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The World Health Organization's latest annual malaria report paints a grim picture that's about to get grimmer, as the United States -- which has supplied 37% of global malaria funding since 2010 -- pulls back its international health commitments under President Donald Trump. Malaria cases have been climbing since 2015, when progress against the mosquito-borne disease stalled due to insecticide resistance and chronic underfunding. In 2024, the world recorded 282 million cases and 610,000 deaths…

A scheme to encourage climbers to bring their waste down from Mount Everest is being scrapped -- with Nepalese authorities telling the BBC it has been a failure. From the report: Climbers had been required to pay a deposit of $4,000, which they would only get back if they brought at least 8kg (18lbs) of waste back down with them. It was hoped it would begin to tackle the rubbish problem on the world's highest peak, which is estimated to be covered in some 50 tonnes of waste. But after 11 years …

The camera industry shipped 6.5 million interchangeable lens cameras last year -- a 50% decline from 2010's peak -- yet 2025 may have been the most creatively ambitious year in nearly two decades of digital photography. DPReview's Richard Butler argues that this year's releases displayed "invention, experimentation and niche-tickling lunacy" not seen since digital's earliest days. Interchangeable lens shipments rose 11% in the first ten months of 2025 compared to last year, and fixed lens camer…

In a year when print book sales have slipped 1% to 679 million copies through early December, according to Circana BookScan, audiobooks continue to carve out territory that once belonged exclusively to hardcovers, and in several notable cases this year, the audio versions have outright outsold their physical counterparts. S.A. Cosby's southern crime novel "King of Ashes" moved more copies as an audiobook than as a hardcover, according to publisher Macmillan Audio. The same is true for celebrity…

Japan's demographic transformation is no longer a distant forecast but an accelerating reality, and the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research now estimates the country's population will fall to roughly 100 million by 2050 -- more than 20 million fewer people than today. The share of residents aged 65 and over stood at 29.4% as of September and is expected to reach 37.1% by midcentury. The dependency ratio -- children and older adults supported by every 100 working-age pe…

The six-decade flow of highly skilled Indian immigrants to the United States -- a migration pattern that produced some of the country's highest-earning households, several Nobel laureates, and the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and Pepsi -- appears to be grinding to a halt amid rising anti-Indian rhetoric from Republican officials and chaos in the visa system, according to New York Times. Indian student arrivals at American universities fell 44% this year, even as Indians had just become the larges…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: Insurance giant Aflac is notifying roughly 22.65 million people that their personal information was stolen from its systems in June 2025. The company disclosed the intrusion on June 20, saying it had identified suspicious activity on its network in the US on June 12 and blaming it on a sophisticated cybercrime group. The company said it immediately contained the attack and engaged with third-party cybersecurity experts to help with incident…

Meta has agreed to acquire viral AI agent startup Manus, "a Singapore-based AI startup that's become the talk of Silicon Valley since it materialized this spring with a demo video so slick it went instantly viral," reports TechCrunch. "The clip showed an AI agent that could do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI's Deep Research." From the report: By April, just weeks after launch, the early-stage …

The Wall Street Journal reports that Boston's once-booming biotech sector has hit a sharp downturn, leaving newly minted Ph.D.s struggling to find work as venture funding dries up, lab space sits empty, and companies downsize or relocate amid rising costs and policy uncertainty. The Wall Street Journal reports: Boston's biotech sector, long a vital economic engine for one of America's wealthiest metro areas, is sputtering. A double whammy of cutbacks in venture capital and government funding ha…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they are integrated with similar spike trains coming from still other neurons. Now, researchers have used spiking circuitry to build an artificial robotic skin, adopting some of the principles …

Amid a global DDR5 shortage and soaring prices, Russian hardware enthusiasts are experimenting with do-it-yourself DDR5 RAM by sourcing empty PCBs and soldering memory chips by hand. Tom's Hardware reports: The idea comes from Russian YouTuber PRO Hi-Tech's Telegram channel, where a local enthusiast known as "Vik-on" already performs VRAM upgrades for GPUs, so this is a relatively safe operation for him. According to Vik-on, empty RAM PCBs can be sourced from China for as little as $6.40 per DI…

Phoronix's Michael Larabel is "reliving some of the best moments for Fedora Linux in 2025" by highlighting the year's most popular news around the distro. Throughout 2025, Fedora continued to lead upstream Linux innovation with bold changes like Wayland-only GNOME, newer kernels, architecture cleanups, and experimental features -- while openly grappling with controversial shifts such as dropping 32-bit support and modernizing long-standing subsystems. "Fedora Linux this year continued in punctu…

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: MacRumors reports that Apple plans to expand iPhone and Apple Watch driver's licenses to 7 U.S. states (CT, KY, MS, OK, UT, AR, VA). A recent convert is the State of Illinois, whose website videos demo how you can use your Apple Wallet license to display proof of identity or age the next time you get carded by a cop, bartender, or TSA agent. The new states will join 13 others who already offer driver's licenses in the Wallet app (AZ, MD, CO, GA, OH, HI, C…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Most people use dating apps to find love. Tiffany Chau used one to hunt for a summer internship. This fall, the 20-year-old junior at California College of the Arts tailored her Hinge profile to connect with people who could offer job referrals or interviews. One match brought her to a Halloween party, where she networked in hopes of landing a product-design internship for the summer. While there, she got some tips from someone who had recentl…

OpenAI is offering a $555,000 salary (plus equity) to recruit a new "head of preparedness," a high-pressure role tasked with anticipating and mitigating extreme AI risks. "This will be a stressful job, and you'll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately," said Sam Altman as he launched the hunt to fill "a critical role" to "help the world." The Guardian reports: In what may be close to the impossible job, the "head of preparedness" at OpenAI will be directly responsible for defending agai…