Extracting hangovers from beer: inside the world’s biggest ‘nolo’ brewery in south Wales

A “de-alcoholisation facility” sounds like somewhere to check in after a boozy Christmas, but in the new annexe of a brewery in south Wales they are extracting hangovers from beer.With demand for no-alcohol and low-alcohol (“nolo”) beer taking off in the UK, the hi-tech brewing apparatus enables the plant at Magor, which produces more than 1bn pints of Budweiser, Corona and Stella Artois a year, to make the increasingly popular teetotal versions too.The new unit is part of AB InBev’s global brewing empire and at its official opening on Friday, Brian Perkins, whose wider management responsibilities include running the drinks group’s UK arm, acknowledged that in the early days alcohol-free beer tasted “lousy”.Alcohol gives beer a sweet, warming, full-bodied taste, as well as affecting how other flavour compounds evaporate, resulting in its distinctive flavour. So removing it and being left with a drink that still tastes good has been a huge challenge for the industry

Keir Starmer to make Iceland boss Richard Walker a Labour peer

The formerly Conservative-supporting boss of the supermarket Iceland is to be made a Labour peer when the party appoints another 25 representatives to parliament’s upper house later this month.Keir Starmer will appoint Richard Walker to the House of Lords, the Guardian understands, the culmination of an unusual and rapid political transformation for someone named as a prospective Tory MP candidate a little over three years ago.It was only February this year when Iceland’s executive chair was rating Starmer’s government six out of 10, saying that Labour needed to focus on “inclusive growth and everyday growth” that could “trickle down in everyday people’s lives”.As a Labour peer, Walker will get the chance to push for policies close to his heart including closer relations with the EU and also for a more positive message on the economy.He took over the leadership of Iceland in 2023 after his father, Malcolm Walker, stepped down from the frozen foods chain he had founded in 1973

Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’

A single person claims to have authored 113 academic papers on artificial intelligence this year, 89 of which will be presented this week at one of the world’s leading conference on AI and machine learning, which has raised questions among computer scientists about the state of AI research.The author, Kevin Zhu, recently finished a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and now runs Algoverse, an AI research and mentoring company for high schoolers – many of whom are his co-authors on the papers. Zhu himself graduated from high school in 2018.Papers he has put out in the past two years cover subjects like using AI to locate nomadic pastoralists in sub-Saharan Africa, to evaluate skin lesions, and to translate Indonesian dialects. On his LinkedIn, he touts publishing “100+ top conference papers in the past year”, which have been “cited by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, MIT, Oxford and more”

Cloudflare apologises after latest outage takes down LinkedIn and Zoom

Cloudflare has apologised after an outage on Friday morning hit websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and Downdetector, the company’s second outage in less than a month.“Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the internet down again,” it said in a blogpost, adding that it would release more information next week on how it aims to prevent these failures.The outage on Friday came after Cloudflare adjusted its firewall to protect customers from a widespread software vulnerability revealed earlier this week, and was not an attack, it said. Earlier, it said a separate issue had been reported with its application programming interfaces.The issue, which affected 28% of its traffic, lasted for half an hour and was resolved shortly after 9am GMT, it said

Lando Norris proud of winning first F1 drivers’ championship ‘my way’

Lando Norris said he is proud of the way he went about winning his first Formula One world championship, stating after an emotional celebration with his McLaren team and family that he was glad he “won it my way”.Norris emphasised that he felt he had raced fairly and without being overly aggressive, an approach for which he has received criticism in not demonstrating the much eulogised “killer instinct”, which he believes he has proved is not necessary by claiming the title.Norris finished in third at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, enough to secure the world drivers’ championship by two points from Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, who won the race but could not overcome Norris’s 12-point advantage.The 26-year-old Briton has been explicit all season that he felt he could win the title and still drive clean, and he felt he had made his point.“That’s one of the things that makes me most proud,” Norris said

Britain’s Norris pips Verstappen to win maiden F1 world title after third place in Abu Dhabi – as it happened

Time to wave the chequered flag on today’s live blog, and a thrilling F1 season. I’ll leave you with Giles’ Richards race report. Thanks for joining me – see you in March for the Australian Grand Prix. Bye!And here’s Oscar Piastri, who won four of the first six races but ultimately came up short. “We gave it everything, a bit of a gamble on strategy to try and win the race and the championship