Michael McLintock, chairman of ABF, said: “The board has now completed its in-depth review of the structure of ABF and has concluded that a demerger of Primark is the best way to maximise long-term returns for shareholders, reflecting Primark’s scale today and the need for a better understanding of the Food business. Source link
An artist’s impression of comet 41P as it approached the sun and shot material off into space NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI) A small comet seems to have switched the direction in which it is rotating – the first time astronomers have seen evidence of such behaviour. Changes like this may help us learn about the insides of comets, which could reveal information about the composition of the early solar system. Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák, or simply 41P, measures about 1 kilometre across and takes around 5.4 years to orbit the sun. We can only see it when it visits the inner solar system and its trajectory happens to take it relatively close to Earth. It was last seen in 2017. In March that year, it was rotating at a rate of about one full spin every 20 hours. When astronomers observed it just two months later, it had slowed down dramatically to one spin every 46 to 60 hours. Now, David Jewitt at the University of California, Los Angeles, has reanalysed observations from the Hubble …
Members of the US exhibition basketball team the Harlem Globetrotters taught Pope Leo XIV to spin a basketball on his finger on Wednesday as they met with the pontiff at his weekly general audience in Saint Peter’s Square. The moment drew loud cheers from the watching crowds. Source link
For years, Saturn made no sense. Measure its rotation rate using radio signals from its aurora and you get one number. Use the planet’s gravity field and you get another. Worse still, the radio-derived rate appeared to be slowly changing over time, which is physically impossible for a planet. A world cannot simply speed up or slow down its spin. Now, using the most powerful space telescope ever built, researchers at Northumbria University have produced the first detailed maps of heat and electrically charged particle distributions across Saturn’s auroral region. What they found explains not just the rotation mystery, but reveals something stranger and more elegant: Saturn’s northern lights are powering a planetary feedback loop that sustains itself through a chain of atmospheric and magnetic interactions. Within This “Mystery”, A Problem The initial explanation of Saturn’s rotation mystery was provided by a 2021 paper co-authored by planetary astronomer and Northumbria professor Tom Stallard. In this study, Stallard and his colleagues demonstrated that the changing radio frequency signal from Saturn’s auroral region was not measuring Saturn’s …
Microsoft is taking a major swing at health AI. The company announced on Thursday that it’s introducing Copilot Health, a new experience inside its chatbot that will bring together all your medical records and wearable data with an AI that’s designed to help you understand it all. “We are really on the cusp of building a true medical superintelligence,” said Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI CEO. “One that can learn everything about you, all of your health conditions, from your wearable data, your electronic health records, and use that to provide support and insights and intelligence at your fingertips.” A recent Microsoft survey found that mobile Copilot users ask the chatbot health-related queries more than for any other topic. Copilot Health was built to answer those questions. Microsoft’s health AI was fine-tuned by its in-house clinicians and an external panel of hundreds of clinicians in more than 24 countries. It uses the National Academy of Medicine’s framework for evaluating credible medical sources and information from Harvard Medical School via a 2025 licensing agreement. Copilot Health gives …
At temperatures approaching absolute zero, most magnetic materials settle into tidy patterns. Their tiny magnetic moments, or spins, align in one of two ways: all pointing in the same direction in ferromagnetic order, or alternating neatly in an antiferromagnetic pattern. But a compound of cerium, magnesium, aluminum, and oxygen — CeMgAl₁₁O₁₉ — refuses to follow those rules. For decades, scientists assumed it was a quantum spin liquid, a rare state where spins remain disordered even in extreme cold. New experiments reveal that assumption was wrong, uncovering a previously unknown state of matter. “This material had been classified as a quantum spin liquid due to two properties: observation of a continuum of states and lack of magnetic ordering,” said Bin Gao, co-first author and research scientist at Rice University. “But closer observation of the material showed that the underlying cause of these observations wasn’t a quantum spin liquid phase.” Rice University Professor Pengcheng Dai. (CREDIT: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University) Unlike quantum spin liquids, where spins fluctuate between many low-energy states because of quantum mechanics, CeMgAl₁₁O₁₉ shows similar …
At the smallest scales of matter, nature behaves in ways that feel almost counterintuitive. Individual particles follow simple rules, but when they interact together, entirely new behaviors can emerge. This collective behavior sits at the heart of condensed matter physics, a field that tries to explain why materials act the way they do. One of the most puzzling and influential examples of this phenomenon is the Kondo effect, a quantum interaction that has shaped decades of research into magnetism and electronic materials. A new study now shows that this famous effect does not behave the same way in all cases. Instead, its outcome depends on something surprisingly simple; the size of a particle’s spin. By carefully building and testing a new quantum material, researchers have shown that the Kondo effect can either erase magnetism or help it grow, depending on that single property. The finding reshapes how scientists understand magnetic order at the quantum level and opens new directions for designing future quantum materials. Crystal structure and Kondo necklace model. (CREDIT: Nature) Why Collective Quantum …
Lily Collins channelled her stylish on-screen Emily In Paris character at a glamorous London party on Monday night. The actress wowed in a chic black ensemble at a star-studded gathering hosted by Maison Perrier at the British Academy. Lily, 36, turned to French designer Jean Paul Gaultier for her head-turning short-sleeved, full-length sheer dress with a black leotard beneath. The mother-of-one accessorised with a sleek bob, black heels and dark nail polish, as well as elegant silver Cartier jewellery. Also at the party alongside Lily were Jaime Winstone and Henry Holland. At the event, which was attended by HELLO!, the actress mingled with the British fashion designer, to whom she said: “It’s so lovely to meet you, I have always been a fan.” Lily Collins wowed in a sheer black Jean Paul Gaultier gown The Emily In Paris actress attended the glamorous event at the British Academy She accessorised her stylish ensemble with silver Cartier jewellery The mother-of-one mingled with stars including Jaime Winstone and Henry Holland Lily’s well-dressed outing comes off the back of the …
Keir Starmer’s director of communications has just resigned just one day after No.10′s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney stepped down. In a statement, Tim Allan said: “I have decided to stand down to allow a new No10 team to be built. I wish the PM and his team every success.” The top spin doctor only started the job in September. His replacement will be the fifth person to lead No.10′s communications operation since Starmer won the general election just 19 months ago. Allan was deputy director of communications under Tony Blair and was expected to help steady the ship when the government was going through a rocky patch in September. Labour sources suggest his resignation is all part of the ongoing fallout around the Peter Mandelson scandal. The former US ambassador’s ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein emerged in full last week, prompting outrage across the country – and within Labour MPs. Ex-chief of staff McSweeney took some of the blame for Mandelson’s appointment and resigned on Sunday afternoon. In a statement, he said: …
Chinese company Moonshot AI upgraded its open-sourced Kimi K2 model, transforming it into a coding and vision model with an architecture that supports an agent swarm orchestration. The new model, Moonshot Kimi K2.5, is a good option for enterprises that want agents that can automatically pass off actions instead of having a framework be a central decision-maker. The company characterized Kimi K2.5 as an “all-in-one model” that supports both visual and text inputs, letting users leverage the model for more visual coding projects. Moonshot did not publicly disclose K2.5’s parameter count, but the Kimi K2 model that it’s based on, had 1 trillion total parameters and 32 billion activated parameters thanks to its mixture-of-experts architecture. This is the latest open-source model to offer an alternative to the more closed options from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, and it outperforms them on key metrics including agentic workflows, coding, and vision. On the Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE) benchmark, Kimi K2.5 scored 50.2% (with tools), surpassing OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 (xhigh) and Claude Opus 4.5. It also achieved 76.8% on SWE-bench …
