Sci-Tech news

• 75% of the world's 59 labs that handle deadly pathogens receive low biosafety and security scores

  21-06-2021 20:43 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  Only a quarter of the world's biosafety level 4 labs, facilities that handle dangerous pathogens, scored high on biosafety and biosecurity levels. These labs are located in 23 countries.
  
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• Citrix says it's back as a mainstream server virtualization player that won't send scary bills

  01-07-2026 14:01 via theregister.com
  
  Citrix says it has returned to the mainstream server virtualization market with the release of XenServer 9. The hypervisor was a contender in the early 2010s but struggled to compete with VMware and Microsoft. By 2014, analyst firm Gartner suggested Citrix had stopped trying to compete for workloads other than its own desktop virtualization and network security products. Citrix kept the product alive without much fanfare for years and rebranded it Citrix Hypervisor. After a pair of private equit
  
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• How do YOU pronounce 'happy' or 'chilly'? Here's what it says about your social class

  01-07-2026 13:44 via dailymail.com
  
  How do you pronounce 'happy', 'baby', 'chilly', or 'city'? According to a new study, the answer could say a lot about your social class.
  
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• Brit competition cops fast-track £2B borging of Netomnia into Openreach challenger

  01-07-2026 13:31 via theregister.com
  
  Britain's competition watchdog wants to cast a close eye over the proposed takeover of Substantial, owner of Netomnia, by a consortium that includes Virgin Media O2 owners Liberty Global and Telefónica. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has referred the acquisition for an in-depth investigation under its fast-track procedure at the merging parties' request. It notified the parties earlier this week that it was launching an inquiry, and today's decision means it is fast-tracking
  
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• Purism launches supersized 16-inch laptop for buyers who put privacy before price

  01-07-2026 12:59 via theregister.com
  
  Purism has launched the Librem 16, a privacy-focused Linux laptop with a 16-inch display and hardware controls designed to disable potentially intrusive components. The machine runs Coreboot firmware and disables Intel's Management Engine. Founder and CEO Todd Weaver told The Register about doing this back in 2017. Purism also offers privacy-centric smartphones. The new laptop has two hardware kill switches located in the strip between the keyboard and the screen hinge. One of them disconnects t
  
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• Urgent warning as ocean surface temperatures hit a record high for June - with fears the planet is entering 'uncharted territory'

  01-07-2026 12:19 via dailymail.com
  
  The planet's oceans are at unprecedented temperatures for this time of year, scientists have warned.
  
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• Boffins peg narcissistic leadership as the real driver behind 'return to office' demands

  01-07-2026 12:00 via theregister.com
  
  OPINION Bosses say working from the office is all about productivity, but the truth is it's just a power trip driven by fear and narcissism. Executives who insist on people working from the office like to say it's all about productivity, culture, collaboration, and mentoring. Pull the other one; it has bells on. When executives demand that we "return to the office," they usually lean on a familiar set of talking points: remote work hurts productivity, people collaborate better in the office, and
  
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• ZTE honored with two GeSI DWP Global Awards for Signal Reach Program in Africa

  01-07-2026 11:58 via theregister.com
  
  ZTE has received two prestigious Digital with Purpose (DWP) honors - the Smart Cities Award and the Global Award - for its Signal Reach Program in Africa at the DWP Global Summit Shenzhen 2026. The awards span three core categories: Climate, Smart Cities, and Health & Wellbeing. In addition, the event presents the coveted Global Award as its supreme annual honor. Dubbed the Award of the Awards, it is the year's sole top overall prize, selected from outstanding entries across all category div
  
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• Large Hadron Collider is shut down by CERN ahead of major upgrades to make it even more powerful

  01-07-2026 11:26 via dailymail.com
  
  The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful atom smasher, was switched off on Monday night ahead of major upgrades.
  
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• UK.gov vows to cut consultancy spending, then hands up to £350M to consultancies

  01-07-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  The UK's Home Office has awarded two global consultancies contracts worth up to £350 million for data and analytics services, despite the government's commitment to spend less on consultants. Deloitte has won a four-year deal worth up to £200 million to offer "strategic multifunctional teams" for data analytics, data matching and data insight services. PA Consulting has won a contract for up to £150 million for the same services over the same period, according to procurement do
  
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• Portuguese restaurant kiosk software gives Windows indigestion

  01-07-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  Restaurant kiosks are hazardous places, and not only on the side of the screen where patrons jab greasy fingers. On the other side of the glass, things can also go wrong when Windows starts working against the kiosk software. Spotted in a Portuguese restaurant chain by eagle-eyed Register reader Mário, the screen shows Windows 10 - though it could possibly be Windows 8.x - turning its nose up at a kiosk application. Either way, the sight of it would be enough to put even the most cast-iro
  
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• Japan wants 10 million more robots by 2040, some providing medical care

  01-07-2026 08:08 via theregister.com
  
  Japan has updated its national robotics strategy with a goal to adopt 10 million robots by the year 2040, with some intended to provide medical care. Minister for the Economy, Trade and Industry Ryosei Akazawa yesterday announced the amended strategy, which envisions more robots working to provide medical care, or taking on roles in the food and beverage manufacturing sectors. To make it happen, Akazawa announced investments in models for AI-powered robots and other forms of physical AI. As is o
  
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• BIS Warns: Bursting Of AI Bubble, Collapse Of Circular Deals Are Among Top Risks To Global Financial System

  01-07-2026 06:43 via technocracy.news
  
  If you remember the Enron collapse, which was caused by circular financing, hidden leverage, and revenues that may be less real than they look, you might see why some people are calling BS on the whole AI industry. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) sees the risks. The AI funding money is drying up, AI data center construction has hit a brick wall, and the public is rising up in every sector of the country: labor, homeowners, college graduates, and business employees. Tech oligarchs ar
  
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• Former Indonesian minister and startup hero jailed for Chromebook buys

  01-07-2026 05:59 via theregister.com
  
  An Indonesian corruption court has sentenced the nation’s former education minister Nadiem Makarim, who is also a hero of the nation’s tech startup scene, to ten years in jail for his role in buying a stack of Chromebooks. Nadiem is a co-founder of Gojek, a so-called superapp that offers ride share, food delivery, digital payments, and even logistics services. In 2021, Gojek merged with its rival Tokopedia. The combined entity became a ubiquitous part of daily life in Indonesia and o
  
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• T-Mobile appears to be quitting VMware – and fighting a very familiar battle for support rights on the way out

  01-07-2026 03:19 via theregister.com
  
  Telco giant T-Mobile appears to be transitioning away from VMware and fighting a court battle for support it says Broadcom is bound to provide, according to court documents seen by The Register. The dispute relates to a deal T-Mobile struck with VMware in August 2023, which saw the telco acquire perpetual licenses and two years of support for some software, plus the option for a further year of support. When Broadcom acquired VMware in 2023, it stopped selling perpetual licenses and standalone s
  
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• Claude Code users complain their chat records are being mysteriously wiped out

  01-07-2026 00:15 via theregister.com
  
  Claude Code users are reporting that the app is silently deleting conversation transcripts – yours may even already be gone if you don’t know to change a default setting that the platform never bothers to tell users about. Claude Code’s GitHub repo features multiple open issues from the past couple of months, as users of the coding tool are finding their conversation transcripts gone. The problem appears to come down to the cleanupPeriodDays configuration option, which defaults
  
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• Qualcomm's proposed solution to catch up in AI infra: Bury the compute under the DRAM

  30-06-2026 22:25 via theregister.com
  
  Qualcomm is finally getting serious about AI infrastructure, but its push into the datacenter hinges on the success of an ambitious near-memory compute architecture designed to deliver better inference economics than today's GPUs. Announced during its 2026 investor day last week, the tech will see Qualcomm stack layer upon layer of DRAM on top of its XPUs to form a single unified compute and memory module it's calling high-bandwidth compute (HBC). “We offer all of the performance advantage
  
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• Shelter-in-place orders issued after freight train carrying hazardous materials derails in Pennsylvania

  30-06-2026 22:11 via dailymail.com
  
  A freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed in a Pennsylvania community Tuesday afternoon, triggering a shelter-in-place order as emergency crews raced to the scene.
  
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• Changing AI math could reduce the hardware burden, researchers show

  30-06-2026 22:07 via theregister.com
  
  Sophisticated AI models tend to require a lot of memory and take up a lot of storage space. One of the ways to reduce that footprint involves a process called quantization, which changes how model weights are represented and stored. But quantization has its drawbacks. Andrés Mac Allister, CEO and founder of The SEMQ Group, believes there's another way to make machine learning more efficient and less resource intensive. Instead of compressing model weights (specifically embeddings), he con
  
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• Several US states enter 'zone of sweaty despair' with humidity worse than the Amazon rainforest

  30-06-2026 21:49 via dailymail.com
  
  A suffocating surge of moisture is turning parts of the US into a 'zone of sweaty despair,' with humidity levels rivaling, and in some cases exceeding, the Amazon rainforest.
  
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• Infosec professionals sour on automated pentesting tools

  30-06-2026 21:38 via theregister.com
  
  Perhaps bots aren't the answer to everything when it comes to finding flaws. Fully automated pentesting has been a letdown for many security teams, according to offensive security firm Cobalt, as support for the approach has fallen sharply over the past year. Cobalt’s recent 2026 State of Pentesting report found, among other things, that security practitioners are rapidly ditching autonomous pentesting tools, in large part because they’re simply failing to detect critical vulnerabili
  
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• Bombshell claims raise fears CIA's secret mind-control program is still experimenting on Americans

  30-06-2026 19:59 via dailymail.com
  
  A notorious CIA program known as MKUltra is back in the spotlight as experts claim the mind control experiments used against American citizens may have continued after the 1970s.
  
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• Strange formation in NASA's Mars photo fuels claims of extraterrestrial life on the Red Planet

  30-06-2026 19:51 via dailymail.com
  
  An unusual sighting in a NASA image has reignited speculation that something extraterrestrial once existed on Mars.
  
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• CIA's secret mind-control horrors exposed as new claims of torturing Americans emerge

  30-06-2026 19:21 via dailymail.com
  
  A notorious CIA mind-control program is back in the spotlight amid fresh allegations of torture and deadly human experiments.
  
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• Huntress CEO says threat hunter used 'poor judgment' in alerting ransomware crim about law enforcement probe

  30-06-2026 18:54 via theregister.com
  
  Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan said he is aware of “questionable, long-term threat actor communications” between a threat hunter who is still employed with the security firm and a cybercriminal, and called this “poor judgment.” “In one particular exchange, our current teammate disclosed to a threat actor that law enforcement had reached out to them about the threat actor,” Hanslovan said in a blog post, addressing a former employee’s accusations that the cu
  
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• CIA's secret mind-control horrors exposed as chilling new MKUltra claims emerge

  30-06-2026 18:42 via dailymail.com
  
  A notorious CIA mind-control program is back in the spotlight amid fresh allegations of torture and deadly human experiments.
  
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• Bombshell claims raise fears CIA's MKUltra mind-control program is still experimenting on Americans

  30-06-2026 18:41 via dailymail.com
  
  A notorious CIA program known as MKUltra is back in the spotlight as experts claim the mind control experiments used against American citizens may have continued after the 1970s.
  
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• Meta's non-surgical mind reading machine improves on prior projects, but still isn't great

  30-06-2026 18:25 via theregister.com
  
  For those who can't move their fingers to type, a brain-computer interface that can help them communicate by decoding neural activity is a lifeline. Researchers at Meta have been working on a noninvasive - no surgery required - brain-computer interface that is better than its predecessors, but still far from practically usable after more than a year of work. Meta announced the second iteration of its system designed to pick up and decode brain signals that fire when users are typing, called Brai
  
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• AI agents: Cause of database sprawl. And also the proposed solution

  30-06-2026 18:01 via theregister.com
  
  Database management work will soon be mostly automated by AI agents, just like coding, according to the CEO of Cockroach Labs, the company behind the distributed database of the same name. Spencer Kimball told The Register that the proliferation of databases demanded by the explosion of AI agents in coding and business functions will mean that managing them in a largely manual way is out of the question. “Nobody's going to do manual work on a database, just like almost nobody's doing manua
  
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• Bombshell testimony warns CIA's MKUltra mind-control program may still be experimenting on Americans

  30-06-2026 17:58 via dailymail.com
  
  A notorious CIA program known as MKUltra is back in the spotlight as experts claim the mind control experiments used against American citizens may have continued after the 1970s.
  
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