Sci-Tech news

• Elon Musk denies affair with Google co-founder Sergey Brin's wife

  25-07-2022 11:44 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The technology multi-billionaire's comments came in response to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
  
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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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• Canonical backs quest to translate mountains of C into safe Rust with AI

  24-08-2026 11:27 via theregister.com
  
  Canonical's fondness for AI and Rust is no secret. Now it is co-funding a three-year PhD project investigating whether the former can translate large C codebases into the latter. Engineering veep Jon Seager announced the investment on Ubuntu's Discourse forum. The PhD project will be conducted at the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group. So don't panic. This is not an announcement that Canonical will turn the bots loose to rewrite all of Ubuntu as Rusty slop. (For a start
  
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• UK's rarest bird of prey rears new chicks in secret location

  24-08-2026 10:31 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The Montagu Harrier successfully nested for the second year running in the same secret location.
  
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• Software should work, and talking about it needn't be boring

  24-08-2026 10:31 via theregister.com
  
  OPINION DVD is one of those technologies that dominated for barely a generation yet left a permanent cultural mark. It made high-quality video cheap enough for mass distribution, popularized the TV series boxed set, and encouraged its gluttonous consequence: binge viewing. Streaming and capacious storage have since pushed optical media toward irrelevance. There may no longer be a box, but the boxed-set mentality remains, and we still binge like Roman emperors. It is a genuinely new way of absorb
  
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• China calls off ambitious ice-hunting moonshot a day before flight

  24-08-2026 09:11 via theregister.com
  
  China’s Manned Space Agency (CMSA) on Sunday cancelled a planned Monday moonshot launch. The mission plan for Chang'e 7 calls for it to send a lander to a region near the Moon’s South Pole, in a location thought likely to contain ice in deep craters. The lander carries two other vehicles: a wheeled rover, and a hopper. China wants to test the latter to see if it can jump over crater rims to look for ice, and then hop out again and continue exploring. The lander is also important to C
  
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• Batch file automated a clean-up job, then fouled itself by deleting the wrong directory

  24-08-2026 08:31 via theregister.com
  
  WHO, ME? Welcome to another installment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column in which The Register opens the working week with your tales of IT woe. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Pascal," who once worked for a company that had just acquired its first Exchange server, home to around 600 mailboxes. "The IT manager was keen we kept on top of the performance of the Information Store and suggested we take the box offline once a week to defrag it," Pascal told The Register
  
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• World-First Biological Data Center Uses 16 Million Living Human Neurons To Process Data

  24-08-2026 05:04 via technocracy.news
  
  The company says that human neurons are harvested from blood and then turned into stem cells. It assures the public that the cells are not taken from human brains or fetal tissue. The neurons sit on a microelectrode array (MEA): a glass/silicon chip covered with hundreds to thousands of tiny electrodes that can both stimulate and record.The public pitch is the AI power crisis, not FLOPS. Cortical Labs and DayOne argue wetware can process information at a fraction of a GPU rack’s wattage. C
  
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• AI-driven upgrade of communications energy storage empowers a new energy ecosystem for multiple industries

  24-08-2026 02:00 via theregister.com
  
  AI datacenters have become a major driver of rising electricity consumption, but AI doesn't just happen in a datacenter. The telecommunications networks connecting datacenters to businesses and consumers are themselves major electricity consumers. 5G and its successors mean ever higher energy demands. Newer comms architectures deliver more bandwidth and richer services, but they also require denser cells, and 5G infrastructure such as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas consumes more
  
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• Ancient ‘Who owns Linux?’ case now has one foot very deep in the grave

  24-08-2026 01:50 via theregister.com
  
  The long legal battle over ownership of Linux is closer than ever to ending, after a panel of three judges ruled a claim against IBM and Red Hat isn’t valid, and that time has expired for further action. This story starts in 1998 when IBM decided the world needed a single version of UNIX capable of running on multiple processor architectures. To make that happen, Big Blue allied with a company called the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) which made a version of UNIX for x86 CPUs. Intel and Sequen
  
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• Revealed: The most ridiculous calls to 101 - as police start using AI to screen for time-wasters

  24-08-2026 01:41 via dailymail.com
  
  The most ridiculous calls to the service have been revealed, and they range from the silly to the absurd.
  
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• France links sharp rise in drownings to heatwaves

  23-08-2026 19:39 via bbc.co.uk
  
  A government minister says people have been taking risks by going into the water, with 301 deaths since 19 June.
  
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• Food prices predicted to surge in 2027 as two global threats collide, JPMorgan warns

  23-08-2026 18:23 via dailymail.com
  
  JPMorgan has warned that Americans could soon be hit by a grocery-price surge as two global threats collide to squeeze the world's food supply.
  
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• I was a church leader. There are secret Bible clues about alien life and I have been threatened for exposing them before... but people must be ready

  23-08-2026 17:29 via dailymail.com
  
  Hints in the Bible suggest that the stories of the Old Testament actually refer to a group of advanced beings - and the tales are echoed in other ancient texts.
  
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• Is nothing sacred? Scientists discover adding sweetener to red wine makes it more appealing for Gen Z

  23-08-2026 17:27 via dailymail.com
  
  Red wine is proving less of a hit with today's younger drinkers, who struggle with its dry, bitter taste. Now, experts have come up with a controversial solution - making it sweeter to appeal to Gen Z.
  
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• How Cursor beat Git's scalability shortcomings

  23-08-2026 15:45 via theregister.com
  
  Developers recently burned by GitHub’s system outages should take note that there are other ways to manage Git at scale. One approach, recently put into action by Cursor, is to build the distributed version control system on object storage. A recent post from Cursor principal systems engineer Vicent Martí explains how the SpaceX subsidiary worked through its scaling issues with the notoriously fickle Git distributed version control system. The post explains how Cursor arrived at an
  
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• The retro diet food making a comeback... experts reveal if the beloved 80s 'it' ingredient is key to weight loss

  23-08-2026 15:08 via dailymail.com
  
  Once the bland poster child of 1980s diet culture, this cheap ingredient is suddenly having a very loud second act.
  
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• An ultra-rare piece of Microsoft history could be hiding on your shelf

  23-08-2026 14:32 via theregister.com
  
  In a future edition of The Antiques Roadshow, the hosts might get all excited about a mint Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows… with a sticker on the box instead of a printed Tetris promotion. Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen explained the reasoning behind using the sticker instead of simply printing what was in the box. Microsoft hadn't locked down the rights for Tetris before the first print run of the packaging, so went with what it had. The Microsoft Entertainment Pack for
  
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• Mysterious 'lost continent' linked to alien beings may have finally been located

  23-08-2026 14:06 via dailymail.com
  
  Interest in a mysterious 'lost continent' where believers claim an advanced civilization once existed has been rekindled thanks to claims science has discovered its true location.
  
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• Revealed: The 'Golden Quartet' of moves that boost the chance of female orgasm, according to scientists

  23-08-2026 13:54 via dailymail.com
  
  In news that will come as music to the ears of women around the world, scientists have uncovered the 'Golden Quartet' of moves that boost the chance of reaching the 'Big O'.
  
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• Why Super El Niño will wreak havoc on Britain this winter: Scientists reveal how the climate event in the Pacific will spark cold and stormy weather in the UK

  23-08-2026 12:11 via dailymail.com
  
  After months of record-breaking heat, Brits have been told to brace for a cold and stormy winter, thanks to the Super El Niño that's building in the Pacific Ocean.
  
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• The clock's ticking for a 'Greenwich Moon time' as world powers are eager to exploit lunar resources

  23-08-2026 01:29 via dailymail.com
  
  Countries are to vote in October on how to measure the passage of time on the Moon, as a tiny difference with Earth threatens navigation and communications systems.
  
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• How a new era of heatwaves could shake up the school calendar

  23-08-2026 01:16 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Teachers warn it could be increasingly difficult for classrooms to function during the hottest months.
  
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• If you're not using AI to attack your own systems, your adversaries will

  22-08-2026 17:02 via theregister.com
  
  AI agents excel at hacking organizations, as they’ve demonstrated in real-life attacks multiple times over the past few weeks. They also expose a whole new attack surface for organizations trying to protect against both human and AI intrusions. As if defenders needed more worries to keep them up at night, agents introduce new data-integration channels that attackers can abuse. They also introduce a new type – and ever growing number – of non-human identities that are difficult
  
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• AI slop is good for business if you know what you're doing

  22-08-2026 15:19 via theregister.com
  
  Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is known for saying, "Your margin is my opportunity." Substitute "irresponsibility" for "margin," and you have a formulation that applies to AI-driven software development. AI models or coding agents make mistakes, and many of the people using them multiply those errors by asking their AI helper to build software without the knowledge necessary to build actual proper software. The resulting vibe-coded apps have created a new growth industry – AI slop sanitation. W
  
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• Wife of Apollo astronaut reveals never-before-told details of husband's secret moon experiment... and the eerie results on Earth

  22-08-2026 14:03 via dailymail.com
  
  Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell's former wife has revealed the secret experiment he conducted in space and the mysterious results recorded on Earth.
  
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• Welsh county becomes global hotspot for carbon emissions after wildfires

  22-08-2026 13:31 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The smell of burning from the Blaenavon wildfire was reported 30 miles away in Cardiff.
  
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• Council set to axe climate emergency declaration

  22-08-2026 12:18 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Barnsley Council says a review is under way to asses climate and net zero-related activity.
  
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