Sci-Tech news

• Google Cloud's London zones takes a nap, multiple services disrupted

  20-10-2026 11:34 via theregister.com
  
  Google Cloud customers in Western Europe are waking up to severe disruption affecting multiple services and, as yet, there is no estimated time of recovery.The europe-west-2-b is one of three local availability zones in the London region, intended to help protect against hardware or regional failures. The downtime began at 0608 UTC, meaning customers need more than a coffee to feel OK about today.According to Google Cloud’s status page: “Multiple Google Cloud services are experiencin
  
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• UK finance watchdog wants firms to report AI failures and close calls

  20-10-2026 11:57 via theregister.com
  
  The UK's financial regulator says firms' incident reporting must cover significant AI failures and near-misses as increasingly autonomous systems raise new risks. Speaking at Bloomberg's UK Policy Series on Monday, Financial Conduct Authority chief data, information and intelligence officer Jessica Rusu said the regulator wants Britain to lead safe AI adoption in financial services. Greater autonomy, however, requires clear accountability. "Poorly governed AI can create consumer harm, cyber vuln
  
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• Who really made China's Terracotta Army? Fingerprints reveal new clues on the builders of the life-size terracotta figures

  20-10-2026 11:38 via dailymail.com
  
  The Terracotta Army is one of the most stunning testaments to the power of the ancient Chinese emperors. Now, scientists have revealed clues about who made this gargantuan funeral monument.
  
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• Hopes of finding Amelia Earhart's lost plane are dashed: US expedition travels 830 miles to remote Pacific island - only to discover the 'Taraia Object' is NOT her Lockheed Electra

  20-10-2026 11:12 via dailymail.com
  
  A mysterious object on a remote Pacific island is not Amelia Earhart's long lost plane, a US expedition has confirmed.
  
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• The next ayahuasca? US drug companies are vying to get their hands on a mind-altering root bark used in Gabonese ritual traditions

  20-10-2026 11:00 via dailymail.com
  
  Move over ayahuasca - there's a new mind-altering plant attracting attention from the US pharmaceutical giants.
  
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• London’s mobile networks fall to bottom of Europe’s capital league

  20-10-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  London's mobile network performance has slipped behind other European capitals as operators struggle to add capacity fast enough to meet demand. The city ranked seventh out of 18 in the continent for median download speed in 2021, but traffic has since expanded faster than available capacity. Other metropolises have improved; London now has the slowest speeds and the highest latency under load, according to mobile network testing firm Ookla. The research points to obstacles mobile operators face
  
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• Why cyber resilience is now a boardroom priority for UK public services

  20-10-2026 10:00 via theregister.com
  
  The UK public sector has reached a cyber resilience inflection point. A new Prime Minister has taken office, and significant machinery-of-government changes have already been announced, including the scrapping of DSIT, the department that had become the center of government digital, technology and cyber policy. Its responsibilities are now being redistributed across other parts of Whitehall, creating a new policy and delivery landscape for public sector leaders to navigate. For years, cyber secu
  
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• Orionid meteor shower to peak in UK skies this week

  20-10-2026 08:31 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Clear skies permitting, skygazers could be able to spot as many as 10-20 meteors per hour as the shower peaks this week.
  
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• The British island where red squirrels are thriving

  20-10-2026 07:38 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Conservationists say that, with red squirrels dwindling in the UK, Jersey is an "important refuge".
  
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• Sony updates the Walkman as a $5,900 gold-plated MP3 player

  20-10-2026 07:29 via theregister.com
  
  Sony last week revived its famed Walkman brand of portable music players, with a trio of updated products that feature Android 16, touch screens, eye-popping prices, and dubious assertions of audiophile appeal. The Japanese giant named the new models the NW-WM1ZM3, NW-WM1AM3 and NW-ZX900. All can store and play many codecs, including MP3s, WMA, and FLAC files, plus others like Direct Stream Digital (DSD) and Apple Lossless, which use various tricks to avoid nasty artefacts accruing during the di
  
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• Northern Ireland needs 'courage and leadership' to tackle climate change

  20-10-2026 07:27 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The new chair of the Climate Change Committee is spending two days in Northern Ireland on a fact-finding mission.
  
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• ‘David Beckham’ was briefly the world’s second-worst manga pirate

  20-10-2026 06:21 via theregister.com
  
  A website registered by “David Beckham” was the world’s second-most-visited source of pirated Japanese manga in February 2025, leading publishers to call for better verification of who buys domain names to address the problem. The “Beckham” who registered the site was of course not the famous footballer and spokesmodel. However Tatsuo Ninoseki, an attorney with the Shin Hirakawa-Cho Law Office who represents the Japan Publishers manga Anti-Piracy Conference (JPMAC),
  
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• Humans have to befriend bots 'or we're toast' and I 'fear for' my children, says genius Brit AI inventor

  20-10-2026 04:31 via dailymail.com
  
  Professor Geoffrey Hinton, a British-Canadian computer scientist known for his work on artificial neural networks, issued the stark warning at a festival in Tenerife.
  
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• ICANN testing tech to let law enforcement access non-public WHOIS info

  20-10-2026 04:11 via theregister.com
  
  ICANN has started testing authentication schemes that will allow law enforcement agencies to make urgent requests for non-public WHOIS information – when needed to address threats to life, critical infrastructure, or child exploitation. Domain registrars collect information about their customers and in the past that data was publicly available in WHOIS records. Some domain registrars offer services that substitute their own contact details, to preserve customer privacy. In recent years, la
  
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• DeepSeek deep-sixed at all US federal civilian agencies

  20-10-2026 02:11 via theregister.com
  
  The US Department of Homeland Security on Monday issued an order directing federal civilian agencies not to use technology products from Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, and to remove any existing implementations. The order [PDF] is broad, as it requires agencies to ditch "all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations." Complying will be tricky as it is not clear which third-party products and services have been developed usi
  
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• Five ways El Niño is affecting the weather around the world

  20-10-2026 01:08 via bbc.co.uk
  
  As the strongest El Niño on record continues to intensify, what impacts on weather patterns are already being felt across the globe? Sarah Keith-Lucas looks at the evidence.
  
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• Forgotten particle could answer mystery of why we exist, say physicists

  20-10-2026 01:01 via dailymail.com
  
  Why we exist is one of the strangest mysteries science has to grapple with, but scientists may have found the answer.
  
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• Could a SELFIE predict whether you'll survive cancer? Scientists develop AI tool that can spot patients at greatest risk of dying simply by looking at their faces

  20-10-2026 00:32 via dailymail.com
  
  A simple selfie could soon be used to predict a patient's chance of surviving cancer, an intriguing study has suggested.
  
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• Mission to Mars! Japanese spacecraft begins epic five-year quest to bring Martian moon samples back to Earth for the first time

  20-10-2026 00:24 via dailymail.com
  
  A Japanese rocket is set to blast off on an ambitious £262 million mission to swipe soil samples from one of Mars's mysterious moons.
  
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• Grocery giant Ahold Delhaize confirms cyberattack forced US and European systems offline

  19-10-2026 22:26 via theregister.com
  
  Dutch grocery giant Ahold Delhaize, which operates US supermarket chains Food Lion, Giant Food, and Stop & Shop, said it proactively took IT systems offline following a cyberattack, affecting most of its US and European brands. The multinational chain originally disclosed the incident on October 12. “Ahold Delhaize is experiencing a security issue within its network,” it said at the time, adding that security teams, working to mitigate the issues, took “some” IT syste
  
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• Amazon makes vague commitment to unproven nuclear tech to power Indiana datacenters

  19-10-2026 22:22 via theregister.com
  
  To feed its Indiana datacenters with plenty of juice, Amazon is funding the development of a new nuclear facility that will provide nearly 1 gigawatt of power. However, we'll have to see if this happens anytime soon, given the immature technology it's using. Amazon said on Monday that it was funding the project with an undisclosed amount of cash as part of an expansion of its existing deal with X-energy, a next-generation nuclear power startup focusing on building small modular reactors (SMRs) p
  
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• Maxwell gives sub-optimal code a runtime glow-up

  19-10-2026 21:57 via theregister.com
  
  It may not be enough to just use LLMs to write your code when you can also use them to adjust it while your program runs. DoubleAI, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based startup founded in 2023, on Monday introduced Maxwell, a code execution model (CEM) that evaluates, optimizes, and rewrites binary code during execution. Named for Maxwell's Demon, a creature imagined by physicist and mathematician James Clerk Maxwell in 1867 as part of a thought experiment on entropy, the Maxwell CEM preprocesses algorithms
  
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• Mission blasts off for Mars to grab a piece of its moon

  19-10-2026 21:45 via bbc.co.uk
  
  A spacecraft is set to launch on an ambitious mission to bring 10g of Martian moon dust back to Earth.
  
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• I worked with NASA. UFO disclosure will finally happen... but it's not coming from the White House

  19-10-2026 21:11 via dailymail.com
  
  The White House made a promise to release every file connected to UFOs and extraterrestrials, leading many to believe they would finally know if aliens are real or just science fiction.
  
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• Giant Pacific 'wave' heads for US coast as scientists warn of 'quintuple whammy' flooding threat

  19-10-2026 20:59 via dailymail.com
  
  Thousands may be forced to evacuate as a string of events are about to collide to cause massive waves and sea level rise along the West Coast.
  
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• Security patches need patches now that attackers have AI

  19-10-2026 20:23 via theregister.com
  
  Updating your software only gets you so far. A scary scenario - security fixes themselves being bypassed - is becoming more common, according to AI penetration-testing startup Terra Security, which found a sharp rise in reported patch failures in 2026 after years of relatively low numbers. And no, it’s not a coincidence that AI vulnerability discovery and patching also exploded this year. For example, Russian government cyberspies exploited a zero-day Windows Shell security bypass bug, CVE
  
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• Write bot-resistant code with KillSwitch, a programming language designed to confuse LLMs

  19-10-2026 19:10 via theregister.com
  
  If you want to keep bots from making sense of the code you worked so hard on and using it to write programs of their own, there's a new programming language out there designed to confuse LLMs. What began as software engineer Dominik Picheta experimenting with whether LLMs understand the code they write has turned into something else entirely: An open-source, albeit esoteric, programming language he’s dubbed KillSwitch. There are no brackets, no formatting standards to remember, and seeming
  
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• Mission to Mars! Japanese spacecraft to begin epic five-year quest to bring Martian moon samples back to Earth for the first time

  19-10-2026 18:39 via dailymail.com
  
  A Japanese rocket is set to blast off on an ambitious £262 million mission to swipe soil samples from one of Mars's mysterious moons.
  
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• Europe’s cloud sovereignty rules could do more harm than good

  19-10-2026 18:35 via theregister.com
  
  Europe’s drive for cloud sovereignty is leading to member states favoring providers from their own nation instead of building a Europe-wide cloud services market, according to a report critical of the EU’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA). A study by the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) looked at public cloud contracts in nine EU member states and found that every one that invoked the new vocabulary around “sovereignty” went to a dom
  
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• Capybara pups at Manx zoo draw record crowds

  19-10-2026 18:12 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Curraghs Wildlife Park has its busiest October weekend ever after the birth of eight capybara pups.
  
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