UC Berkeley statistician Nikita Zhivotovskiy, who has used LLMs since the first ChatGPT, told the publication: "So far, they seem to mainly combine existing results, sometimes incorrectly, rather than produce genuinely new approaches."

"I don't think models are there yet," Weil admitted. "Maybe they'll get there. I'm optimistic that they will." The models excel at surfacing forgotten solutions and finding connections across fields, but Weil says the bar for accelerating science doesn't require "Einstein-level reimagining of an entire field."

GPT-5 has read substantially every paper written in the last 30 years, he says, and can bring together analogies from unrelated disciplines. That accumulation of existing knowledge -- helping scientists avoid struggling on problems already solved -- is itself an acceleration.

Pinterest said on Tuesday it would trim its workforce by less than 15% and reduce office space, as the social media company looks to reallocate resources to AI-focused roles and initiatives. From a report: The announcement comes as the company competes with TikTok and Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram for digital advertising budgets, as these platforms continue to draw marketers with their extensive user base.

Pinterest had 5,205 full-time employees as of September 2025. The latest job cut would translate to less than 780 positions. Top executives at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting said while jobs would disappear, new ones would spring up, with two telling Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies which were planning layoffs anyway. Last week, design software maker Autodesk also announced a 7% job cut to redirect investments to its cloud platform and AI efforts.

Samsung said today that its Galaxy Z TriFold, the first tri-fold smartphone to ship in the U.S., will be available starting January 30 at a price point of $2,899 -- substantially more expensive than any other phone on the U.S. market, including Samsung's own $2,000 Galaxy Z Fold 7 and a fully loaded 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max.

The company will only sell the device through its website and Samsung Experience Stores; mobile carrier partners including Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T won't be offering it directly. The TriFold unfolds into a 10-inch tablet, measures 3.9mm at its thinnest point, and is rated for 200,000 folds over its lifetime. Samsung launched the TriFold in South Korea on December 12 at 3.59 million won, about $2,450 at the time. Early reviews have praised the expansive inner screen for video but noted the 309-gram weight, thick folded dimensions, and half-baked software as significant drawbacks.

Court documents unsealed last week in a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic reveal that the AI company ran an operation called "Project Panama" to buy millions of physical books, slice off their spines, scan the pages to train its Claude chatbot, and then send the remains to recycling companies.

The company spent tens of millions of dollars on the effort and hired Tom Turvey, a Google executive who had worked on the legally contested Google Books project two decades earlier. Anthropic bought books in batches of tens of thousands from retailers including Better World Books and World of Books. A vendor document noted the company was seeking to scan between 500,000 and two million books.

Before Project Panama, Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann downloaded books from LibGen, a shadow library of pirated material, over 11 days in June 2021. He later shared a link to the Pirate Library Mirror site with colleagues, writing "this is awesome!!!" Meta employees similarly downloaded books from torrent platforms after approval from Mark Zuckerberg, court filings allege, though one engineer wrote that "torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right." Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion in August without admitting wrongdoing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Thurrott: Microsoft is testing a refresh of the Xbox Cloud Gaming web experience in public preview. "This preview is a first look at our new web interface on your browser and lets you try the updated design and product flow before it is rolled out broadly," Microsoft's Patrick Siu explains. "Players who opt in to this preview will see some changes to their experience including updated navigation features and a refreshed look and feel. As this is a preview, some functions may not yet be available or may behave differently than the current web experience. We will continue iterating during the preview period and changes may be made over time."

[...] There's no real info about what's in the new experience, oddly. Microsoft notes only that it "lays the foundation for accelerating [their] ability to build new experiences for players," and that it "helps [them] validate the new web platform and refine the experience for everyone." The public preview can be found at xbox.com/play.

jeditobe writes: ReactOS, the open-source operating system aimed at binary compatibility with Windows, recently marked its 30th anniversary. Launched in 1996, ReactOS has focused on providing a free alternative to Windows, with compatibility for Windows applications and drivers. Though still in development, it has made significant progress in recent years, including improvements to USB support, better hardware compatibility, and enhanced performance with the release of version 0.4.15. The upcoming 0.4.16 release is set to introduce UEFI support, KMDF and WDDM graphics driver support, marking a major step forward in ReactOS's development.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from PCMag: A lawsuit claims that WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption is a sham, and is demanding damages, but the app's parent company, Meta, calls the claims "false and absurd." The lawsuit was filed in a San Francisco US district court on Friday and comes from a group of users based in countries such as Australia, Mexico, and South Africa, according to Bloomberg.

As evidence, the lawsuit cites unnamed "courageous whistleblowers" who allege that WhatsApp and Meta employees can request to view a user's messages through a simple process, thus bypassing the app's end-to-end encryption. "A worker need only send a 'task' (i.e., request via Meta's internal system) to a Meta engineer with an explanation that they need access to WhatsApp messages for their job," the lawsuit claims. "The Meta engineering team will then grant access -- often without any scrutiny at all -- and the worker's workstation will then have a new window or widget available that can pull up any WhatsApp user's messages based on the user's User ID number, which is unique to a user but identical across all Meta products."

"Once the Meta worker has this access, they can read users' messages by opening the widget; no separate decryption step is required," the 51-page complaint adds. "The WhatsApp messages appear in widgets commingled with widgets containing messages from unencrypted sources. Messages appear almost as soon as they are communicated -- essentially, in real-time. Moreover, access is unlimited in temporal scope, with Meta workers able to access messages from the time users first activated their accounts, including those messages users believe they have deleted." The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Telegraph: China hacked the mobile phones of senior officials in Downing Street for several years, The Telegraph can disclose. The spying operation is understood to have compromised senior members of the government, exposing their private communications to Beijing. State-sponsored hackers are known to have targeted the phones of some of the closest aides to Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak between 2021 and 2024. It is unclear whether the hack included the mobile phones of the prime ministers themselves, but one source with knowledge of the breach said it went "right into the heart of Downing Street."

Intelligence sources in the US indicated that the Chinese espionage operation, known as Salt Typhoon, was ongoing, raising the possibility that Sir Keir Starmer and his senior staff may also have been exposed. MI5 issued an "espionage alert" to Parliament in November about the threat of spying from the Chinese state. [...] The attack raises the possibility that Chinese spies could have read text messages or listened to calls involving senior members of the Government. Even if they were unable to eavesdrop on calls, hackers may have gained access to metadata, revealing who officials were in contact with and how frequently, as well as geolocation data showing their approximate whereabouts.

Reddit has forced Jaime Rogozinski, the founder of infamous r/WallStreetBets, to strip the WallStreetBets name from an upcoming Miami conference after legal threats citing trademark rights. According to a press release, it's the "first known case of a social media company enforcing trademark control over a user-created community." From the report: After years of litigation, courts ultimately sided with Reddit in a decision now referred to as the "Rogozinski Ruling," a precedent that grants platforms broad authority to assert trademark ownership over user-created communities. That ruling now forms the basis for Reddit's demand that the words "WallStreetBets" be physically removed from the event. "They aren't afraid of the name being used," said Rogozinski. "If they were, they'd have to sue the internet. What they're afraid of is the creator hanging out with his creation. They're afraid of the community's independence. And they're afraid it's evolved into something bigger than a subreddit."

The irony is difficult to ignore. The original subreddit counts around three million subscribers, while conservative estimates place more than seven million WallStreetBets participants spread across other platforms. For a movement that built its reputation confronting corporate overreach, Reddit's decision to extend its authority beyond the confines of its web-based platform, reaching into real-world gatherings to police culture it did not create, risks stirring a hornet's nest with a long memory and a track record of collective action.

The event formerly known as WallStreetBets Live, will proceed as scheduled on January 28-30 in Miami. In compliance with Reddit's demands, all references to the name will be physically redacted on-site. "Reddit's lawyers did one thing right," Rogozinski continued. "They proved exactly why we need a decentralized future. This event has become a live case study in what's broken about modern social media. Platforms can deplatform creators, and now, with courts backing them, they can appropriate what users build."

Skylight, an open-source, TikTok-style video app built on the AT Protocol, surged past 380,000 users after last week's shake-up around TikTok's U.S. ownership and privacy concerns. TechCrunch reports: Launched last year and backed by Mark Cuban and other investors, Skylight's mobile app is built on the AT Protocol, the technology that also powers the decentralized X rival Bluesky, which now has north of 42 million users. Skylight, co-founded by CEO Tori White and CTO Reed Harmeyer, offers a built-in video editor; user profiles; support for likes, commenting, and sharing; and the ability for community curators to create custom feeds for others to follow. The app now has over 150,000 videos uploaded directly to the platform. It can also stream videos from Bluesky because of its AT Protocol integration.

Harmeyer said Saturday that 1.4 million videos were played on the app the day before, up 3x over the past 24 hours. The app had also seen sign-ups increase more than 150%. Other noteworthy stats include over a 50% increase in returning users, over 40% rise in video played on average, and over 100% increase in posts created. This surge was likely triggered by concerns over TikTok's change in ownership and its unfortunately timed technical glitches. [...] Over the weekend, Skylight's CEO, Tori White, said the app added around 20,000 new users and is continuing to grow. So far this January, the app has seen around 95,000 monthly active users. "We've seen what happens when one person dictates what's pushed into people's feeds," White told TechCrunch. "Not only does it harm a creator's connection with their followers, but the entire health of the platform. That's why we built Skylight Social on open standards. We wanted creator and user power to be guaranteed by the technology. Not an empty promise, but an irrevocable right."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: Microsoft on Monday announced Maia 200, the second generation of its custom AI chip, claiming it's the most powerful first-party silicon from any major cloud provider. The company says Maia 200 delivers three times the performance of Amazon's latest Trainium chip on certain benchmarks, and exceeds Google's most recent tensor processing unit (TPU) on others. The chip is already running workloads at Microsoft's data center near Des Moines, Iowa. Microsoft says Maia 200 is powering OpenAI's GPT-5.2 models, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and internal projects from its Superintelligence team. A second deployment at a data center near Phoenix is planned next.

It's part of the larger trend among cloud giants to build their own custom silicon for AI rather than rely solely on Nvidia. [...] The company says Maia 200 offers 30% better performance-per-dollar than its current hardware. Maia 200 also builds on the first-generation chip with a more specific focus on inference, the process of running AI models after they've been trained. [...] Microsoft is also opening the door to outside developers. The company announced a software development kit that will let AI startups and researchers optimize their models for Maia 200. Developers and academics can sign up for an early preview starting today.

California tech executive Gordon Abas Goodarzi has been arrested and charged with murder in the death of his estranged wife, Aryan Papoli, whose body was found last November down an embankment off Highway 138 in San Bernardino County. Authorities initially believed the injuries were consistent with a fall, but the case was later ruled a homicide following a months-long investigation by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department. "Arrest records show that Goodarzi is currently in custody without bail and faces a murder charge and that he is set to appear in court Monday," reports SFGATE. From the report: Goodarzi, a California tech executive with ties to BattleBots, is publicly listed as the president and CEO of Magmotor, which describes itself as a "proud" supporter of the combat robot community and claims to support several teams each year. According to his LinkedIn, Goodarzi also previously worked as a research affiliate at UCLA's B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences since 2023.

Originally from Iran, Papoli and Goodarzi settled in Los Angeles County's verdant Rolling Hills community because of its tranquility and natural beauty, Papoli previously wrote. [...] She described her husband, Goodarzi, as a pioneer in the world of renewable energy, developing both electric and hybrid vehicles since the 1980s. According to Papoli, he also worked as the technical director at Hughes Electronics, which developed and manufactured the EV1, an early iteration of the electric car, in the 1990s.