Science and Tech

Getty Images More than a dozen states in the US have sued TikTok, accusing the social media platform of helping to drive a mental health crisis among teenagers. A bipartisan group of 14 attorneys general from across the country allege that the company uses addictive features to hook children to the app and that it has intentionally misled the public …

A US teenager is the first known person to get classic video game Tetris to reset to level 0 after beating it. Michael Artiaga, 16, claimed the historic moment of so-called “rebirth” while livestreaming himself playing Nintendo’s version of the game on Twitch on Sunday. It took him 82 minutes to successfully clear level 255 on Tetris – the game’s …

Getty Images The announcement was made in Stockholm, Sweden The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to two scientists, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, for their work on machine learning. British-Canadian Professor Hinton is sometimes referred to as the “Godfather of AI” and said he was flabbergasted. He resigned from Google in 2023, and has warned about the dangers …

A US federal judge has ruled that Google must allow Android apps made by rival technology firms onto its Google Play app store for three years starting next month. The change was among several remedies ordered by Judge James Donato in a case brought against Google by Epic Games, the maker of the hit video game Fortnite. Google says it …

Panaseer Dr Leila Powell brought her scientific method from astrophysics to cyber-security How do galaxies form? What happens when they collide? These are the kinds of questions Dr Leila Powell grappled with in her previous life as an astrophysicist. But in 2015 she put those galactic-sized questions to one side and moved into cyber-security. “The pursuit of understanding the universe …

Getty Images People waiting for an Uber should be patient enough to wait a few minutes longer for an electric car, the boss of the ride-hailing firm has said. “A couple of minutes isn’t going to kill anyone,” Dara Khosrowshahi told the BBC in an interview. Uber is rolling out new options to encourage customers to choose electric rides, but …

Reuters Creditors of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX are poised to receive up to $16.5bn (£12.6bn) under a bankruptcy plan approved in the US on Monday. The agreement will put an end to a saga that started when the firm went bankrupt in November 2022, leaving millions of customers around the world without access to their accounts. Last year, former …

Facebook-owner Meta must minimise the amount of people’s data it uses for personalised advertising, the EU’s highest court says. The Court of Justice for the European Union (CJEU) ruled in favour of privacy campaigner Max Schrems, who complained that Facebook misused his personal data about his sexual orientation to target ads at him. In complaints first heard by Austrian courts …

Getty Images Finding the best gate for an aircraft is a surprisingly difficult task Next time you’re running at full tilt towards your airport gate, spare a thought for the airline staff who made sure that that gate was actually available. Gate allocation is a surprisingly complex task. “With 15 gates and 10 airplanes, there are more than 570 billion …

Getty Images Google has released a new feature which will allow people to search the internet by taking a video. Video search will let people point their camera at something, ask a question about it, and get search results. Android and iPhone users globally will gain access to the feature from 1700 GMT by enabling “AI Overviews” in their Google …