Sci-Tech news

• Beam smart light bulb lets you watch movies on your bedroom CEILING

  26-02-2015 16:39 via
  
  Beam, made by Los Angeles based Beam Labs, allows you to watch movies, play games and browse the internet on your ceiling, work surfaces and dinner table, and fits into any light socket.
  
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• Revealed: The high street hot drinks that contain the most caffeine - including one popular beverage with the equivalent of four cans of Red Bull

  25-08-2026 01:01 via dailymail.com
  
  Experts at Which? have analysed the levels of caffeine in the hot drinks from five popular retailers - with astonishing results.
  
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• Conjure cash with old Macs by linking them to AI inference Borg

  24-08-2026 21:40 via theregister.com
  
  Eigen Labs, a five-year-old tech biz based in Seattle, Washington, estimates that owners of Apple Silicon hardware can earn $120 to $200 per month on average by selling idle compute power for AI inference. Gajesh Naik, an engineer at Eigen Labs, said on Friday that the Darkbloom project, a distributed network of Apple Silicon devices, has become a paid inference provider on OpenRouter and invited Mac owners to add their machines to the Darkbloom network. "We have fulfilled on track close at 4.5B
  
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• Blood-red moon over US sparks Armageddon fears as biblical prophecy appears to unfold

  24-08-2026 20:59 via dailymail.com
  
  A partial lunar eclipse will turn the moon a copper-red color, creating an eerie blood moon visible across all 48 lower US states.
  
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• Eerie blood-red moon rising over the US in just DAYS sparks fears of a biblical prophecy

  24-08-2026 20:09 via dailymail.com
  
  A partial lunar eclipse will turn the moon a copper-red color, creating an eerie blood moon visible across all 48 lower US states.
  
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• Windows NT 4 went on sale 30 years ago today

  24-08-2026 19:43 via theregister.com
  
  Today marks the 30th anniversary of Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 becoming available on August 24, 1996. Windows NT 4.0, codenamed “Tukwila,” went on retail sale exactly 30 years ago. This was the version that started to deliver on the promise of Microsoft’s long-running Windows NT project. NT 4 married the very solid NT operating system with a slightly modified version of the Windows Explorer desktop from Windows 95, which is why it was also internally known as the “Shell Upd
  
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• YouTuber's backyard fab ambitions expand from RAM to homebrew LEDs

  24-08-2026 19:22 via theregister.com
  
  A YouTuber on a mission to liberate semiconductor manufacturing from the grip of multinational megacorporations is back with a new round of DIY success, this time manufacturing working LEDs in his backyard fab. Dr. Semiconductor, also known as semiconductor engineer Dr. Matthew Hartensveld, per his recently launched website, first caught the internet’s attention five months ago when he built a class-100 cleanroom in a shed in his backyard. Back in April, we wrote about his successful proje
  
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• Iran-linked cyberattack shut down a UK power plant

  24-08-2026 18:59 via theregister.com
  
  A suspected Iran-linked cyberattack shut down a small UK power plant around the time that a series of digital intrusions disrupted American water utilities across 12 states. A British government spokesperson confirmed the hack to The Register on Monday and told us that the security incident affected a “small-scale energy generator.” “At no point was there a risk to the wider energy system,” the spokesperson said, adding that the UK’s energy system is “highly r
  
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• Logitech hit by sueball over tariff refunds

  24-08-2026 18:34 via theregister.com
  
  A complaint filed in a California District Court has accused peripheral maker Logitech of withholding tariff refunds from customers, and asked for the proceeds from its activities to be returned to punters. When the US administration imposed tariffs on imports, companies quickly passed them on to US customers. While we won't go into the whys, wherefores, and the what-were-you-thinking, of tariffs imposed by the US administration, the upshot was that customers often ended up paying more for the s
  
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• Users mash LinkedIn's AI slop button 1M+ times in 3 weeks

  24-08-2026 18:15 via theregister.com
  
  More than 1 million LinkedIn users have clicked the newish “Seems like AI slop” button since the social network launched it at the end of July. Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s chief product officer, said that compared to the period before launching the AI slop reporting button, those who copy-paste AI-written posts are seeing around 40 percent fewer views. “Despite the progress, we know we have more to do to ensure LinkedIn remains a place where you can find real people and r
  
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• Emperor Penguin Linus Torvalds banishes a bug – with a bot

  24-08-2026 17:32 via theregister.com
  
  Work on Linux kernel 7.3 is underway, and a bug fix just came in from an unusual source: Linus himself. Well, kind of… The new bug fix has the title of Don’t hand out the flat CCS storage as usable VRAM, and it comes from emperor penguin Linus Torvalds . Now that kernel 7.2 is out, the team is hard at work on what will be kernel 7.3, which means lots of bug-bashing. However, while Torvalds remains in charge of the overall kernel project, as he has said a number of times, including o
  
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• Monster heat dome traps 50 million Americans in life-threatening 118F inferno

  24-08-2026 17:27 via dailymail.com
  
  Extreme heat and humidity are expected to make conditions outdoors life-threatening for millions in seven US states, and many will be feeling the heat throughout the entire week.
  
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• What Nvidia's first Groq 3 LPU benchmarks tell us about its $20B gamble

  24-08-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  Nvidia’s $20 billion bet on Groq’s LPU tech sure looks like it was a good one. On Monday, the GPU giant offered the first glimpse of just how big a speedup its Groq 3-based LPX racks will provide. In an independent benchmark conducted by Artificial Analysis, Nvidia’s LPX rack systems managed to churn out 3,400 tokens a second (tok/s) with a 100,000-token input sequence in Google’s Gemma 4 31B model. According to Nvidia, this makes it 4x faster than the nearest alternative
  
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• What Nvidia's first Groq 3 LPU benchmarks do and don't tell us about its $20B gamble

  24-08-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  Nvidia’s $20 billion bet on Groq’s LPU tech sure looks like it was a good one. On Monday, the GPU giant offered the first glimpse of just how big a speedup its Groq 3-based LPX racks will provide. In an independent benchmark conducted by Artificial Analysis, Nvidia’s LPX rack systems managed to churn out 3,400 tokens a second (tok/s) with a 100,000-token input sequence in Google’s Gemma 4 31B model. According to Nvidia, this makes it 4x faster than the nearest alternative
  
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• Tesla to recall almost three million vehicles over hidden door handles

  24-08-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  Millions of Tesla vehicles are being recalled in China over the brand's hidden door handles, which regulators worry could present a danger in crashes. Minimalist door handles have long been a feature of Elon Musk's electric vehicles. However, Chinese regulators are less than impressed with the tech and demanded that Tesla, alongside other brands, update the vehicles to mitigate a perceived safety risk, in which occupants might not be able to escape a vehicle or rescuers be unable to gain access
  
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• Scientists uncover lost world beneath Egypt's desert that rewrites its ancient past

  24-08-2026 16:37 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists have uncovered evidence of a lost world buried beneath Egypt's desert, which rewrites the nation's ancient past.
  
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• Oracle Exadata Database@AWS offers advantages, but trade-offs remain

  24-08-2026 16:29 via theregister.com
  
  As Oracle launches its Exadata service on Database@AWS — a year after it went live for lower-level databases — experts have warned there are trade-offs in getting value for money and cautioned over Oracle FUD around the cloud migration decision-making. Earlier this month, Big Red announced the general availability of Oracle Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure on Oracle AI Database@AWS, which adds the beefed-up Oracle database to the service. AWS was the last major clo
  
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• The ominous sign Super El Niño is ramping up: Global ocean temperatures hit a record high - and scientists say the worst is yet to come

  24-08-2026 16:17 via dailymail.com
  
  Global ocean temperatures have hit their highest daily average ever recorded, in a worrying sign that Super El Niño is ramping up.
  
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• ShinyHunters and ReliaQuest trade blows over claimed breach

  24-08-2026 16:01 via theregister.com
  
  ShinyHunters has claimed another cybersecurity scalp, but ReliaQuest says the crew's social engineering attack only got as far as one employee identity before its defenses slammed the door. The ransomware baddies listed US-based infosec biz ReliaQuest on its leak site on August 23, claiming the corporation as its latest victim. The listing, seen by The Register, links to screenshots the gang claims show access to ReliaQuest's Okta dashboard. It did not publish any stolen customer data, however,
  
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• Chipmakers laughing all the way to the vault as memory prices go stratospheric

  24-08-2026 15:40 via theregister.com
  
  Semiconductor revenue is set to nearly double this year, with Gartner projecting the industry will bring in $1.6 trillion in 2026, up sharply from $809 billion in 2025 Memory chips are driving almost all of that growth: DRAM and NAND revenue are each expected to roughly triple or quadruple, pushing memory past non-memory chips in total revenue for the first time. Gartner expects memory alone to top $1 trillion by 2027. Last year, memory revenue was $220 billion vs $589 billion for non-memory chi
  
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• I picked Task Manager 'to see how ready AI is for primetime… or if it would just degrade to slop' – OG dev talks to The Reg

  24-08-2026 15:03 via theregister.com
  
  The author of the original legendary 1996 Windows Task Manager has released new versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux, telling The Reg the project started life as a way to see if vibe coding could produce something useful. "I picked Task Manager as a simpler target to see how ready AI is for primetime… or if it would just degrade to slop," former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer told us. "And it turns out it depends on what you ask for, largely! And what you test and instrument. It's like h
  
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• AliExpress accused of fingerprinting shoppers with silent audio trick that also muted a dev's headphones

  24-08-2026 14:32 via theregister.com
  
  Developer Matt Callaghan claims he caught Alibaba trying to track web users by playing sounds through browsers vulnerable to audio fingerprinting. The software engineer drew attention to the issue late last week after investigating why his Bluetooth headphones stopped playing music whenever he visited Alibaba’s website. “Recently I ran into a strange problem with my Bluetooth headphones,” Callaghan wrote. “They support multipoint Bluetooth audio, so they can be connected
  
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• US datacenters tripled their water footprint in 10 years

  24-08-2026 14:01 via theregister.com
  
  Datacenters in America used about 17 billion gallons of water during 2023, triple the amount they used a decade earlier in 2014, according to an estimate from US Congressional Research Service (CRS). In a recent report published by the Library of Congress, the CRS casts an eye over how server farms use water, looks at potential options to reduce this, and discusses the current federal role in overseeing the use of H2O by operators. The CRS notes the federal government does not systematically ass
  
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• Back to buttons? British drivers call for car manufacturers to ditch touchscreens in favour of physical dials

  24-08-2026 13:47 via dailymail.com
  
  A new survey has revealed that more than half (51 per cent) of UK drivers wish cars still used physical dials for key functions.
  
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• World's oldest lab-grown human brains reach seven years old - and scientists think they may have 'recorded the passage of time'

  24-08-2026 13:30 via dailymail.com
  
  The world's oldest lab-grown human brains have reached seven years old, scientists have revealed.
  
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• $1T investment giant Apollo breached after social engineering attack

  24-08-2026 13:29 via theregister.com
  
  Apollo Global Management has admitted that attackers talked their way into its cloud systems and got their hands on Social Security numbers and other personal information. The investment giant disclosed the breach in a notification filed with California's attorney general, saying it had suffered a "social engineering incident" that resulted in unauthorized access to "certain cloud platforms" between July 6 and July 10. Apollo isn't saying which cloud platforms were compromised, how the attackers
  
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• AI vendors are turning to custom hardware as Microsoft winds back the clock on Windows

  24-08-2026 12:57 via theregister.com
  
  KETTLE This week, we learned a lot more about what’s going on inside the datacenter. GPUs may still be king but their exclusive reign on the rack is over. The taskbar's supremacy at the bottom of the desktop may be coming to an end too. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. Those platforms also let you subscribe to Kettle, so you are always notified when the latest episode goes live. Register Systems Edit
  
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• Security vets rally around $4 paper password books for sale in Australia

  24-08-2026 12:17 via theregister.com
  
  Are you sick and tired of maintaining a password manager? Struggling with choosing the right one for you? Well, readers who live Down Under can get themselves down to their local AusPost branch where they can pick up an old-school alternative for just AU$4.90 (US$3.51). Password books are something of a historical relic, phased out largely because of the scrutiny associated with using one and the now-gray-haired elders who once scoffed at the mere notion of such an opsec crime. They might not be
  
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• Meet Britain's newest dog breeds! Braque du Bourbonnais and Epagneul Français are officially recognised - making them the 229th and 230th breeds in the UK

  24-08-2026 11:46 via dailymail.com
  
  The Royal Kennel Club has officially granted recognition to the Braque du Bourbonnais and Epagneul Français - two gundog breeds from France.
  
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• AI could help terrorists build bombs and bioweapons, report warns

  24-08-2026 11:29 via dailymail.com
  
  AI could help terrorist groups build sophisticated biological and chemical weapons, a report has warned.
  
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