Sci-Tech news

• Happy ‘Internaut Day’: The web marks 25 years since it was first made public

  23-08-2016 19:05 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  Internet users believe the anniversary marks a quarter of a century since the web’s inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, made the service publicly available for the first time on 23 August 1991.
  
  Read more

• MinIO pitches persistent memory for agents with work to finish

  29-07-2026 17:15 via theregister.com
  
  Conventional chatbots respond to individual prompts and often retain only limited context. AI agents may carry out longer, multi-step jobs that span sessions, making persistent memory more important. Object storage vendor MinIO claims it can provide that memory. AI agents can help make decisions, create documents, draft analyses, and answer questions once handled by people alone. MinIO characterizes the resulting output as organizational knowledge – a record of what an enterprise knows, de
  
  Read more

• The VMware deadline that could reshape your IT strategy

  29-07-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  Turn VMware’s mandate into an opportunity with Nutanix Many VMware customers assumed the most disruptive effects of Broadcom’s acquisition were already behind them. Licensing changes and pricing shifts required attention, but infrastructure strategy largely stayed the same. But that assumption is about to be tested. Before the October 2027 end of general support for vSphere 8, VMware customers must decide whether to upgrade or migrate1. And what sounds like a routine upgrade could ha
  
  Read more

• Millions told to close windows NOW as heart attack-causing toxins from wildfires engulf five US states

  29-07-2026 16:58 via dailymail.com
  
  Thousands have been ordered to evacuate their homes has toxins fill the air in multiple states this week.
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Baby giraffe hailed as medical marvel after 'miracle' birth at US wildlife park

  29-07-2026 16:31 via dailymail.com
  
  The newborn calf defied seemingly impossible odds after experts were forced to make a heartbreaking, life-or-death decision. Her survival has since been hailed as a miracle..
  
  Read more

• NASA Swift rescue mission spins into trouble during commissioning

  29-07-2026 16:29 via theregister.com
  
  Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft is having some attitude problems on its way to rescue NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, resulting in a multi-axis spin and loss of communications. LINK has three reaction wheels for attitude control, pointing, and stability, but the company said two are currently not operable. NASA reported some loss of functionality in its cold-gas thruster system as well. LINK remains in contact with its controllers despite the sporadic communications, and its other major
  
  Read more

• The ideal number of daily coffees to drink, depending on your age - experts say have MORE in mid-life

  29-07-2026 16:20 via dailymail.com
  
  Coffee has long been one of Britain's favourite drinks, with 95 million cups consumed every day. So is there an ideal number of cups to drink as we age?
  
  Read more

• Ocean explorer tracks down terrifying 'alien' sharks that can clone themselves lurking off US shores

  29-07-2026 16:18 via dailymail.com
  
  A wildlife biologist has tracked down four of the strangest creatures in the shark family living in the waters around the US.
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Iran-linked CyberAv3ngers suspected in attacks on Minnesota water systems

  29-07-2026 15:49 via theregister.com
  
  Security researchers at Tenable suspect the Iran-linked faux hacktivist outfit CyberAv3ngers was behind the cyberattack that disrupted more than 30 Minnesota water facilities. Neither state-level nor federal officials have made any claims regarding attribution for the attacks, however, Tenable reckons the operational pattern is consistent with the crew's previous raids, noting the timing relative to recent government warnings. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) updated a
  
  Read more

• Scientists say we need to HALVE Earth's population to just 4 billion to save the planet

  29-07-2026 15:26 via dailymail.com
  
  It might sound like the evil plan of a nefarious villain, but scientists now say that we need to halve Earth's population to save the planet.
  
  Read more

• AI storage boom is keeping Seagate's hard drives spinning

  29-07-2026 15:17 via theregister.com
  
  The AI infrastructure boom isn't just eating all the memory – it's also driving demand for storage, giving high-capacity hard drives a new lease of life, according to Seagate. The storage veteran says cloud operators are buying ever more mass-capacity hardware as AI applications generate and retain growing volumes of data. "Datacenter demand now represents approximately 90 percent of our exabyte shipments," chairman and CEO Dave Mosley told analysts during a call to discuss Seagate's Q4 an
  
  Read more

• Microsoft faces competition probe over Copilot subscription price hike

  29-07-2026 14:45 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft faces an investigation by the UK's competition watchdog over whether customers were misled when it added features to Microsoft 365 subscriptions and raised prices. The issue dates back to January 2025, when Microsoft added new features, including Copilot, to its consumer package. At renewal, customers were automatically moved onto a more expensive tier containing those features unless they switched plans or canceled altogether. Existing customers could switch to a cheaper "Classic" pla
  
  Read more

• AI insiders ask Uncle Sam to help slow the race they started

  29-07-2026 14:11 via theregister.com
  
  More than 1,200 employees of frontier AI companies have signed a petition calling for US government support to develop ways of slowing automated AI development if necessary. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Google DeepMind chief strategy officer Jasjeet Sekhon, and Meta AI chief scientist Shengjia Zhao are among the signatories to the petition, which calls for tools to "deliberately pace frontier-wide progress." "The world's leading AI companies believe they cou
  
  Read more

• After rewriting SQLite in Rust, Turso turns its sights on Postgres

  29-07-2026 13:28 via theregister.com
  
  Having built a SQLite-compatible database from scratch in Rust, cloud database provider Turso is attempting something more ambitious: a Postgres-compatible implementation on the same foundation. "I don't think there is anything fundamentally wrong with Postgres. If there was something wrong with Postgres, we wouldn't rewrite it," Turso CEO Glauber Costa told The Register. But, like SQLite, Postgres could be freshened up for the cloud-native era. Turso has grander ambitions than putting another n
  
  Read more

• Buzz off! Spray-free hacks for warding off bugs and mosquitos this summer revealed by experts - from 'miracle' £6 body oil and herbs to quirky gadgets

  29-07-2026 13:03 via dailymail.com
  
  Hotter days tend to make bugs and mosquitos more active, while longer daylight hours draw people outdoors into their biting range.
  
  Read more

• Back of the NetApp: Latest exec signing scores $34M compensation package

  29-07-2026 12:45 via theregister.com
  
  The World Cup may be over but a reminder of the staggering sums footballers are paid has emerged from an unexpected quarter: NetApp's latest signing to its squad of execs. Chief Product Officer Syam Nair, who succeeded Harvinder Bhela in July last year after moving from Zscaler, is being made to feel very welcome, judging by the sums involved. According to NetApp's proxy statement ahead of its annual shareholder meeting in September, Nair received total compensation of $34.27 million in the fisc
  
  Read more

• NHS England rapped over inaccurate Palantir patient data disclosure

  29-07-2026 12:08 via theregister.com
  
  NHS England has admitted that a data protection document inaccurately stated who could access patient information, failing to disclose that Palantir staff could view identifiable data held within part of its Federated Data Platform. The US spy-tech firm won a £330 million contract to provide the platform in 2023 after it was awarded £60 million in COVID-era contracts without competition. The system is designed to improve data sharing across the NHS in England and help tackle the back
  
  Read more

• Free-range eggs aren't all they're cracked up to be! Organic options are TWICE as bad for the environment as those from chickens living in cages, study finds

  29-07-2026 11:55 via dailymail.com
  
  If you want to do your bit to save the planet, you might think that opting for free-range organic eggs would be the most eco-friendly choice.
  
  Read more

• Scientists reveal the most attractive EYES - and Anya Taylor-Joy and Jeremy Allen White are the closest real-life examples

  29-07-2026 11:32 via dailymail.com
  
  If you've ever wondered what makes a pair of eyes truly captivating, scientists may finally have the answer.
  
  Read more

• AI digs through 3,700 accounts of dreams and waking life, finds method in the madness

  29-07-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  Your brain apparently spends the night remixing reality rather than simply replaying it, according to researchers armed with AI and more than 3,700 accounts of dreams and waking life. Researchers at Italy's IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca used natural language processing (NLP) to analyze more than 3,700 reports of dreams and waking experiences from 287 adults and found dreams are neither random mental noise nor faithful replays of the day's events. Instead, the sleeping brain appears to re
  
  Read more

• Seeing double? Incredibly rare two-headed gecko is born in Pennsylvania

  29-07-2026 10:53 via dailymail.com
  
  Named Simon and Garfunkel, the tiny crested gecko hatched unexpectedly at Rockstar Geckos, a breeding business based in north-eastern Pennsylvania.
  
  Read more

• Burnham's spanner in the works leaves UK government tech scattered across Whitehall

  29-07-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  OPINION A week after becoming the UK's seventh Prime Minister in ten years, Andy Burnham has made some good headlines, but, among the promises to cap bus fares and end rough sleeping, something was missing. The post of a dedicated technology minister is gone. The last serving secretary of state, Liz Kendall, was sacked when Burnham decided the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) should be broken up and its responsibilities divided among the Cabinet Office, the Department for
  
  Read more

• Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

  29-07-2026 08:34 via theregister.com
  
  Airbus yesterday flew the latest variant of its A350 widebody jet from Australia to France, non-stop, on a route that saw it remain aloft for over 24 hours. The variant is called the A350-1000ULR, which stands for Ultra-Long Range. The plane earns its name thanks to its use of an additional rear center fuel tank that can carry 20,900 liters of fuel capacity. That tank gives the plane a range of almost 10,000 nautical miles, or 18,500km/11,500 miles. The launch customer for the plane is Australia
  
  Read more

• Big Tech demanding deals that smooth out memory prices, says SK Hynix

  29-07-2026 07:18 via theregister.com
  
  South Korean memory-maker SK Hynix has revealed that it’s struck “around ten” long-term supply deals with key customers, many of them AI players, and hopes the deals smooth out volatile memory prices. The company revealed the deals today, along with Q2 results that saw quarterly revenue reach ₩79.3 trillion ($54.5 billion), a 257 percent year-over-year increase. Operating profit grew by an even larger number: 557 percent year-over-year to ₩60.5 trillion ($41.6 billi
  
  Read more

• America bans imported robots due to supply chain and security risks

  29-07-2026 04:16 via theregister.com
  
  The US government has decided to effectively ban the sale of advanced robots made in other nations. The decision trickled out over two days with publication of a National Security Determination [PDF] and an update [PDF] to the list of banned devices set by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The national security document observes “Advanced robotic devices will be critical to creating efficiencies in our economy, dominating on the battlefield, and securing our homeland” and
  
  Read more

• A requiem for Optane, Intel's KV Cache killer that could have eased the RAM price crunch

  29-07-2026 01:27 via theregister.com
  
  History is littered with the corpses of technologies that were ahead of their time, and Intel’s Optane storage and memory products are certainly among them. Expensive, badly misunderstood, and awkwardly priced, the technology struggled to find a place in the market, surviving just five years before Chipzilla pulled the plug. Things might have been different if it were launched today. The shift from AI training to inference has driven tremendous demand for DRAM and NAND flash. In fact, the
  
  Read more

• MCP gets an enterprise makeover

  29-07-2026 01:08 via theregister.com
  
  The Agentic AI Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation, has released an update to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that aims to help enterprises adopt AI-based automation. Open-sourced by Anthropic in November 2024, MCP provides a way for AI applications (agents) based on models like GPT-5.6 Sol or Claude Opus 5 to connect to existing data sources, tools, or other applications. It defines how content is exchanged in a client-server architecture. "The new release is MCP’s most important si
  
  Read more

• Looks like JFrog's 0-days let OpenAI's models hack Hugging Face

  29-07-2026 00:01 via theregister.com
  
  We now have a better idea of how OpenAI's models broke out of their cages to attack Hugging Face. The rogue models found zero-day vulnerabilities in JFrog’s universal binary repository manager Artifactory around the time they escaped, according to JFrog CTO Yoav Landman. While Landman doesn’t outright admit that the JFrog flaws were the zero-days that OpenAI’s models found and exploited, ultimately allowing them to breach the massive model mart, it definitely looks and quacks l
  
  Read more

• JFrog's 0-days let OpenAI's models hack Hugging Face

  29-07-2026 00:01 via theregister.com
  
  UPDATED We now know how OpenAI's models broke out of their cages to attack Hugging Face. The rogue models found zero-day vulnerabilities in JFrog’s universal binary repository manager Artifactory around the time they escaped, according to JFrog CTO Yoav Landman. While Landman wouldn't confirm that these flaws were the zero-days that OpenAI’s models found and exploited, ultimately allowing them to breach the massive model mart, OpenAI later admitted the connection. "To gain Internet a
  
  Read more

• Perplexity's tokenmaxxing Model Council gives you multiple bot perspectives

  28-07-2026 23:26 via theregister.com
  
  Hold on tight to your tokens: AI search firm Perplexity on Tuesday expanded its five-month-old Model Council to its cloud-based Computer platform, giving users more ways to configure multi-model queries. The idea behind the Model Council, Perplexity said in Tuesday’s release, is to “allow users to build a board of top models for a single issue.” Models assigned to a council and given a prompt will tackle the problem independently, resulting in a synthesis report that explains w
  
  Read more

Follow @scitech_UK on Twitter!