All posts tagged: Rate

UK economy: Surprise fall in unemployment rate to 4.9% | Money News

UK economy: Surprise fall in unemployment rate to 4.9% | Money News

Published by Sam Flores

The UK’s unemployment rate has taken a surprise fall, according to official figures, released amid warnings of a spike in job losses to come. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that the rate fell to 4.9% during the three months to February. That was down from a previous level of 5.2%. But the ONS said that early data from HM Revenue & Customs, covering workers in payrolled employment, showed a drop of 11,000 during March – the first month of the US-Iran war that saw global energy prices rise sharply. Money latest: Experts disagree on overpaying your mortgage The wider figures showed average annual earnings growth, excluding bonuses, fell to 3.6% from 3.8%. ONS director of economic statistics, Liz McKeown, said: “The number of workers on payroll remained broadly flat in recent periods, reflecting ongoing weak hiring. “Vacancies fell to their lowest level in almost five years, but with unemployment also falling the number of vacancies per unemployed person remains broadly unchanged. “Alongside falling unemployment, the number of people not actively seeking work increased, …

Our local universe’s expansion rate doesn’t add up, astronomers find

Our local universe’s expansion rate doesn’t add up, astronomers find

Published by Jenni Sidey

A difference of a few kilometers per second might not sound like much. In cosmology, it has become one of the field’s most stubborn problems. An international team of astronomers has now delivered one of the sharpest direct measurements yet of how fast the nearby Universe is expanding, and the answer again lands on the high side. Their new value for the Hubble constant, the number used to describe that expansion rate, is 73.50 ± 0.81 kilometers per second per megaparsec. That is just over 1% precision. It also keeps the long-running Hubble tension very much alive. The result, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, comes from the H0 Distance Network Collaboration, or H0DN. The project grew out of a March 2025 workshop at the International Space Science Institute in Bern, Switzerland, where researchers from across the field worked to build a shared framework for combining local measurements of cosmic distance. This graphic represents the tension that exists between measurements of the expansion rate of the late, nearby Universe, versus what would be expected based on …

Have you lost a UK mortgage deal or seen your mortage rate increase? We would like to speak to you | Mortgages

Have you lost a UK mortgage deal or seen your mortage rate increase? We would like to speak to you | Mortgages

Published by Sam Flores

The crisis in the Middle East is also being felt far beyond the region, with the conflict undermining broader business and consumer confidence. One aspect of this has been the impact on the UK mortgage market. Spooked by surging oil prices and inflation fears, lenders pulled hundreds of mortgage products within 48 hours of the outbreak of war, replacing them with more expensive deals. According to Halifax, average UK house prices fell by 0.5% in March, with demand affected by higher mortgage rates. We would like to speak to people who have lost mortgage deals or those affected by more expensive rates. Maybe you have put house buying on hold. What will this mean for you? What are you doing to cope with any changes ? Share your experience You can share your responses in the form below or by messaging us. We won’t use your submission without contacting you first.  Your responses, which can be anonymous, are secure as the form is encrypted and only the Guardian has access to your contributions. We will …

US fertility rate hit a record low last year, extending a nearly two-decade decline

US fertility rate hit a record low last year, extending a nearly two-decade decline

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the Well Enough newsletter with Harry Bullmore for tips on living a healthier, happier and longer life Get the Well Enough email with Harry Bullmore Get the Well Enough email with Harry Bullmore The U.S. fertility rate hit a record low last year, extending a nearly two-decade decline. Fewer women had children and many delayed starting families, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fertility has been trending lower in the U.S. for nearly two decades, with the general fertility rate falling nearly 23% since 2007, the agency’s data showed. The number of babies born in 2025 declined 1% from a year earlier to roughly 3.6 million. The general fertility rate – the number of births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 – also slipped 1% to 53.1, the data showed. The 2025 figures underscore a long-running shift in U.S. childbearing patterns, with declines among younger women continuing to outweigh gains at older ages. The number of babies born in 2025 declined 1% from a year earlier to …

I used an monitor with a 144Hz refresh rate for a week – and couldn’t believe my eyes

I used an $80 monitor with a 144Hz refresh rate for a week – and couldn’t believe my eyes

Published by skeptic

MSI Pro MP243W 24-inch monitor pros and cons Pros Incredibly affordable Lightweight, plug-and-play Thin bezels, compact frame 144Hz, adaptive-sync Cons Visual quality for everyday use 300 nits of brightness Built-in speakers are an afterthought more buying choices Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. As high-end monitors reach for the stars with QD-OLED technology and 1,040Hz refresh rates, products on the opposite end of the spectrum can offer better baseline value for less than a hundred bucks.  Case in point: MSI’s Pro MP243W, a 24-inch monitor for just $84. Budget monitors in 2026 look a whole lot better than they did a few years ago, and after going hands-on with this one, I found it to be a good value for students, kids, and budget-conscious users who use their computers for everyday tasks.  Also: A week with this Samsung smart monitor convinced me I might be done with TVs That said, there are certainly trade-offs with lower-end monitors, and they won’t come as a surprise: less flexibility, less connectivity, and, most importantly, a less vibrant …

Cohere’s open-weight ASR model hits 5.4% word error rate — low enough to replace speech APIs in production pipelines

Cohere’s open-weight ASR model hits 5.4% word error rate — low enough to replace speech APIs in production pipelines

Published by skeptic

Enterprises building voice-enabled workflows have had limited options for production-grade transcription: closed APIs with data residency risks, or open models that trade accuracy for deployability. Cohere’s new open-weight ASR model, Transcribe, is built to compete on all four key differentiators — contextual accuracy, latency, control and cost. Cohere says that Transcribe outperforms current leaders on accuracy — and unlike closed APIs, it can run on an organization’s own infrastructure. Cohere, which can be accessed via an API or in Cohere’s Model Vault as cohere-transcribe-03-2026, has 2 billion parameters and is licensed under Apache-2.0. The company said Transcribe has an average word error rate (WER) of just 5.42%, so it makes fewer mistakes than similar models. It’s trained on 14 languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Arabic. The company did not specify which Chinese dialect the model was trained on.  Cohere said it trained the model “with a deliberate focus on minimizing WER, while keeping production readiness top-of-mind.” According to Cohere, the result is a model that …

Best Heart Rate Monitors (2026): Polar, Coros, Garmin

Best Heart Rate Monitors (2026): Polar, Coros, Garmin

Published by skeptic

FAQS We tested and recommend all of the heart rate monitors below, which do a pretty impeccable job. But what do all these terms mean? Heart rate zones: If someone tells you they’ve been doing 80/20 training, they’ve been doing heart rate zone-based workouts. Heart rate zones are an easy way to break down your range of effort during exercise. Zones go from 1 to 5, with 5 indicating working at 90 to 100 percent of your maximum heart rate. Zone 2 represents training at 60 to 70 percent of maximum heart rate and represents light training. 80/20 training is intended to build endurance and means that 80 percent of your runs should be in Zone 2. If your heart rate monitor doesn’t tell you your zone, you can calculate it using Polar’s simple tool. Maximum heart rate: Some monitors can inform you of your maximum heart rate, which is the number of beats your heart can reach during exercise. This is useful for knowing when you’re training at peak intensity and can be used …

‘Children bring more hardship than joy’: Readers on why the birth rate is falling

‘Children bring more hardship than joy’: Readers on why the birth rate is falling

Published by Daniella Wilson

Join the Independent Women newsletter with Victoria Richards for a thoughtful take on the week’s headlines Join the Independent Women newsletter  Join the Independent Women newsletter  Charlotte Cripps’ exploration of falling birth rates and “unplanned” childlessness has sparked a strong response from Independent readers, revealing the complex interplay between men’s readiness and economic pressures. Many emphasised that men’s immaturity is only part of the picture. While some men are eager and committed to fatherhood, financial realities – soaring housing costs, childcare expenses, and the need for dual incomes – heavily shape family planning, constraining both men and women. The rising cost of living and precarious employment make raising children daunting, several argued, leaving many households struggling. Others pointed to societal expectations and pressures that can cause men to hesitate, even when they are ready to be good fathers. In all, a clear theme emerged: blaming either gender for the falling birth rate oversimplifies the issue. Structural, cultural, and economic factors are central to when – or if – people have children. Here’s what you had …

Rotation rate helps astronomers differentiate giant planets from brown dwarf stars

Rotation rate helps astronomers differentiate giant planets from brown dwarf stars

Published by Jenni Sidey

For centuries, astronomers faced the challenge of classifying objects in space based on their appearance. When observing an object that is orbiting a star at a distance, they would often assume it must be a large planet. It could also be a brown dwarf, which is a type of cosmic object that has a mass larger than a planet but falls short of being able to ignite the process of nuclear fusion that produces energy for stars. Due to the similarity in age, brightness, temperature, and atmospheric chemical makeup between brown dwarfs and large planets, for many years identifying them was difficult. Now, a team of researchers from Northwestern University has found a method that allows for easier distinction between these two types of celestial bodies: rotation speed. In the largest survey of rotation speeds conducted to date of extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs, researchers have shown that giant planets spin significantly faster than brown dwarf objects on a relative basis compared to their maximum theoretical rotation speed. With the publication of their findings in …