Sci-Tech news

• Digger unleashes cloud of pollen in New Jersey

  10-05-2018 11:32 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  A man digging up a tree unleashed a sweeping pollen storm into the air on Monday in New Jersey.
  
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• Oracle support timelines for Fusion Middleware tighter than expected

  18-06-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  Oracle has shocked its customers by releasing new end-of-life conditions for its middleware products that thousands of large organizations rely on in their enterprise application deployments. In a missive published online earlier this month, Big Red warned that support for the widely used Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c Release 2 was approaching a “critical milestone.” Top-level Premier Support is set to end in December 2026, while Extended Support will stop by the end of December 2027.
  
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• Extreme weather is Britain's new normal: Experts say 28°C is no longer considered hot in the UK - as Brits brace for yet another heatwave

  18-06-2026 11:13 via dailymail.com
  
  Professor Andrew Charlton-Perez from the University of Reading warns temperatures around 27 or 28 degrees are now becoming the norm.
  
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• UK Cabinet Office hiring AI and innovation 'influencer' to build 'AI-first culture' in civil service

  18-06-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  The UK Cabinet Office is looking for an AI and Innovation Director who can develop civil servants' use of artificial intelligence and change the way the civil service works. The task of persuading public sector workers to love AI involves "re-imagining the future workforce and business model" for the UK's civil service, promoting adoption of AI tools, "championing, coordinating, and tracking AI adoption" across government departments, and instilling an "AI-first culture," according to the job ad
  
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• Cancer-linked 'forever chemicals' discovered in scores of Tesco own-brand fish, dairy and meat products, experts claim

  18-06-2026 10:12 via dailymail.com
  
  In what has been described as an 'alarming' revelation, per-and poly fluoroalkyl substances - or PFAS for short - were detected in every food item analysed from the popular supermarket.
  
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• RoachFest London 2026: The database as competitive asset

  18-06-2026 10:00 via theregister.com
  
  The database a business depends on shouldn’t be a potential point of failure; it should be a competitive asset. That’s the proposition Cockroach Labs will put to enterprise architects and database administrators at Convene's Bishopsgate venue in London on Thursday, June 25, 2026. The one-day RoachFest London 2026 event will examine how a database makes that transition from costly liability to competitive advantage. Modern infrastructure grows more complex and harder to manage by the
  
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• Cyber offenses now account for around a third of all crime across Asia and South Pacific

  18-06-2026 04:00 via theregister.com
  
  Cybercrime now accounts for more than 30 percent of all offenses across the Asia and South Pacific (ASP) region, according to the latest figures from Interpol. The international cop shop said on Wednesday that the region has seen “a dramatic increase” in the number of recorded cybercrimes, driven largely by an uptake of digital infrastructure, new technologies, and the increasingly organized nature of criminal networks. Interpol’s latest ASP Cyberthreat Assessment Report states
  
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• Renowned scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson tells US government to 'Show the alien!' after latest UFO disclosure

  18-06-2026 03:08 via dailymail.com
  
  Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, 67, explained how any alien visitor from another planet would likely look very different from humans and may not even share the same DNA structure.
  
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• Estonia intends to recognize AI agents with digital IDs

  18-06-2026 01:12 via theregister.com
  
  Estonia plans to allow AI agents to have their own digital identities so they can act on behalf of people in a way that can be verified and audited. The initiative, backed by the country's Eesti.ai advisory board, calls for the development of ID codes that AI agents can use to take actions, subject to some unspecified authorization and task delegation process. Academics and corporate technical folk have already made related proposals in recognition of the absence of agentic technical infrastruct
  
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• Stonehenge's secret SISTER: Archaeologists discover an ancient monument just three miles away that may have served as a 'prototype' for the famous stones

  18-06-2026 01:01 via dailymail.com
  
  Archaeologists have discovered a secret sister monument to Stonehenge that might have served as a 'prototype' for the famous stones.
  
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• Git good with Epic Games' new open source VCS, Lore

  17-06-2026 22:49 via theregister.com
  
  Fortnite maker and Apple nemesis Epic Games has decided to git good all on its own with the open-source release of its homemade version control system, dubbed Lore. The project began life as Unreal Revision Control, and was used by internal teams and as the version control system (VCS) built into Unreal Editor for Fortnite. Now, Epic is ready to share its handiwork with the world. Lore is a centralized, content-addressed VCS that’s meant to be more flexible for developers, as it's licensed
  
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• Smelly config files will make your agents waste tokens, researchers warn

  17-06-2026 21:32 via theregister.com
  
  If you're exposing your agent to a strong odor, it's time to clean up your instructions. Risky or poorly structured code patterns are known as "code smells," and it turns out coding agent directives can be similarly redolent, leading to wasted tokens and worse output. Coding agents rely on configuration files that summarize expected agent behavior. These context-enhancing files are commonly written in Markdown and named either CLAUDE.md for those using Anthropic models or AGENTS.md for pretty mu
  
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• If AGENTS.md smells ripe, your code won’t live up to the hype

  17-06-2026 21:32 via theregister.com
  
  If you're exposing your agent to a strong odor, it's time to clean up your instructions. Risky or poorly structured code patterns are known as "code smells," and it turns out coding agent directives can be similarly redolent, leading to wasted tokens and worse output. Coding agents rely on configuration files that summarize expected agent behavior. These context-enhancing files are commonly written in Markdown and named either CLAUDE.md for those using Anthropic models or AGENTS.md for pretty mu
  
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• Nvidia-backed optics vendor to boost wafer output by 4x to meet AI interconnect demand

  17-06-2026 20:12 via theregister.com
  
  As AI systems grow larger, optics are playing a larger part in their design – so much so that at Computex earlier this month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang proclaimed the technology would make Marvell the next trillion dollar company. Now, Nvidia-backed photonics vendor Coherent plans to boost indium phosphide (InP) wafer production at its Sherman, Texas, fab by 4x in anticipation AI proliferation will trigger an explosion in optical interconnect demand. Supply chains must be ready to meet that
  
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• Tornadoes bringing 'day of destruction' to millions as extreme storms hammer 15 major US cities

  17-06-2026 19:42 via dailymail.com
  
  Over 14 million people across several states face multiple emergency warnings as floods and twisters could ravage the US Wednesday night.
  
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• Massive password-stealing attack hits 75k Fortinet firewalls

  17-06-2026 19:27 via theregister.com
  
  If you have a Fortinet firewall, it's time to stop and change your passwords. Intruders somehow gained access to around 75,000 Fortinet firewall devices and stole credentials belonging to major corporations across 194 countries, in some cases leading to full network compromise. Security researchers say that they have verified the data, and the cracked FortiGate passwords belong to accounts spanning multinational corporations including FoxConn, Samsung, Comcast, Siemens, Lenovo, FedEx, PxW, Accen
  
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• Massive leak exposes 56 million email accounts and 124 million passwords... check if yours is compromised

  17-06-2026 19:24 via dailymail.com
  
  A huge cache of stolen usernames and passwords has raised fresh concerns that millions of online accounts could be vulnerable to hackers.
  
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• Uncle Sam bets $500M that Alphabet spinoff's AI can dig up new semiconductor materials

  17-06-2026 19:05 via theregister.com
  
  In order to move more semiconductor manufacturing onshore, the US needs to depend less on foreign-sourced materials. Now, the government is giving an Alphabet spinoff $500 million in CHIPS Act funds to find domestic minerals, molecules, and chemicals needed for this process. SandboxAQ (that’s AI and Quantum, for those wondering), which spun off from Alphabet in 2022 under the chairmanship of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, announced the award Wednesday. The company won’t be doing any
  
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• Deadly parasite causing cancer-like tumors in humans and pets spreading across US

  17-06-2026 18:42 via dailymail.com
  
  A potentially deadly infection to people and dogs has spread to the East and West Coast, and signs of the illness can stay hidden for up to 15 years.
  
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• Only half of US datacenter capacity planned for 2026 is actually under construction

  17-06-2026 17:55 via theregister.com
  
  Don't count your bit barns before they've at least started to hatch. Developers continue to announce new datacenter construction projects, but construction work for many due to come online this year or next appear not to have commenced, while planned capacity may have been overestimated. According to financial analyst Jefferies, known promises to build new stateside datacenters suggest 160 GW worth of infrastructure will be operational in the country by 2032 In a research note shared with The Re
  
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• Deadly tapeworms causing cancer-like tumors in humans and pets spreading across US

  17-06-2026 17:52 via dailymail.com
  
  A potentially deadly infection to people and dogs has spread to the East and West Coast, and signs of the illness can stay hidden for up to 15 years.
  
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• Experts issue warning as tick-borne infection that causes brain damage in 15 minutes strikes another American

  17-06-2026 17:27 via dailymail.com
  
  Experts are raising the alarm over a virus spread by blood-sucking ticks that could permanently damage your brain - as the US suffers its worst tick bite season in a decade.
  
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• Life-threatening tropical storm Arthur forms off US coast with multiple states at high risk of danger

  17-06-2026 17:24 via dailymail.com
  
  Tropical Storm Arthur has formed off the US coast. Locals have been told to leave their homes if evacuations are given, as life-threatening flooding and storm surge are expected.
  
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• Smartphone market to shrink 15 percent this year due to memory crisis

  17-06-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  Unless your personal tech budget has bloated, prepare to stick with your current smartphone for a while thanks to AI-driven demand that has driven up memory prices and made new handsets so expensive that sales are falling dramatically. So says research firm CCS Insight, which expects smartphone shipments to fall by 15 percent this year as some entry-level devices have already seen their sticker prices go up by more than 50 percent since last year. The firm found that the primary smartphone marke
  
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• Digital sovereignty needs an operating model

  17-06-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  Europe, like much of the world, is living through a period of heightened geopolitical uncertainty in which sanctions risk, legal divergence, and cyber disruption have moved from abstract concerns to board-level variables. Digital sovereignty is shifting from aspiration to operational requirement, driven by resilience expectations, critical service dependency, and rising geopolitical and cyber risk. Definitions of sovereignty vary, ranging from blanket data localization edicts to industrial polic
  
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• AWS hypes continuous agentic DevOps, puts Kiro in your pocket

  17-06-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  AWS today introduced new and enhanced agents aimed at DevOps and code security at its New York Summit, including previews of Continuum for identifying and fixing application vulnerabilities, and an iOS mobile app for its Kiro coding tool. Matt Wood, chief AI and technology officer, said in a press briefing that the company sees AI tools operating continuously in the background, rather than being used on demand. AWS Continuum, now in closed preview, is a set of agents that "continually provide se
  
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• Noah's Ark could finally be found after historic deal promises 'irrefutable proof'

  17-06-2026 16:53 via dailymail.com
  
  A boat-shaped formation on a remote mountainside in eastern Turkey has reignited one of history's most enduring biblical mysteries.
  
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• Surface tension rises as Microsoft's latest kit starts at a pricey $1,499

  17-06-2026 16:25 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft has unveiled new Surface hardware at prices that could keep customers away until the hardware supply chain sorts itself out. Two devices were announced – a new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop with Snapdragon X2 silicon. The 13-inch Pro has, according to Microsoft, 53 percent faster graphics performance than the previous generation, and the 13.8 and 15-inch Laptop deliver 58 percent better graphics performance. The batteries should last all day, and the touchpad on the Laptop featu
  
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• Cisco adds another SD-WAN box to max-severity bug advisory

  17-06-2026 15:45 via theregister.com
  
  Cisco has updated a February security advisory, adding another product to the list of those affected by the maximum-severity CVE-2026-20127. Switchzilla made a small amendment to the original advisory on Tuesday evening, noting that Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Validator, formerly vBond, was also among the boxes attackers could pop open. Readers may remember the fuss over CVE-2026-20127 (10.0) a few months ago. The make-me-admin improper authentication flaw prompted a Five Eyes alert since attackers co
  
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• Homebrew 6.0 released with new security mechanism, Linux sandbox and more

  17-06-2026 15:31 via theregister.com
  
  The Homebrew team has released version 6.0 of this popular open-source package manager for macOS and Linux, with a new mechanism for trusting packages and support for sandboxing on Linux, to align with existing sandboxing on macOS. Homebrew 6.0 introduces tap trust, a "tap" being a collection of formulae, casks (a package of pre-compiled binaries) and commands which usually reside in a Git repository. The tool trusts official Homebrew taps by default, but requires an explicit agreement before it
  
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