Sci-Tech news

• 10 super Luxembourg start-ups to watch siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/luxe…

  01-11-2018 08:01 via twitter.com
  10 super Luxembourg start-ups to watch siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/luxe…
  
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• Earthquake rocks Yellowstone National Park near supervolcano feared to be overdue for eruption

  16-07-2026 16:22 via dailymail.com
  
  An earthquake has struck Yellowstone National Park within miles of an ancient volcanic landmark feared to be showing signs of awakening.
  
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• Future of warfare? Creepy drone spins so fast it disappears before your eyes - and could be used to sneak up on the enemy

  16-07-2026 15:04 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists at Northwestern University have designed a drone that spins so fast it disappears before your eyes.
  
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• Brit Scattered Spider duo handed tickets to prison over Transport for London attack

  16-07-2026 14:49 via theregister.com
  
  The two British Scattered Spider members collared for carrying out the 2024 cyberattack on Transport for London (TfL) will each spend five and a half years in prison after being sentenced on Thursday. Owen Flowers, 18, and Thalha Jubair, 20, were sentenced to five years and six months' imprisonment each, having pleaded guilty in June, in turn receiving a 15 percent reduction in their sentences. Sentencing the pair at Woolwich Crown Court, Mr Justice Turner noted both cybercriminals' immaturity,
  
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• Warning to millions as lung-penetrating toxins sweep across 14 US states... with Detroit's air ranked the worst on Earth

  16-07-2026 14:48 via dailymail.com
  
  Officials are warning millions of Americans to stay indoors if possible on Thursday, as lung-penetrating toxins fill the air over more than a dozen states,
  
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• Warning to millions as lung-penetrating toxins sweep across 14 US states... with Detroit's air ranked worst on Earth

  16-07-2026 14:39 via dailymail.com
  
  Officials are warning millions of Americans to stay indoors if possible on Thursday, as lung-penetrating toxins fill the air over more than a dozen states,
  
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• AI power binge delivers best half since 2022 for climate tech venture funding

  16-07-2026 14:05 via theregister.com
  
  Climate tech venture capital had its strongest first half since 2022 as investors poured billions into low-carbon datacenters and projects needed to feed AI's seemingly endless appetite for compute. According to investment tracker Currence, climate tech startups pulled in $26.1 billion in venture funding during the first six months of 2026, up 55 percent year-over-year. However, that headline growth came with a catch: investors weren't backing the climate sector broadly so much as pouring money
  
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• Meet the REAL Pirates of the Caribbean: Incredible reconstruction reveals the infamous 'Piratetown' of Nassau in its heyday - as well as the buccaneers who lived there

  16-07-2026 13:43 via dailymail.com
  
  The real-life home of the Pirates of the Caribbean has been brought back to life for the first time in more than 300 years.
  
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• Windows 10 refuses to die, and the security bill is coming due

  16-07-2026 13:25 via theregister.com
  
  A hard core of Windows 10 devices cannot or will not be migrated to Windows 11, leaving enterprises with a growing security problem as support options run out. According to asset tracking service Lansweeper, Windows 10 still runs on 16.9 percent of the Windows devices it monitors, or "roughly one in six." A year ago, the operating system accounted for about half of the machines in its dataset, falling to the low-to-mid 40 percent range by the time Microsoft ended standard support. The decline co
  
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• Saharan dust is at an all-time high over Britain - increasing the risk 'blood rain', study warns

  16-07-2026 13:21 via dailymail.com
  
  If you're finding it harder to breathe in Britain, you're not imagining things. A new study has warned that Saharan dust has driven up pollution in the UK by 50 per cent over the last decade.
  
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• It's getting harder to BREATHE in Britain: Saharan dust has driven up UK pollution by 50%, study warns

  16-07-2026 13:07 via dailymail.com
  
  If you're finding it harder to breathe in Britain, you're not imagining things. A new study has warned that Saharan dust has driven up pollution in the UK by 50 per cent over the last decade.
  
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• SpaceX open sources Grok Build in same week company was found beaming users' repos to the cloud

  16-07-2026 13:00 via theregister.com
  
  Elon Musk has confirmed SpaceX has now open sourced the Grok Build CLI just days after researchers caught the AI tool scooping up users’ entire repositories and uploading them to company-controlled cloud storage. SpaceXAI’s data grab was first publicized on Sunday by Cereblab, who probed Grok Build traffic and found that repos were being packaged up as Git Bundles and beamed to Google Cloud storage. Concerning. The news gathered so much negative attention that Elon Musk felt compelle
  
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• AWS CloudFront outage serves errors instead of websites

  16-07-2026 12:54 via theregister.com
  
  Amazon Web Services (AWS) is experiencing another outage after a CloudFront issue began throwing 5xx errors, knocking a string of websites and online services offline across multiple regions. According to AWS, the issue began at 0145 PDT (0945 UTC) this morning and affects CloudFront customers using VPC Origins. This is a relatively new CloudFront feature that lets customers serve applications running behind private load balancers through CloudFront without exposing their back-end infrastructure
  
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• Alzheimer's 'wonder drug' could delay disease for three years - 90% of brain damage vanished in new trial

  16-07-2026 12:29 via dailymail.com
  
  A 'wonder drug' that can stave off Alzheimer's disease can protect the brain for three years after taking it, say researchers.
  
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• Telegram shortlinks knocked offline over sanctioned VPN connection

  16-07-2026 12:07 via theregister.com
  
  The operator of the .ME domain registry has confirmed that Telegram's t.me shortlinks stopped working for around a day while the messaging platform verified that links associated with a sanctioned VPN service had been removed. The US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated First VPN Service (1VPNS) on July 13 for selling services to ransomware groups and other cybercriminals. Shortly after, users across the app reported problems with t.me links, which Telegram uses to share links to c
  
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• A dismal glimpse into the future: Scientists give their chilling predictions for life in the 2100s

  16-07-2026 11:21 via dailymail.com
  
  From chocolate grown in labs to intense fires raging across the globe, the world of 2100 could look very different from today.
  
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• Is your avocado oil FAKE? Study warns 89% of foods that claim to be made with the trendy oil are bulked out with cheap alternatives

  16-07-2026 11:04 via dailymail.com
  
  It's one of the healthiest cooking oils on the market. But it turns out the avocado oil in your favourite snacks might be fake.
  
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• How to teach an old Intel Mac new tricks with OpenCore Legacy Patcher

  16-07-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  HANDS-ON Dortania's OpenCore Legacy Patcher lets you run newer versions of macOS on unsupported Intel Macs. It's handy, but there are a few things to beware of – including macOS Tahoe. OpenCore Legacy Patcher brings Hackintosh techniques to genuine Mac hardware. It's an inspired hack that helps you to install newer versions of Apple macOS on older Macs for which Apple has dropped support in recent versions of macOS. Its co-author, Mykola Grymalyuk, has a fascinating retrospective on its de
  
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• Law firm insisted on one password to rule them all

  16-07-2026 09:00 via theregister.com
  
  PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we gather lessons from organizations that didn’t take security seriously enough. This week’s tale of woe comes from a company that left a door wide open for miscreants, but was lucky it didn't have to pay the price. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at [email protected]. Anonymity is available upon request. Our story comes courtesy of a reader we’ll Regomize as Manny. A few yea
  
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• Tech support scam caused massive data breach at Australian airline Qantas

  16-07-2026 08:27 via theregister.com
  
  Australia’s Privacy Commissioner has revealed a tech support scam was the cause of the massive 2025 data breach at Australian airline Qantas and found the carrier didn’t breach its privacy obligations despite leaking personally identifiable information for 5.7 million customers. The Commissioner reached that conclusion, and a decision not to open a formal privacy probe, in a report published today. Qantas has previously admitted the incident was the result of a social engineering att
  
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• Even HP resellers thought the price of toner and ink was too high – so HP India facilitated an illegal cartel

  16-07-2026 07:01 via theregister.com
  
  The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has fined HP Inc. and some of its resellers, for what it calls “cartelisation” activities that inflated the cost of PCs and printers – and which it says HP used to head off threats from resellers to sell counterfeit ink cartridges. The ₹138.85 crores/$14.4 million fine won’t be a massive inconvenience to HP. The facts of the case may be, as the CCI found HP told its resellers what prices to charge when they bid for tenders p
  
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• Cyberattack threatens utterly critical infrastructure in Japan: KFC

  16-07-2026 04:01 via theregister.com
  
  The crippling high-consequence attack on vital infrastructure that cybersecurity experts have warned about for years is upon us, in the form of an incident that may force KFC to close some stores in Japan. Colonel Sanders himself is not the victim here. That role goes to Nichirei Group, a Japanese purveyor of frozen foods and super-chill logistics services that move them around. Nichirei Group on Monday posted a notice [PDF] in which it admitted “system failures caused by unauthorized acce
  
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• Former OpenAI CTO does what Altman won't, releases a frontier AI model that's actually open

  16-07-2026 02:14 via theregister.com
  
  If you're in the market for a frontier-class open weights model, your options are few and far between outside of the Chinese model houses. With the Wednesday release of a new model codenamed "Inkling," an outfit called Thinking Machines Lab aims to change that. Founded in early 2025 by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Thinking Machines' first model is a big one. Weighing in at 975 billion parameters, the model requires more than two terabytes of GPU memory — a quantity present in around eigh
  
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• Former OpenAI CTO does what Altman won't: releases a frontier AI model that's actually open

  16-07-2026 02:14 via theregister.com
  
  If you’re in the market for a frontier-class open weights model, your options are few and far between outside of the Chinese model houses. With the Wednesday release of a new model code-named "Inkling", an outfit called Thinking Machines Lab aims to change that. Founded in early 2025 by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Thinking Machines' first model is a big one. Weighing in at 975 billion parameters, the model requires more than two terabytes of GPU memory — a quantity present in arou
  
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• Cadence's AuraStack agent melds AI with HPC to speed PCB, advanced packaging design

  16-07-2026 00:30 via theregister.com
  
  How AI will change the way scientific computing is done remains an open question. One relies on ultra-precise double-precision mathematics, while the other is perfectly happy working with 4 bits. On the surface, the two are diametrically opposed, two extremes of a spectrum we call high-performance computing (HPC) — and yes, whether you like it or not, AI is HPC. However, the latest AI offering from Cadence Design Systems, one of the biggest names in industrial HPC, offers a glimpse of how
  
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• Amazon Web Services' most vocal customer now runs EC2

  15-07-2026 22:54 via theregister.com
  
  Dave Brown, a 19-year veteran of AWS and member of its S-team leadership cabal, is leaving Amazon for parts undisclosed. It's hard to overstate Dave's impact on AWS; the few times I've met him, it was very clear that there was nothing I could trot out in the realm of "arcane EC2 trivia" that he didn't go orders of magnitude deeper on with zero forewarning. This is a titanic loss for AWS, because that's roughly how deep Dave routinely dove. He'll be handing the reins over to fellow S-team member
  
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• Prominent Haskell defector pilloried by anti-AI purists

  15-07-2026 22:37 via theregister.com
  
  Another day, another programming language feels the heat from AI. A prominent Haskell-based software platform is shifting new development to Python, with its founder arguing that Haskell's tooling and ecosystem have been slow to adapt to AI-assisted development. “Haskell is in real danger,” warned Scarf founder Avi Press, in a post entitled “After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell.” “AI is here to stay. The people and ecosystems th
  
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• Americans told to stay indoors TODAY as wildfire smoke reaches 'hazardous' levels across seven states

  15-07-2026 21:52 via dailymail.com
  
  Millions of Americans are being told to stay indoors as a massive plume of wildfire smoke spreads across multiple states, pushing air quality to dangerous levels.
  
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• ZTE's AI new calling builds an open and intelligent telecom ecosystem, transforming from basic voice call to an AI-powered service hub

  15-07-2026 21:00 via theregister.com
  
  ZTE showcased at MWC Shanghai 2026 its groundbreaking AI New Calling solution, together with China Mobile Research Institute (CMCC). Based on the concept of "Calling as a Service", this innovation uses open interfaces to deeply integrate traditional voice calls with artificial intelligence (AI), establishing a dual-engine system powered by "Calling + AI Agents" and "Calling + AI Capabilities". Through an intelligent service portal, it expands the scope of communication applications and converts
  
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• Americans told to stay indoors as wildfire smoke reaches 'hazardous' levels across seven states

  15-07-2026 20:09 via dailymail.com
  
  Millions of Americans are being told to stay indoors as a massive plume of wildfire smoke spreads across multiple states, pushing air quality to dangerous levels.
  
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