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Prince Harry and several other high-profile claimants have lost a lawsuit against the publisher of the Daily Mail tabloid over allegations of unlawful information gathering.

The trial, which began in London’s High Court in January, included accusations against the Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) company of obtaining information by deception, including phone hacking and corrupt payments.

A U.K. High Court judge dismissed all 97 claims, stating the group had “failed to prove their pleaded allegations” in a decision handed down Tuesday afternoon.

ANL denied all claims and maintained that the information had been brought forward too late.

The judge, Matthew Nicklin, acknowledged the allegations were serious, but stated the evidence was not sufficiently convincing in his summary of the case.

In a public statement following the verdict, Paul Dacre, ANL’s editor-in-chief, described the court’s decision as a “victory for Associated’s magnificent journalists” and free press itself.

The high-profile case included claims from several other celebrities including singer Elton John and his husband, member of the House of Lords Doreen Lawrence, former politician Simon Hughes, and actresses Sadie Frost and Elizabeth Hurley.

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For the first time, a physicist has experimentally watched time emerge from within an isolated quantum system — by creating a “mini-universe.” This bizarre experiment raises an intriguing question: If the universe has nothing outside it, where does time come from?

In a new study published June 11 in the journal Physical Review Research , Giovanni Barontini , an experimental physicist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., used a cloud of ultracold atoms to build his mini-universe. The system was so well isolated from its surroundings that, like the universe itself, it had nothing external to use as a clock. He split that system in two and ignored one half — what he called the "dark sector" — to show that time could arise entirely from within the system.

The result offers the first experimental look on why the universe has time at all. "When you put everything together, things really start to make sense," Barontini told Live Science. "How time inside the system was speeding up or slowing down, or even stopping — this was quite surprising, how well everything came together. Very neatly, in a way. Which is something that doesn't happen that often in experiments."

The work is an experimental verification of ideas that have been floating around in quantum cosmology and thermodynamics for decades. This is not a bombshell claim that time is an illusion , but it is the first time anyone has put those ideas to a direct, quantitative test in the lab.

A universe with nothing outside

Barontini set out to look at a problem that physicists have puzzled over for nearly 60 years. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation — a central equation in quantum gravity, the field that seeks to unify Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics — describes the universe as a whole system with no external time parameter. There is no cosmic clock ticking away outside the universe. So where does our experience of time come from?

One influential idea, called relational time, says that time doesn't exist as a fundamental ingredient of reality. Instead, it emerges from relationships inside the universe, with one part of the system acting as a clock for another. But this idea had never been tested directly in the lab.

Barontini's inspiration came from watching his son play with building toys. "I thought that it's something very similar to what we do in our labs," he told Live Science. "We play with very expensive toys. We create our own small samples of reality."

In his lab, that sample is a Bose-Einstein condensate — a state of matter that forms only at near absolute zero. In a Bose-Einstein condensate, thousands of atoms slow to a near standstill and blur together into a single quantum object, behaving as one.

The University of Birmingham experiment to trap and cool rubidium atoms close to absolute zero — the first step in assembling the mini-universe. (Image credit: University of Birmingham) The dark side of time

To mimic a universe with nothing outside it, Barontini placed the condensate in a trap and divided it down the middle with a thin sheet of laser light. He watched one half, the "bright sector," closely and deliberately ignored the other half, which he called the "dark sector."

The atoms in the bright sector sloshed back and forth in the trap, periodically spilling over the barrier and back again. Barontini called the moments when atoms flooded into the bright sector the "Big Bang" and the times when they drained out the "Big Crunch" (the nickname for one theory of how the universe will end , with the universe collapsing in on itself). Then, he tracked how entropy — a measure of disorder, or how spread out energy is within a system — was exchanged between the two halves as atoms crossed the barrier.

Instead of using laboratory time to order events, he built an "entropic time" — a clock defined entirely by how much entropy was flowing between the two halves of the system. If entropy was flowing, time was ticking. If no entropy was exchanged, time stopped. "The entropy exchange between the two systems could be transformed into an internal time variable," Barontini said.

Time speeds up, slows down and stops

What surprised Barontini most was how cleanly everything fit together. The internal, entropic time reliably ordered events in the bright sector. It matched the sequence seen in laboratory time, but it flowed at a different rate.

When entropy was flooding between the sectors, entropic time ran fast. When the exchange slowed, so did the clock. And when the two halves reached equilibrium (no more entropy flowing), the internal clock stopped altogether.

Both time and the arrow of time — maybe they just are born from ignorance.

Giovanni Barontini, experimental physicist at the University of Birmingham

"Time was speeding up or slowing down, or even stopping, depending on what the system was doing," Barontini said.

He then went a step further: Using this internal time, he derived a version of the Schrödinger equation and showed it accurately reproduced what he saw in the experiment. "This was quite surprising, how well everything came together," he said — "very neatly, in a way, which is something that doesn't happen that often in experiments."

Both time itself and the arrow of time — why time flows in one direction rather than the other — may arise from the same source: an observer giving up information. When Barontini chose not to look at the dark sector, he gave up knowledge of that half of the system. That act of ignorance, encoded in entropy, is what gave rise to time in the other half.

"Both time and the arrow of time — maybe they just are born from ignorance," Barontini said. "To have time and to observe, you have to give up some degrees of freedom."

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Barontini sees this as just the beginning. The same cold-atom tool kit that generated a miniature Big Bang and Big Crunch in his trap could, in principle, be engineered to simulate far more exotic phenomena, such as black hole analogues, the conditions of the early universe, and what will happen at the moment of the Big Crunch itself.

"These are things we can do very simply, using the tools we already have to engineer our systems," he said.

The study is a proof of concept ‪—‬ a first demonstration that controlled quantum systems can serve as a test bed for some unanswered questions in physics . For now, those questions remain open.

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Fairphone has poked fun at the Nothing Phone (4b)'s visible screws

The company highlighted in an Instagram story that they're just 'for show' rather than being accessible

The Fairphone 6, on the other hand, has visible screws that users can access

The Nothing Phone (4b) was unveiled earlier today, and it sounds like a reasonable budget handset, with a 6.77-inch 120Hz screen, a 5,200mAh battery with 33W charging, a 50MP wide camera, an 8MP ultra-wide, and a Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chipset paired with 8GB of RAM. But despite having visible screws on the back, it might not be very easy to repair or to replace its components.

We won’t know for sure until someone has done a teardown of the (4b), but Fairphone has shared an Instagram story pointing out that while quite a few screws are visible on the rear of the device, you can’t actually get to them without breaking into the glued-on cover.

The Instagram story — an image of which can be seen below — shows the Fairphone 6 , complete with its own visible screws, overlaid with text reading “every screw is functional on Fairphones. Nothing is for show.” Then, at the bottom, directed at the Nothing Phone (4b), it says, “next time, maybe the screws can be… outside?”

A fair criticism

(Image credit: Fairphone) And it’s a fair point. The Fairphone 6 is a reasonably stylish handset itself, with the visible screws helping it stand out, much like on the Nothing Phone (4b).

But the difference is that the Fairphone’s screws are accessible, making for a modular design where you can easily swap out components, rather than having to replace the whole phone.

So, if you want a handset that’s designed to last, you might want to consider a Fairphone instead of the Nothing Phone (4b) — though Fairphone’s CEO recently teased that two new products are on the way, so you might want to wait for those first, since one of them is likely to be the Fairphone 7.

And, of course, we'll be testing the Nothing Phone (4b) for ourselves in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for our real, experience-backed verdict on that device.

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Website maps open source accident data onto an interactive map

Users can see the most dangerous roads around them

Collisions are graded in severity

Cyclists, pedestrians and careful drivers could find the data offered by interactive online mapping service RoadRisk invaluable when attempting to plan the safest routes for getting from A to B.

The online tool, which uses OpenStreetMap at its core and STATS19 accident reports from police forces in England, Scotland or Wales, handily plots all collision data from the year 2000 to 2025 onto an easy-to-navigate map.

Simply punch in a post code and the website will reveal all accident data from some 350 local authorities over the past 25 years, colour-coding each based on the severity of the collision: slight, serious and fatal.

Not only can you see the most dangerous routes in your area, or in a proposed location, you can also delve into the data to see date, time, location, road and junction details, weather and surface conditions, as well as full records for each vehicle and casualty involved.

The STATS19 data does not contain names, addresses, phone numbers or vehicle registration details, with only age, sex and an area-level deprivation score given.

Interestingly, the site’s homepage also lists the worst roads for fatal crashes (that will be the A38) and the worst local authorities for collisions, which is Birmingham.

RoadRisk says the UK’s Department for Transport typically publishes each year's accident data around September of the following year, with the maps updated shortly after each release.

Analysis: A handy tool for parents and cyclists

(Image credit: RoadRisk) RoadRisk is an interesting proposition and, while you can’t plan a route using the software and navigate via the ‘safest’ roads, it is a great tool for scoping out accident hotpsots in the local area.

As a parent with children old enough to walk to school alone, it was interesting to explore the roads near me with the highest accident rates. More interestingly, many of those involved individuals aged between 11 and 15.

Those shocking results backed up my decision to walk them across some of the most perilous routes before waving them off in the mornings.

Similarly, there are a number of roads in my local area that appear to be hotspots for collisions involving cyclists, which could well inform the next route I take into town.

What’s more, RoadRisk says anyone can use the data to quote statistics, take screenshots, and use the information for any purpose — a boon for anyone lobbying the local authority for safer roads.