"After a half-century asking us to exercise more, doctors and physiologists say we have been thinking about it wrong," [1]writes Washington Post columnist Michael J. Coren .

" [2]U.S. and [3]World Health Organization guidelines no longer specify a minimum duration of moderate or vigorous aerobic activity."

> [4]Movement-tracking studies show even tiny, regular bursts of effort — as short as 30 seconds — can capture many of the health benefits of the gym. Climbing two to three flights of stairs a few times per day could change your life. Experts call it [5]VILPA , or vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. "The message now is that all activity counts," said Martin Gibala, a professor and former chair of the kinesiology department at McMaster University in Canada... Just [6]taking the stairs daily is associated with lower body weight and cutting the risk of stroke and heart disease — the [7]leading (and largely preventable) cause of death globally. [8]While it may not burn many calories (most exercise doesn't), it does appear to extend your health span. Leg power — a measure of explosive muscle strength — was a stronger predictor of brain aging than any lifestyle factors measured in a 2015 study in the journal Gerontology...

>

> How little activity can you do? Four minutes daily. Essentially, a few flights of stairs at a vigorous pace. That's the effort [Emmanuel Stamatakis, a professor of physical activity and population health at the University of Sydney] found delivered significant health benefits in that 2022 study of British non-exercisers. "We saw benefits from the first minute," Stamatakis said. For Americans, the effect is even more dramatic: a 44 percent drop in deaths, according to a peer-reviewed paper recently accepted for publication. "We showed for the first time that vigorous intensity, even if it's done as part of the day-to-day routine, not in a planned and structured manner, works miracles," Stamatakis said. "The key principle here is start with one, two minutes a day. The focus should be on making sure that it's something that you can incorporate into your daily routine. Then you can start thinking about increasing the dose."

>

> Intensity is the most important factor. You won't break a sweat in a brief burst, but you do need to feel it. A highly conditioned athlete might need to sprint to reach vigorous territory. But many people need only to take the stairs. Use your breathing as a guide, Stamatakis said: If you can sing, it's light intensity. If you can speak but not sing, you're entering moderate exertion. If you can't hold a conversation, it's vigorous. The biggest benefits come from moderate to vigorous movement. One minute of incidental vigorous activity [9]prevents premature deaths , heart attacks or strokes as well as about three minutes of moderate activity or 35 to 49 minutes of light activity.



[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/fitness/what-science-says-we-ve-been-getting-wrong-about-exercise/ar-AA1Vyvty

[2] https://odphp.health.gov/our-work/nutrition-physical-activity/physical-activity-guidelines

[3] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/physical-activity

[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2022/12/09/increase-longevity-vigorous-activity/

[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02100-x

[6] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8122558/

[7] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.124.072253

[8] https://www.acefitness.org/resources/everyone/tools-calculators/physical-activity-calorie-counter/

[9] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.124.072253

Despite urgent pleas to Americans to save the honeybees, "it was all based on a fallacy," [1]writes Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank . "Honeybees were never in existential trouble. And well-meaning efforts to boost their numbers have accelerated the decline of native bees that actually are."

> "Suppose I were to say to you, 'I'm really worried about bird decline, so I've decided to take up keeping chickens.' You'd think I was a bit of an idiot," British bee scientist Dave Goulson said in [2]a video last year. But beekeeping, he went on, is "exactly the same with one key difference, which is that honeybee-keeping can be actively harmful to wild-bee conservation." Even from healthy hives, diseases flow "out into wild pollinator populations."

Honeybees can also outcompete native bees for pollen and nectar, Milbank points out, and promote non-native plants "at the expense of the native plants on which native bees thrive."

> Bee specialist T'ai Roulston at the University of Virginia's Blandy Experimental Farm here in Boyce warned that keeping honeybees would "just contribute to the difficulties that native bees are having in the world." And the Clifton Institute's Bert Harris, my regular restoration ecology consultant in Virginia, put it bluntly: "If you want to save the bees, don't keep honeybees...."

>

> Before I stir up a hornet's nest of angry beekeepers, let me be clear: The save-the-pollinator movement has, overall, been enormously beneficial over the past two decades. It helped to get millions of people interested in pollinator gardens and wildflower meadows and native plants, and turned them against insecticides. A lot of honeybee advocacy groups promote native bees, too, and many people whose environmental awakening came from the plight of honeybees are now champions of all types of conservation...

>

> But if your goal is to help pollinators, then the solution is simple: Don't keep honeybees... The bumblebees, sweat bees, mason bees, miner bees, leafcutters and other native bees, most of them solitary, ground-nesting and docile, need your help. Honeybees do not.

The article calls it "a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences that emerge when we intervene in nature, even with the best of intentions."



[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/science/ecology/good-news-we-saved-the-bees-bad-news-we-saved-the-wrong-ones/ar-AA1VNCtc

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiBYBmlKSYU

Neocities founder Kyle Drake has spent weeks trapped in Microsoft's automated support loop after discovering that Bing [1]quietly blocked all 1.5 million websites hosted on his platform , a free web-hosting service that has kept the spirit of 1990s GeoCities alive since 2013.

Drake first noticed the issue last summer and thought it was resolved, but a second complete block went into effect in January, cratering Bing traffic from roughly half a million daily visitors to zero. He submitted nearly a dozen tickets through Bing's webmaster tools but could not get past the AI chatbot to reach a human. After Ars Technica contacted Microsoft, the company restored the Neocities front page within 24 hours but most subdomains remain blocked. Microsoft cited policy violations related to low-quality content yet declined to identify the offending sites or work directly with Drake to fix the problem.



[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/neocities-founder-stuck-in-chatbot-hell-after-bing-blocked-1-5m-sites/

An anonymous reader shares a report:

> A new bill in the New York state legislature would require news organizations to [1]label AI-generated material and mandate that humans review any such content before publication. On Monday, Senator Patricia Fahy (D-Albany) and Assemblymember Nily Rozic (D-NYC) [2]introduced the bill , called The New York Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Requirements in News Act -- The NY FAIR News Act for short.

>

> "At the center of the news industry, New York has a strong interest in preserving journalism and protecting the workers who produce it," said Rozic in a statement announcing the bill. A closer look at the bill shows a few regulations, mostly centered around AI transparency, both for the public and in the newsroom. For one, the law would demand that news organizations put disclaimers on any published content that is "substantially composed, authored, or created through the use of generative artificial intelligence."



[1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/a-new-bill-in-new-york-would-require-disclaimers-on-ai-generated-news-content/

[2] https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A8962/amendment/A

About 4% of all public commits on GitHub are now being [1]authored by Anthropic's Claude Code , a terminal-native AI coding agent that has quickly become the centerpiece of a broader argument that software engineering is being fundamentally reshaped by AI.

SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor and AI research firm, published a report on Friday projecting that figure will climb past 20% by the end of 2026. Claude Code is a command-line tool that reads codebases, plans multi-step tasks and executes them autonomously. Anthropic's quarterly revenue additions have overtaken OpenAI's, according to SemiAnalysis's internal economic model, and the firm believes Anthropic's growth is now constrained primarily by available compute.

Accenture has signed on to train 30,000 professionals on Claude, the largest enterprise deployment so far, targeting financial services, life sciences, healthcare and the public sector. On January 12, Anthropic launched Cowork, a desktop-oriented extension of the same agent architecture -- four engineers built it in 10 days, and most of the code was written by Claude Code itself.



[1] https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/claude-code-is-the-inflection-point

Salesforce is essentially shutting down Heroku as an evolving product, moving the cloud platform that helped define modern app deployment to a " [1]sustaining engineering model " focused entirely on stability, security and support.

Existing customers on credit card billing see no changes to pricing or service, but enterprise contracts are no longer available to new buyers. Salesforce said it is redirecting engineering investment toward enterprise AI.



[1] https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/

Hollywood's recent attempts to build entertainment around AI have [1]consistently underperformed or outright flopped , whether the AI in question is a plot device or a production tool. The horror sequel M3GAN 2.0, Mission: Impossible -- The Final Reckoning, and Disney's Tron: Ares all disappointed at the box office in 2025 despite centering their narratives on AI.

The latest casualty is Mercy, a January 2026 crime thriller in which Chris Pratt faces an AI judge bot played by Rebecca Ferguson; one reviewer has already called it "the worst movie of 2026," and its ticket sales have been mediocre. AI-generated content hasn't fared any better. Darren Aronofsky executive-produced On This Day...1776, a YouTube web series that uses Google DeepMind video generation alongside real voice actors to dramatize the American Revolution. Viewer response has been brutal -- commenters mocked the uncanny faces and the fact that DeepMind rendered "America" as "Aamereedd."

A Taika Waititi-directed Xfinity commercial set to air during this weekend's Super Bowl, which de-ages Jurassic Park stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, has already been mocked for producing what one viewer called "melting wax figures."



[1] https://www.wired.com/story/hollywood-is-losing-audiences-to-ai-fatigue/

An anonymous reader shares a report:

> Republicans' tax cuts shaved billions off Amazon's tax bill, new government filings show. The company says it [1]ran a $1.2 billion tax bill last year , down from $9 billion the previous year, and even as its profits jumped by 45% to nearly $90 billion.

>

> That's largely because of the generous new depreciation breaks GOP lawmakers included in their One Big Beautiful Bill, something that's particularly important to Amazon which -- in addition to maintaining a vast infrastructure for its ubiquitous delivery business -- has been spending billions to build out artificial intelligence data centers.

>

> Also helping, though less important: The law's expanded breaks for businesses research and development expenses. The company has long been criticized by Democrats for paying little in tax, and it appeared to be bracing for criticism in the wake of the report to the Securities and Exchange Commission.



[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/06/amazon-emerges-a-big-winner-from-gop-tax-cuts-00768985

An investigation has uncovered a sprawling network of hidden cameras in Chinese hotel rooms that livestream guests -- including couples having sex -- to paying subscribers on Telegram. Over 18 months, the BBC identified six websites and apps on the messaging platform that claimed to [1]operate more than 180 spy cams across Chinese hotels , not just recording but broadcasting live.

One site, monitored for seven months, cycled through 54 different cameras, roughly half active at any given time. Subscribers pay 450 yuan (~$65) per month for access to multiple live feeds, archived clips, and a library of more than 6,000 edited videos dating back to 2017.

The BBC traced one camera to a hotel room in Zhengzhou, where researchers found it hidden inside a wall ventilation unit and hardwired into the building's electricity supply. A commercially available hidden-camera detector failed to flag it. China introduced regulations last April requiring hotel owners to check for hidden cameras, but the BBC found the livestreaming sites still operational.



[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62rexy9y3no

Memory prices across DRAM, NAND and HBM have [1]surged 80 to 90% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026, according to Counterpoint Research's latest Memory Price Tracker. The price of a 64GB RDIMM has jumped from a Q4 2025 contract price of $450 to over $900, and Counterpoint expects it to cross $1,000 in Q2.

NAND, relatively stable last quarter, is tracking a parallel increase. Device makers are cutting DRAM content per device, swapping TLC SSDs for cheaper QLC alternatives, and shifting orders from the now-scarce LPDDR4 to LPDDR5 as new entry-level chipsets support the newer standard. DRAM operating margins hit the 60% range in Q4 2025 -- the first time conventional DRAM margins surpassed HBM -- and Q1 2026 is on track to set all-time highs.



[1] https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/Memory-Prices-Surge-Up-to-90-From-Q4-2025

Waymo's robotaxis have [1]racked up at least 24 safety violations involving school buses in Austin since the start of the 2025 school year, and a voluntary software recall the company issued in December after a federal investigation has not fixed the problem.

Austin Independent School District initially reported at least 19 incidents of Waymo vehicles failing to stop for buses during loading and unloading -- illegal in all 50 states -- prompting NHTSA to open a probe. At least four more violations have occurred since the software update, including a January 19th incident where a robotaxi drove past a bus as children waited to cross the street and the stop arm was extended.

Waymo also acknowledged that one of its vehicles [2]struck a child outside a Santa Monica elementary school on January 23rd, causing minor injuries. Austin ISD has asked Waymo to stop operating near schools during bus hours until the issue is resolved. Waymo refused. Three federal investigations have been opened in three months.



[1] https://www.theverge.com/transportation/874385/waymo-school-bus-austin-safety-robotaxi

[2] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/01/29/151223/waymo-robotaxi-hits-a-child-near-an-elementary-school-in-santa-monica

Kris Marszalek, the co-founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com, has [1]paid $70 million for the domain AI.com -- the highest price ever publicly disclosed for a website name, according to the deal's broker Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com.

The entire sum was paid in cryptocurrency to an undisclosed seller. Marszalek plans to debut the site during a Super Bowl ad this weekend, offering a personal "AI agent" that lets consumers send messages, use apps and trade stocks. The previous domain sale record was nearly $50 million for Carinsurance.com, per GoDaddy.



[1] https://www.ft.com/content/83488628-8dfd-4060-a7b0-71b1bb012785

An anonymous reader [1]shares a report :

> Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each reported hundreds of billions in RPO (remaining performance obligations) -- signed contracts for cloud computing services that can't yet be filled and haven't yet hit the books. Collectively, the big three cloud providers reported a $1.1 trillion backlog of revenue.



[1] https://sherwood.news/tech/big-techs-usd1-1-trillion-cloud-computing-backlog/

An anonymous reader shares a report:

> KPMG, one of the world's largest auditors of public and private companies, [1]negotiated lower fees from its own accountant by arguing that AI will make it cheaper to do the work, according to people familiar with the matter. The Big Four firm told its auditor, Grant Thornton UK, it should pass on cost savings from the rollout of AI and threatened to find a new accountant if it did not agree to a significant fee reduction, the people said.

>

> The discussions last year came amid an industry-wide debate about the impact of new technology on audit firms' business and traditional pricing models. Firms have invested heavily in AI to speed up the planning of audits and automate routine tasks, but it is not yet clear if this will generate savings that are passed on to clients.

>

> Grant Thornton is auditor to KPMG International, the UK-based umbrella organisation that co-ordinates the work of KPMG's independent, locally owned partnerships around the world. Talks with Grant Thornton were led by Michaela Peisger, a longtime audit partner and executive from KPMG's German member firm, who became KPMG International's chief financial officer at the beginning of 2025.



[1] https://www.ft.com/content/c891c47c-b21f-4e0f-84b3-b80c794eff3d

German newspaper Bild reported in January that some ski jumpers have been [1]injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid ahead of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics -- the theory being that temporarily enlarged genitalia would yield looser-fitting suits when measured by 3D scanners, and those looser suits could act like sails to produce longer jumps.

A study published last October in the scientific journal Frontiers found that a 2cm suit change translated to an extra 5.8 metres in jump distance. No specific athletes have been accused. The World Anti-Doping Agency said Thursday it would investigate if presented with evidence, noting its powers extend to banning practices that violate the "spirit of sport." The claims arrive as ski jumping already faces scrutiny -- two Norwegian coaches and an equipment manager received 18-month bans in January for illegally manipulating suit stitching.



[1] https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7024688/2026/02/05/ski-jump-penis-enhancement-wada/

TikTok's endless scroll of irresistible content, tailored for each person's tastes by a well-honed algorithm, has helped the service become one of the world's most popular apps. Now European Union regulators say those same features that made TikTok so successful [1]are likely illegal . From a report:

> On Friday, the regulators released a preliminary decision that TikTok's infinite scroll, auto-play features and recommendation algorithm amount to an "addictive design" that violated European Union laws for online safety. The service poses potential harm to the "physical and mental well-being" of users, including minors and vulnerable adults, the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc's executive branch, said in a statement.

>

> The findings suggest TikTok must overhaul the core features that made it a global phenomenon, or risk major fines. European officials said it was the first time that a legal standard for social media addictiveness had been applied anywhere in the world. "TikTok needs to change the basic design of its service," the European Commission said in a statement.



[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/business/tiktok-addictive-design-europe.html

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced a sweeping plan to shore up the country's auto industry and [1]accelerate its electric vehicle transition , the latest in a series of moves to reduce Canada's deep economic dependence on the United States as American tariffs continue to batter the sector.

The plan includes financial incentives for carmakers to invest in Canada, a new tariff credit scheme for manufacturers like General Motors and Toyota, and the reintroduction of EV buyer rebates. Canada will also enact stricter vehicle emissions standards and has set a goal of EVs comprising 90% of car sales by 2040. Carney at the same time scrapped a 2023 EV sales mandate introduced by former PM Justin Trudeau that automakers had called too costly.

The announcements follow a deal last month with China to ease tariffs on Chinese EVs and an agreement with South Korea to encourage Korean car manufacturing in Canada. Roughly 90% of Canadian-made vehicles are exported to the US, and thousands of auto workers have lost their jobs since Trump imposed 25% tariffs on Canadian cars and parts last year.



[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgd2j80klmo

Bitcoin has fallen roughly 44% from its October peak, and while the drawdown isn't crypto's deepest ever on a percentage basis, Bloomberg's Odd Lots newsletter [1]lays out a case that this is the industry's worst winter yet . The macro backdrop was supposed to favor Bitcoin: public confidence in the dollar is shaky, the Trump administration has been crypto-friendly, and fiat currencies are under perceived stress globally. Yet gold, not Bitcoin, has been the safe haven of choice.

The "we're so early" narrative is dead -- crypto ETFs exist, barriers to entry are zero, and the online community that once rallied holders through downturns has largely hollowed out. Institutional adoption arrived but hasn't lifted existing tokens like ETH or SOL; Wall Street cares about stablecoins and tokenization, not the coins themselves. AI is pulling both talent and miners toward data centers. Quantum computing advances threaten Bitcoin's encryption. And MicroStrategy and other Bitcoin treasury companies, once steady buyers during the bull run, are now large holders who may eventually become forced sellers.



[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-02-05/10-reasons-this-is-the-worst-crypto-winter-ever

Elon Musk told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe co-founder John Collison that space will become the [1]most economically compelling location for AI data centers in less than 36 months , a prediction rooted not in some exotic technical breakthrough but in the basic math of electricity supply: chip output is growing exponentially, and electrical output outside China is essentially flat.

Solar panels in orbit generate roughly five times the power they do on the ground because there is no day-night cycle, no cloud cover, no atmospheric loss, and no atmosphere-related energy reduction. The system economics are even more favorable because space-based operations eliminate the need for batteries entirely, making the effective cost roughly 10 times cheaper than terrestrial solar, Musk said. The terrestrial bottleneck is already real.

Musk said powering 330,000 Nvidia GB300 chips -- once you account for networking hardware, storage, peak cooling on the hottest day of the year, and reserve margin for generator servicing -- requires roughly a gigawatt at the generation level. Gas turbines are sold out through 2030, and the limiting factor is the casting of turbine vanes and blades, a process handled by just three companies worldwide.

Five years from now, Musk predicted, SpaceX will launch and operate more AI compute annually than the cumulative total on Earth, expecting at least a few hundred gigawatts per year in space. Patel estimated that 100 gigawatts alone would require on the order of 10,000 Starship launches per year, a figure Musk affirmed. SpaceX is gearing up for 10,000 launches a year, Musk said, and possibly 20,000 to 30,000.



[1] https://cheekypint.substack.com/p/elon-musk-on-space-gpus-ai-optimus

Google's Quick Share-AirDrop interoperability, which has been exclusive to the Pixel 10 series [1]since its surprise launch last year , is headed to a much broader set of Android devices in 2026.

Eric Kay, Google's Vice President of Engineering for the Android platform, confirmed the expansion during a press briefing at the company's Taipei office, saying Google is "working with our partners to expand it into the rest of the ecosystem" and that [2]announcements are coming "very soon." Nothing is the only OEM to have publicly confirmed it's working on support, though Qualcomm has also hinted at enabling the feature on Snapdragon-powered phones.



[1] https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/11/20/1732245/you-can-finally-airdrop-files-between-android-and-iphone-starting-with-pixel-10

[2] https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-airdrop-expansion-3638222/