Sci-Tech news

• El Niño could be biggest since records began and bring with it some rain

  14-08-2015 06:45 via
  
  Dubbed the 'Godzilla El Niño' or 'Bruce Lee El Niño', the weather event looks set to bring more rain and tropical cyclones to the Pacific Southwest since records began in 1950.
  
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• Malware scare keeps schoolkids home for a second day

  11-06-2026 12:30 via theregister.com
  
  Great Marlow School in Buckinghamshire, England, has entered its second day of a shutdown following "a suspected malware incident." Only students sitting their GCSE and A-level exams – those in Years 11 and 13 – were permitted to attend on Wednesday, in line with their exam timetable, and the same goes for Thursday. Students in other years (Years 6-10 and Year 12) were told to stay at home and access what revision materials they can via Microsoft Teams as teachers are currently unabl
  
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• NS&I dangles £220K salary for CEO willing to straighten out £3B IT mess

  11-06-2026 12:09 via theregister.com
  
  National Savings & Investments (NS&I) is looking for a new chief executive to take charge of the state-backed savings institution as it attempts to steer a troubled £3 billion digital transformation program back on course. The government-owned bank has launched a search for a permanent successor to former chief executive Dax Harkins, who left earlier this year amid a scandal involving hundreds of millions of pounds in unclaimed funds owed to the estates of deceased customers. Whoev
  
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• Migrate expectations: Couple teach birds to migrate to Spain by flying 1,600 miles alongside them in a paraglider

  11-06-2026 11:47 via dailymail.com
  
  Helena Wehner and Johannes Fritz are part of an Austrian conservation group known as Waldrappteam, which are dedicated to bringing the northern bald ibis to Europe.
  
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• Humans prefer to walk anticlockwise - and scientists have no idea why

  11-06-2026 11:37 via dailymail.com
  
  You walk into an art gallery, museum, or shopping centre - which way do you turn? According to a new study, the answer is probably left.
  
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• Nottingham Uni says student records raided after ShinyHunters claims cyberattack

  11-06-2026 11:20 via theregister.com
  
  The University of Nottingham has confirmed a cyberattack on its student record system after the ShinyHunters crew claimed to have stolen tens of gigabytes of data from the Russell Group institution. "The University of Nottingham has been the victim of a cyber incident and a significant amount of data in our student record system has been accessed by a well-known cybercriminal group," a spokesperson told The Register. "We are working with the third party that maintains the platform to lead
  
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• Millions of homes in London, Essex and Kent are at risk of SINKING, scientists warn - as they call for urgent mitigation measures

  11-06-2026 11:14 via dailymail.com
  
  Millions of homes in London, Essex, and Kent are at risk of sinking into the ground, scientists have warned.
  
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• China's answer to petrol stations comes to Britain: BYD is installing 300 ultra-fast chargers in the UK with five-minute EV charging

  11-06-2026 10:41 via dailymail.com
  
  BYD has announced plans to install 300 'flash chargers' in the UK by the end of this year, rising to 600 by 2027.
  
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• UK Treasury still deciding whether to show up to £1.7B ERP program it agreed to fund

  11-06-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  The UK Treasury will not say whether it will join the government's £1.7 billion finance and HR transformation strategy until December despite funding the program for five years. Savings from the so-called Matrix cluster of the shared service strategy are contingent on a bunch of departments – including His Majesty's Treasury (HMT) – adopting cloud-based finance and HR software from Workday. To do so, HMT would have to migrate from its customized version of Oracle Fusion. In a l
  
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• As Machine Gun Kelly reveals 'blackout' tattoo left him 'yellow and sick', experts reveal the other risks of going under the needle - from blindness and blood disease to permanent scarring

  11-06-2026 09:45 via dailymail.com
  
  Machine Gun Kelly has revealed the how undergoing 'two years' worth' of tattoos in as many months left him jaundiced and unwell.
  
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• Smacking children is 'harmful' and must be banned in England, according to new study - but other experts argue that it prevents anti-social behaviour later in life

  11-06-2026 09:24 via dailymail.com
  
  Children who are smacked by their parents are more likely to fail their exams and become bullies, new research has found.
  
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• Every employee’s password was stored in a single Excel file

  11-06-2026 09:00 via theregister.com
  
  PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly screed where we highlight those who did not do the deed of securing their systems. If someone left their passwords or their access exposed, we will be writing about them here. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at [email protected]. Anonymity is available upon request. This week’s terrifying tale of poor security hygiene comes courtesy of Luke Irwin, CEO and principal consultant at Aegis Cyberse
  
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• Pollution rules criticised for raising new home costs

  11-06-2026 07:43 via bbc.com
  
  Developers claim the rules will stop them from hitting housebuilding targets.
  
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• Tick-borne infection resurfacing in celebrity-loved wine hotspot... as officials warn of 'highly lethal' disease

  11-06-2026 07:12 via dailymail.com
  
  A new case of a rare tick-borne disease has been detected in a human for only the fourth time on record.
  
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• Social media on trial: Four important cases to watch

  11-06-2026 07:02 via bbc.com
  
  Social media firms face thousands of lawsuits, the BBC looks at four which could be significant.
  
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• Four days of extreme rain killed 7% of world's rarest orangutans, study says

  11-06-2026 05:50 via bbc.com
  
  Climate change-induced weather events are pushing orangutan populations to extinction, says a study.
  
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• Chinese agents caught rebuilding botnets and stirring the pot on AI datacenter debate

  11-06-2026 02:00 via theregister.com
  
  Multiple reports indicate that Chinese operatives continue using every tech tool at their disposal – including American AI – to amass data on and manipulate everyone from security-clearance holders to everyday US citizens. And they’re trying to influence public opinion on building datacenters for AI, albeit without success so far. One of these reports found a “significant resurgence” of a botnet linked to Chinese government-backed goons, including Volt Typhoon, whic
  
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• Memory and personalization make AI more likely to tell you what you want to hear

  11-06-2026 01:17 via theregister.com
  
  AI companies have touted context retention (memory) and the availability of personal details (personalization) as mechanisms for improving AI model interaction. Both have value to help keep models from losing the thread of a conversation. But they raise the potential for sycophancy, where models will say what they predict you want to hear, which may not be the most accurate response. Researchers at Writer, an enterprise AI vendor, have conducted two studies of model memory and personalization th
  
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• Greenhouse gas emissions have hit an all-time high: Study reveals how 56.8 BILLION tonnes of CO2 were released in 2024 - as climate scientists call for urgent action

  11-06-2026 01:01 via dailymail.com
  
  A worrying report has revealed that greenhouse gas emissions have hit an all-time high.
  
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• CIA's bombshell ties to UFOs and alien tech revealed in exposed documents

  10-06-2026 22:59 via dailymail.com
  
  A UFO whistleblower has named a declassified report that he said shows the CIA's involvement with extraterrestrial technology.
  
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• Blockbuster new Raspberry Pi project turns any screen into old-school VCR

  10-06-2026 22:56 via theregister.com
  
  I love Star Trek so much. I’ve watched most Trek series multiple times over the decades, and was shocked when, on my most recent watch of The Next Generation, I noticed something: High definition upscaling makes the show look way worse. Old-school 4:3 CRT television screens with their low resolution hid a lot of stuff, like tape on the Enterprise set doors that hid whatever names were stenciled on them for prior episodes, which are glaringly present on modern editions of the show. I’
  
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• It blocked us at 'hello!' Anthropic Fable 5 refusing innocuous prompts

  10-06-2026 22:20 via theregister.com
  
  Anthropic's newly released Claude Fable 5 generative AI model is trying so hard to be safe that it's hurting its own userbase. Customers attempting to use the AI knowledge regurgitator are reporting that the model is refusing to answer harmless questions, an issue that has annoyed security researchers following past model releases. Anthropic warned that it had tuned Fable 5's guardrails conservatively: "they’ll sometimes catch harmless requests, though they trigger, on average, in less tha
  
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• Bombshell UFO report exposed by famed whistleblower reveals CIA's ties to alien technology

  10-06-2026 21:23 via dailymail.com
  
  A UFO whistleblower has named a declassified report that he said shows the CIA's involvement with extraterrestrial technology.
  
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• Angry bug hunter with Microsoft beef drops new Windows 0-day

  10-06-2026 20:45 via theregister.com
  
  They are angry at Redmond and will have their revenge. Nightmare Eclipse, the prolific bug hunter and possibly disgruntled ex-Microsoft employee, disclosed another zero-day vulnerability just hours after Redmond issued a record-breaking number of CVEs and fixes for June Patch Tuesday. The latest zero-day, RoguePlanet, targets Microsoft Defender and works against fully patched Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems, according to the researcher, who also released proof-of-concept exploit code for the s
  
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• 'Worrying' pollution in Cotswolds river - volunteers

  10-06-2026 20:11 via bbc.com
  
  Volunteers record high phosphate and nitrate levels and call on the Environment Agency to investigate.
  
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• The fight to stop animals dying in fishing nets

  10-06-2026 19:17 via bbc.com
  
  Thousands of sea mammals and birds are killed as a result of fishing nets every year.
  
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• GM gets datacenter fever, decides to build grid-scale sodium-ion batteries

  10-06-2026 18:55 via theregister.com
  
  The lure of datacenter dollars is a strong one for America’s mega corporations - so strong that even automobile giant General Motors is getting in on the game by turning its battery research efforts toward stationary grid-scale energy storage. GM announced a partnership with energy storage firm Peak Energy on Tuesday that will see the Big Three automaker develop next-generation sodium-ion battery cells designed for grid-scale energy storage. GM will manufacture the cells and Peak will depl
  
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• Rare butterfly population increases by 9000%

  10-06-2026 18:53 via bbc.com
  
  A record number of Duke of Burgundy butterflies were recorded in Kent last year, a charity says.
  
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• Datacenter growth may run into a power wall by 2030

  10-06-2026 18:36 via theregister.com
  
  Energy consumed by datacenters is set to grow 26 percent this year thanks to AI, and grid supply may be unable to keep pace with demand by 2030, Gartner warns. The research giant expects global datacenter electricity consumption to reach 565 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2026, as power demand rises from 104 GW in 2025 to 132 GW this year. This is higher than the 500 TWh per year Gartner estimated two years ago that AI-optimized servers would consume by 2027. And as everyone knows by now, the culprit i
  
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• macOS 27 beta boots Asahi Linux off Apple Silicon

  10-06-2026 17:36 via theregister.com
  
  macOS 27 may have dealt a blow to Intel Macs, but it has also caused headaches for Linux on Apple Silicon, according to the Asahi Linux team. Apple's next operating system debuted at WWDC this week and promptly landed as a beta, but the Asahi developers say the update has "changed how the boot picker and Startup Disk application detect valid OS boot volumes." The upshot is that the Asahi partition is no longer visible, which means no Linux booting on Apple Silicon for the time being. The advice
  
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