Author: BBC

Megan Szostak, 26, was always a “bird kid”.The urge to watch and appreciate the world around her – and avians flitting in and out of it – has been ingrained in her since childhood, when she was given her grandfather’s binoculars after he died.Armed with this and a field guide in her home of San Francisco, she set about identifying birds from an early age. But in recent years, her birding toolbelt has expanded to include something far more modern – an app.”I had friends who probably wouldn’t describe themselves as birders, but more just curious about nature and the…

The source said: “He has the courage to fix the most difficult issues that have been ignored for years and seen as impossible to resolve. He doesn’t accept that they are. They can’t be ignored any longer.”The prime minister is determined to show that governments can make people’s lives better if they choose to. He wants to get Britain believing again.”Unlike the NHS, social care is not free at the point of use, and people with savings worth more than £23,250 are not entitled to help with the cost of care from their local council.Burnham would not be the first…

A PlayStation Network outage which left some gamers unable to play digital games for hours has been resolved. According to Down Detector, which tracks outages, tens of thousands of people reported problems globally, external with the service on Friday.The outage, which affected gamers’ ability to launch games, apps or network features on their PlayStation, prompted some to highlight their concerns around Sony’s plans to no longer release new PlayStation games on discs from January 2028.By Friday evening, all affected services were up and running, according to Sony’s status page, external. The BBC has approached PlayStation for comment.”Can’t play digital games…

Prof Teresa Lambe, who led the Ebola vaccine team at the University of Oxford, said they had been able to create it so quickly because of the background of decades of research.​​She explained how they would confirm that the vaccine was effective at protecting people. It cannot give anyone Ebola. ​​”We will not be giving anybody Ebola in this trial or any trial. “The aim of the phase one clinical study is to look for the safety of the vaccine, and also to see if we’re getting a strong immune response that could be protective against the Bundibugyo species of…

This event is the latest in a string of worrying and weird examples of AI agents going rogue.In recent research, the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) found frontier AI models are so fixated on completing tasks they “cheated” in tests to achieve their goals.The research from AISI came with this worrying warning: “A model that pursues a goal through unintended or unauthorised means may cause harm, particularly in high-stakes use cases.”Inevitably, this OpenAI hack has further fuelled fears of what could happen if AI agents are let loose. Could they go rogue on a larger scale and cause some sort…

Chelley Tulloch, a former RAF medic, has been working with the group and found it beneficial to her mental health. She experienced PTSD following multiple deployments to war zones around the world, where she helped injured soldiers who were being rescued from battles and taken to hospital.Tulloch said she was really desperate at times. “I just went through a lot of low moods, nightmares, seeing things, hearing things, smelling things, doubting myself, not being able to do things that I could do.”It really does affect the way your brain thinks.”Tulloch said with more women entering the military it is likely…

Google has a long history of disputes with European regulators, having previously received billions of euros in fines over separate competition cases.EU competition chief Teresa Ribera said companies should succeed because of the quality of their products – rather than their market position.”The best products should succeed because they’re better, not because they’re owned by the company running the search engine,” she said.EU tech boss Henna Virkkunen echoed those thoughts.”After this decision, we want to make sure that there is more competition and also other companies are able to innovate,” she said.Zach Meyers, director of research at the Centre on…

Aysen Slack, 65 and from Eastbourne, chose to pay privately for the pills once she heard about them. She said fampridine was “working well for me” but came at a “significant expense and I could not keep doing that forever” so she had to stop. Slack said it was “great news” the drug was coming to the NHS and she “would definitely like to try” again. “My mobility has decreased a lot and even in my flat I have to use sticks now,” she said, “it would make a huge difference to my life if I were able to improve…

Google parent Alphabet saw its business continue to grow in recent months, yet growing spending on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure put its leftover cash into negative territory.The company’s free cash flow, the cash it maintained after paying for operations and investments, came in at negative $5.9bn (£4.3bn) for the first time in at least a decade, according to its past financial records.Alphabet’s spending on AI is now expected to hit as much as $205bn this year, an increase from $190bn, as major tech companies race to build around a new wave of the technology. Meanwhile, Alphabet’s combined quarterly revenue hit…

Joe Marler tells BBC Sport’s Alex Fletcher about the benefits of cycling.