Sci-Tech news

• Could a green sponge hold cancer-fighting secrets?

  27-07-2017 12:18 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  A small green sponge discovered in dark, icy waters of the Pacific off Alaska could be the first effective weapon against pancreatic cancer, researchers said. It also killed ovarian cancer cells.
  
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• Microsoft has mostly repaired a flaw in Surface hardware that allowed unprotected devices to be bricked by a single packet

  12-06-2026 15:05 via theregister.com
  
  EXCLUSIVE For the past 90 days, Microsoft has been quietly patching a firmware flaw in Surface devices that allowed the hardware to be bricked with a single packet, though only for those who have disabled Secure Core and Secure Boot. And the company's Copilot AI software inadvertently helped identify the faulty firmware. According to Jack Darcy, a security researcher based in Australia, his instance of Microsoft Copilot stumbled across the bug after being asked to adjust the screen backlighting
  
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• I found alien DNA hidden in human genes: Inside a scientist's hunt for extraterrestrial hybrids as CIA is accused of secretly tracking them

  12-06-2026 14:52 via dailymail.com
  
  A geneticist attempting to find alien-human hybrids on Earth says he knows what the CIA is allegedly looking for in public DNA databases like 23andMe.
  
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• Trump releases THIRD bombshell tranche of UFO files revealing shape-shifting orbs over the US and CIA reports hidden for decades

  12-06-2026 14:23 via dailymail.com
  
  The Trump administration on Friday opened another chapter in its UFO disclosure campaign, releasing a third wave of previously hidden files.
  
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• Google fires sueball at alleged Chinese phishers over AI-powered fraud ops

  12-06-2026 14:14 via theregister.com
  
  Google has sued an alleged China-based cybercrime operation it says used AI-powered phishing kits to blast out millions of scam text messages and funnel victims to fake websites designed to steal passwords, payment cards, and other sensitive information. The complaint targets a group Google refers to as the "Outsider Enterprise," which the company describes as a sprawling criminal network that operates on Telegram and supplies phishing tools to other fraudsters. According to Google's filing, the
  
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• The most handsome footballers at the World Cup, according to science - and Cristiano Ronaldo doesn't even make the top 40

  12-06-2026 14:12 via dailymail.com
  
  Experts have used the Golden Ratio to uncover the most beautiful players competing at the World Cup in Canada, Mexico and the United States.
  
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• SpaceX's $75B IPO has investors seeing stars

  12-06-2026 13:38 via theregister.com
  
  SpaceX has priced its blockbuster initial public offering at $135 a share, raising $75 billion and valuing Elon Musk's rocket biz at roughly $1.78 trillion. The haul could rise to about $86 billion if underwriters exercise their option to buy more stock, making it the largest IPO in US history. The company confirmed [PDF] that 555.6 million shares of Class A common stock were sold in the offering, with another 83.3 million available to underwriters. SpaceX is a loss-making company. In its Form S
  
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• The fungal network hidden beneath our feet: Secret web of fungi could circle Earth 2.7 TRILLION times

  12-06-2026 13:26 via dailymail.com
  
  It might sound like something out of The Last of Us, but scientists have uncovered a hidden fungal network lurking beneath our feet.
  
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• The most handsome footballers at the World Cup, according to science - and Cristiano Ronaldo doesn't even make the top 40

  12-06-2026 12:53 via dailymail.com
  
  Experts have used the Golden Ratio to uncover the most beautiful players competing at the World Cup in Canada, Mexico and the United States.
  
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• Met Police boss threatens to cut 700 frontline jobs after Palantir deal blocked

  12-06-2026 12:51 via theregister.com
  
  London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) is planning to cut around 700 extra frontline posts after being blocked from awarding a software contract to US supplier Palantir, Commissioner Mark Rowley said. On May 20, the capital's deputy mayor for policing and crime Kaya Comer-Schwartz refused to approve the MPS's plan to hand its Unified Operational Analytics (UOA) contract, worth up to £50 million over two years, to Palantir. The force already uses Palantir in professional standards inves
  
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• Plymouth council exposes hundreds in latest local government email gaffe

  12-06-2026 12:32 via theregister.com
  
  Plymouth City Council has joined the growing ranks of public bodies defeated by the humble BCC field after exposing the email addresses of around 500 home-schooling families in a mass-mailing mishap. The blunder comes barely a week after City of York Council disclosed a similar mistake that exposed the email addresses of hundreds of disabled residents, suggesting that some public sector workers remain engaged in an ongoing battle with one of email's oldest features. The message, sent by Plymouth
  
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• UK digital ID gets brain trust to 'challenge' ministers on policy

  12-06-2026 12:13 via theregister.com
  
  The UK government has set up an advisory board for its digital ID project, intended "to challenge the government on emerging ideas or policy decisions to ensure the system works for everyone," says the Cabinet Office. The board includes David Rogers, an Internet of Things security expert and CEO of security consultancy Copper Horse. He is no stranger to government advisory panels, having previously sat on a group formed in 2020 to consider telecoms diversification. A year later, as chairman of t
  
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• BOFH: For one ambitious security type, chaos is a ladder

  12-06-2026 11:17 via theregister.com
  
  EPISODE 11 "And uh... what are you doing?" the Head of Security asks, entering the Security office as I'm making my way to the exit – with a PC under my arm. "Just taking this back to the office to archive the contents and then reset it to factory defaults," I say. "Company policy when someone has been... let go." There have been a number of changes at Security – the same number of changes as there used to be members of Security staff. Apparently, eating endless pastries and watching
  
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• Revealed: The cities where people are most at risk from extreme heat as El Nino arrives - including several major tourist destinations

  12-06-2026 11:12 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists from the University of Oxford analysed the hazard exposure, vulnerability and coping capacity of 220 major cities.
  
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• Is the Gulf Stream about to collapse? Mysterious 'cold blob' in the Atlantic suggests key current is weakening, scientists warn

  12-06-2026 10:54 via dailymail.com
  
  A mysterious 'cold blob' has emerged in the North Atlantic - and scientists say it indicates a critical ocean current is on the verge of collapsing.
  
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• Windows bowls a BSOD at sports fans

  12-06-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  BORK!BORK!BORK! Windows swings for a six but smacks the stumps instead as the baleful glow of a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) adorns Worcestershire County Cricket Club. We were worried that, with recent editions of Windows, the traditional white monospaced text on a blue background of a BSOD was becoming a thing of the past. Thankfully, Worcestershire County Cricket Club, founded in 1865, is keeping the old ways alive with a BSOD to bring a tear to many a system administrator's eye. Spotted by Reg
  
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• Delos Data offers AI chip startups a fast track to rack scale

  12-06-2026 09:30 via theregister.com
  
  COMPUTEX 2026 It’s hard enough for startups to compete with AMD and Nvidia on chip design. The rise of rack-scale architectures has only made things harder. Companies not only have to invest in chip design but also the mechanical, thermal, and power engineering necessary to pack six dozen or more AI accelerators into a single rack that functions as one enormous GPU. At Computex last week, Delos Data, a startup funded by former Intel and Barefoot Networks execs, showed off a modular server
  
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• The trendy 'raw' cheeses linked to deadly listeria case - as experts warn of hidden risks

  12-06-2026 09:04 via dailymail.com
  
  Health experts have issued a warning over trendy 'raw' cheeses after a man died from listeria poisoning , as the popularity of unpasteurised dairy surges in the UK.
  
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• This is your BIOS speaking. Please fix me. Your PC is broken

  12-06-2026 08:30 via theregister.com
  
  ON CALL 你好 Nǐ hǎo, dear reader, and welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your stories of translating technical trauma while delivering transcendent tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Jackson" who told us about his time providing tech support in a university's biology department. "It was sometime in the mid-2000s and our IT group at the time consisted of myself, my boss, and a part-timer," he told On Cal
  
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• Missing nuclear official's final words before vanishing with a gun revealed as case takes disturbing turn

  12-06-2026 07:20 via dailymail.com
  
  The final chilling words of a missing nuclear lab official tied to classified secrets have been revealed as new details in his disappearance have been released by police.
  
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• Claude is ready for its corporate close-up

  12-06-2026 00:43 via theregister.com
  
  Enterprises that have watched Claude claw its way toward mass appeal over the past few months of capacity challenges and pricing realignment should take a closer look at Anthropic's offerings, according to International Data Corporation (IDC). The tech consultancy has been tracking Anthropic's moves over the past six months and says that the AI biz is taking credible steps toward making itself an enterprise AI provider. "Currently, no frontier model company is mature enough to be evaluated as an
  
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• Everyone hates frontier AI labs, says Palantir boss

  11-06-2026 22:54 via theregister.com
  
  Palantir CEO Alex Karp doesn’t think frontier AI labs prepping for IPOs really understand what their customers need, and that ignorance is making Palantir a success. Karp had a wide-ranging, often rambling and self-interrupting sit-down (coherent compared to some of his other interviews, to be fair) with CNBC’s Sara Eisen on Wednesday in which he said that every single enterprise customer Palantir has is unhappy with frontier AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. Those companies, says K
  
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• Anthropic recruits army to sell Claude to nonprofits

  11-06-2026 21:29 via theregister.com
  
  AI may or may not be pushing lots of people out of the workforce, but Anthropic has good news as the Claude creator is creating temporary positions to promote the adoption of AI, even as CEO Dario Amodei ponders policy interventions to counter "job displacement." The AI biz has announced the launch of Claude Corps, a $150 million program that will pay 1,000 Claude Corps Fellows $85,000 (plus benefits and a token budget) for one year to help advance the missions of nonprofit organizations using g
  
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• ShinyHunters hacked 100+ orgs by exploiting an Oracle PeopleSoft 0-day

  11-06-2026 21:01 via theregister.com
  
  Data theft and extortion group ShinyHunters has exploited a critical Oracle PeopleSoft bug as a zero-day to compromise more than 100 organizations, including the University of Nottingham, across 300 vulnerable instances. A spokesperson for the cybercrime crew on Thursday told The Register that they exploited CVE-2026-35273 to break into the university’s PeopleSoft system and steal 40 GB of personal data and billing records belonging to hundreds of thousands of current and former students.
  
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• ShinyHunters hacked 100 orgs by exploiting an Oracle PeopleSoft 0-day

  11-06-2026 21:01 via theregister.com
  
  Data theft and extortion group ShinyHunters has exploited a critical Oracle PeopleSoft bug as a zero-day to compromise more than 100 organizations, including the University of Nottingham, across 300 vulnerable instances. A spokesperson for the cybercrime crew on Thursday told The Register that they exploited CVE-2026-35273 to break into the university’s PeopleSoft system and steal 40 GB of personal data and billing records belonging to hundreds of thousands of current and former students.
  
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• ShinyHunters claims it hacked 100 orgs by exploiting an Oracle PeopleSoft 0-day

  11-06-2026 21:01 via theregister.com
  
  Data theft and extortion group ShinyHunters claims to have exploited a critical Oracle PeopleSoft bug as a zero-day to compromise more than 100 organizations, including the University of Nottingham, across 300 vulnerable instances. A spokesperson for the cybercrime crew on Thursday told The Register that they exploited CVE-2026-35273 to break into the university’s PeopleSoft system and steal 40 GB of personal data and billing records belonging to hundreds of thousands of current and former
  
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• Rare tornado outbreak threatens millions across three states TODAY

  11-06-2026 20:45 via dailymail.com
  
  Millions of Americans are urged to have a tornado safety plan ready as powerful storms sweep across the nation.
  
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• Google's new open-weights model brings image-generation tricks to AI text generation

  11-06-2026 20:31 via theregister.com
  
  The boffins on Google’s DeepMind team unveiled an experimental new language model this week that uses techniques originally developed for AI image generators to boost text output performance by as much as 4x when running on resource-constrained consumer hardware. It's free to download and you can run it with just 18 GB of DRAM or VRAM. The model, codenamed DiffusionGemma, is the latest addition to Google’s open weights model family. But unlike Gemma 4, which launched this spring, the
  
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• Meteorologist reveals America's most dangerous cities in super El Niño's 'corridor of chaos'... and warns this is only the beginning: 'It may haunt you'

  11-06-2026 20:17 via dailymail.com
  
  El Niño is back and scientists are comparing it to a disaster that led to the deaths of 50 million people. Now AccuWeather meteorologist Paul Pastelok reveals exactly where it will hit hardest.
  
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• Microsoft's worst 'Nightmare' unleashes BitLocker bypass 0-day

  11-06-2026 19:51 via theregister.com
  
  Nightmare Eclipse, the prolific zero-day vulnerability hunter with an axe to grind against Microsoft, released yet another exploit late Wednesday that the researcher claims will spawn a command prompt that provides total access to the BitLocker volume. This bug, called GreatXML, was “an accidental discovery,” according to the researcher, who said it only took four hours to find. They claim this exploit (published on GitHub and Git-based code-hosting platforms) can bypass BitLocker on
  
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