When the sun is out, it's just about warm enough here in north-east London to read outside – which means it's time to crack out the best new science fiction and find a sheltered spot. I love the way the genre continues to tackle the biggest issues of our day, whether that's ageing or artificial intelligence. Top of my pile is Lucy Lapinska's look at how a robot might deal with being freed from human governance, but I'm also looking forward to Nick Harkaway's latest, set in a world where a drug can (for a huge price) stop you from ageing, but it will also make you grow very large. And I'm keen to try out Sayaka Murata's strange and disturbing vision of the future, Vanishing World. Amane lives in a society where children are conceived by artificial insemination and raised by parents in "clean", sexless marriages. When she and her husband hear about an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there.

Rami Sinno is crouched beside a filing cabinet, wrestling a beach-ball sized disc out of a box, when a dull thump echoes around his laboratory. "I just dropped tens of thousands of dollars' worth of material," he says with a laugh. Straightening up, Sinno reveals the goods: a golden silicon wafer, which glitters in the fluorescent light of the lab. This circular platter is divided into some 100 rectangular tiles, each of which contains billions of microscopic electrical switches. These are the brains of Amazon's most advanced chip yet: the Trainium 2, announced in December.

MediaTek launched the Kompanio Ultra as the company's premium Chromebook processor on Wednesday, predicting that it will easily offer the highest Minecraft performance of any Chromebook chip while bringing AI to the platform, too. Essentially, MediaTek launched the Kompanio Ultra to help answer the question: Which Chromebook should I buy? Besides Google's own Chromebook Plus brand, there aren't too many answers. Instead, the list of Chromebooks is a hodgepodge of various processors, including the Intel Celeron, Pentium, and Core processors; AMD's A-series and Ryzen chips, and Arm processors like the Qualcomm Snapdragon and the existing MediaTek Kompanio 500 and 800 series. Google launched the Chromebook Plus specification to help clarify matters, but it certainly doesn't help to differentiate the performance each chip can offer.

Roblox is equipping parents with more oversight power for their young players, introducing new blocking and monitoring tools to their recently revamped parental control settings. The update includes new options for parents seeking to block and report specific friends on their child's friends lists, as well as individual experiences -- until this update, parents could only prevent children from accessing experiences by blocking that entire maturity level. Children under the age of 13 can request to unblock a friend or experience at any time, but it must be approved by the parent. Parents can also find more detailed weekly insights into their children's activity, including their child's top 20 most-visited experiences over the last week. They can access additional safety resources on Roblox's updated Safety Center, as well.

From slices of toast to patches of clouds, Jesus's face has a habit of appearing in some unusual places. But this mind-boggling optical illusion might be the most bizarre appearance yet.

Ch Supt Dan Card from the Met, local policing commander for north-east London, said the force was committed to finding Kaliyah, and were using drone technology and boats as part of their "thorough search over a wide area". "Specialist officers are supporting Kaliyah's family through this deeply upsetting time and our thoughts go out to all those impacted by what has happened." He added: "I'd like to thank the members of public, our first-responding officers, and colleagues from other emergency services, as they responded rapidly to carry out a large-scale search during a highly pressurised and distressing time." The force is appealing for witnesses. The search on Monday involved boats and helicopters from HM Coastguard, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and London Fire Brigade.

Wikimedia has seen a 50 percent increase in bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content since January 2024, the foundation said in an update. But it's not because human readers have suddenly developed a voracious appetite for consuming Wikipedia articles and for watching videos or downloading files from Wikimedia Commons. No, the spike in usage came from AI crawlers, or automated programs scraping Wikimedia's openly licensed images, videos, articles and other files to train generative artificial intelligence models. This sudden increase in traffic from bots could slow down access to Wikimedia's pages and assets, especially during high-interest events. When Jimmy Carter died in December, for instance, people's heightened interest in the video of his presidential debate with Ronald Reagan caused slow page load times for some users.

Kathryn Foley's nine-year-old daughter Helene is a regular on Roblox. Kathryn ensures her daughter avoids games where other players would talk to her, or friend requests. Ms Foley told BBC News: "I know I will absolutely be using the game blocking feature, and to see how long my daughter spends on particular games - and also if she is playing games I didn't know she played." Kirsty Solman has spoken with the BBC about how Roblox has helped her 13-year-old son Kyle - who has ADHD, autism and severe anxiety - with social interactions. She said: "These all sound fantastic especially the experience blocking, as a concern is the type of games our children are accessing."

Home printers and scanners had their moment--around the same time flip phones did. Instead, they're swapping out those dusty relics for a powerful little app called iScanner. This mobile document scanner fits in your pocket, fires up instantly, and doesn't charge you monthly. You can grab lifetime access for just 24.99 with code SCAN at checkout while codes last (reg. Last time we ran this deal, they sold out within the day--so act fast if you're interested.

As of April 2, the Shark AI Ultra Voice Control Robot Vacuum is on sale at Amazon for 299.99. Normally it's listed for 599, so you're getting a 50 percent discount. Some of the best deals available in Amazon's Big Spring Sale this year were on robot vacuums, and thankfully, there are still some nice deals floating around after the sale event. One of our favorites is this discount on the Shark AI Ultra Robot Vacuum, which is still 50 percent off for a limited time. If you're looking to pick up a robot vacuum to get ahead of your spring cleaning, now is your chance.