Sci-Tech news

• Impact of social media varies across adolescence, study finds

  28-03-2022 11:09 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  Sensitivity to social media use might be linked to developmental differences, like puberty, which occurs later in boys than in girls, report experts at Oxford and Cambridge.
  
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• Bertha slams into US coast as forecasters fear tropical storm may gain strength soon

  22-07-2026 19:59 via dailymail.com
  
  Tropical Storm Bertha is expected to slam into the US coast before nightfall as millions prepare for potentially life-threatening conditions across multiple states.
  
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• NASA whistleblowers claim 'alien presence' is hidden in altered moon photos

  22-07-2026 19:06 via dailymail.com
  
  Claims have emerged that NASA pilots were told to destroy photos that may have contained images of UFOs, as other astronauts alleged aliens warned them to stay away from the moon.
  
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• Linux kernel team publishes 432 CVEs in two days

  22-07-2026 18:58 via theregister.com
  
  If you're responsible for Linux security, someone just dumped a pile of work onto your desk: 432 Linux kernel CVEs were published across Sunday and Monday this week. Linux watchers at nixCraft pointed out the volume on Monday morning, and it didn’t take long for seasoned sysadmins to start expressing concerns. Jan Schaumann, chief information security architect at Akamai Technologies, took to the OSS-SEC mailing list Tuesday to express concerns over the sheer volume of Linux kernel CVEs pu
  
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• Astronomers spot exomoon candidate that's almost as massive as Jupiter

  22-07-2026 17:47 via theregister.com
  
  Scientists may have found the first moon outside our Solar System – depending on what astronomers ultimately decide counts as one. Either way, the groundbreaking research, published in Nature this week, promises a path to clearer sightings of so-called exomoons. Kevin Hoy, a PhD student affiliated with Universidad Diego Portales and the European Southern Observatory in Chile, has found an object orbiting a brown dwarf, which in turn orbits a host star, which sits about 73 light-years from
  
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• World's most narcissistic countries revealed... and America's shock ranking

  22-07-2026 17:24 via dailymail.com
  
  A global study examined 53 countries to find the most narcissistic, with results finding a shocking ranking for America.
  
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• Scientists blame Gen Alpha for climate change! Research reveals teen diets drive the highest climate emissions

  22-07-2026 17:00 via dailymail.com
  
  Younger generations might like to think of themselves as eco-warriors, but a new study suggests they have some of the biggest food-related carbon footprints.
  
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• Millions brace as Tropical Storm Bertha is set to smash US in just hours

  22-07-2026 17:00 via dailymail.com
  
  Tropical Storm Bertha is expected to slam into the US coast before nightfall as millions prepare for potentially life-threatening conditions across multiple states.
  
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• Latest Musk merch drop runs entirely on child labor

  22-07-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  Tesla's latest vehicle has two wheels, no motor, and a target market still mastering walking: the $225 Balance Bike for Kids. The contraption, designed for children aged two to five, "features a lightweight magnesium frame, adjustable seat and futuristic design," and can handle up to 35 kg. The price tag puts it at the higher end of such devices. Cycling Weekly recommends the Hornit Airo at £139, although there are plenty of alternatives aimed at introducing children to two wheels. Althoug
  
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• Grok muscles into Excel with an AI add-in of its own

  22-07-2026 16:00 via theregister.com
  
  You've got an idea for an Excel spreadsheet, but building it is another matter. Microsoft's Copilot can help, and now SpaceXAI is offering an alternative: the Grok add-in for Excel. Available on the Microsoft Marketplace, the add-in places a sidebar in Excel that can "search the web, update spreadsheets, or build powerful financial models," according to the product description It isn't without cost. The add-in is currently available for SuperGrok, Heavy, Business, and Enterprise plans, although,
  
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• Tropical Storm Bertha to strike US in just HOURS as millions brace for floods and power outages

  22-07-2026 15:16 via dailymail.com
  
  Tropical Storm Bertha is expected to slam into the US coast before nightfall as millions prepare for potentially life-threatening conditions across multiple states.
  
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• OpenAI tries the consulting path with 'Presence', charging enterprises boots-on-the-ground prices to deploy agents

  22-07-2026 15:15 via theregister.com
  
  Having popularized AI with the cheapskate masses, OpenAI has turned its attention to enterprise customers who might actually pay for its services. The debt-fueled maker of frontier models on Wednesday announced the debut of Presence, a web service designed to make it easier for enterprises to deploy AI agents for a handful of common business tasks. "Today, Presence supports real-time experiences across voice and chat, such as customer support, outbound sales, and high-risk internal workflows," t
  
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• Sneaky Windows stealer targets 300+ apps, gives crims an AI profiler to maximize profits

  22-07-2026 15:00 via theregister.com
  
  EXCLUSIVE A Windows information-stealer targeting more than 300 applications comes equipped with a novel surveillance tool: an AI profiler that ranks infected victims so crooks know who to target first. Varonis Threat Labs spotted the new stealer and remote access trojan (RAT), called Dolphin X, for sale on a cybercrime forum, and shared their research exclusively with The Register. The ad for the malware claims it can target upwards of 300 applications and has the ability to bypass browser pass
  
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• Ireland stalls €1B Microsoft tender amid digital sovereignty questions

  22-07-2026 14:15 via theregister.com
  
  The Irish government has kicked a Microsoft procurement potentially worth €1 billion into touch amid a political debate about the nation's overreliance on US tech providers and a move to free and open source software. In Ireland's parliament (Dáil Éireann), Frankie Feighan, Minister for Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation, said the recent tender for suppliers to take part in a framework agreement to supply Microsoft software and service
  
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• Greedy ransomware crews return for seconds after victims cough up first extortion payments

  22-07-2026 13:49 via theregister.com
  
  Authoritative advice against paying ransom demands is everywhere in UK PLC, and one warning keeps proving true in 2026: paying doesn't mean the crooks leave you alone. Fresh Proofpoint data shows that 58 percent of extorted organizations in Britain pay their ransom. Worse, 22 percent of those who pay get extorted again anyway. The UK’s data tracks the global picture: 54 percent, of victims pay, though the rate swings sharply by region, from just 19 percent in Japan to 93 percent in the US.
  
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• See the shipwrecks of Shackleton and Scott like NEVER before: First ever full-sized scans reveal stunning details of ships from the Heroic Age of exploration

  22-07-2026 13:17 via dailymail.com
  
  A daring expedition to the bottom of the ocean has revealed the shipwrecks of Britain's greatest explorers as they have never been seen before.
  
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• GNOME can look like Windows – and Flashback can do it without extensions

  22-07-2026 12:50 via theregister.com
  
  A new GNOME extension called Simple-taskbar does a pretty good job of giving GNOME 50 a taskbar and start menu very much like the ones from Windows 11. It's so new that it's still not listed on the GNOME Extensions website – at the time of writing, it's still under review. We built it and installed it, and it works. This single extension merges GNOME's built-in panel (across the top of the primary screen) and what it calls the "dash" – the icon bar down the left side – into a s
  
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• See the shipwrecks of Shackleton and Scott like NEVER before: First ever full-sized scans could finally shed light on what happened on the ill-fated expeditions

  22-07-2026 12:29 via dailymail.com
  
  A daring expedition to the bottom of the ocean has revealed the shipwrecks of Britain's greatest explorers as they have never been seen before.
  
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• Redmond's reaper cometh: October 2026 set to bury a graveyard of Microsoft products

  22-07-2026 12:00 via theregister.com
  
  October 2026 is shaping up to be a busy month for administrators as it heralds the end of several big products, along with the retirement of components that could mean sleepless nights for the ill-prepared. After the demise of Windows 10 in October 2025, sysadmins might have hoped for some respite from Microsoft's ax, but 2026 will see the demise of more beasts. First, there's the end of support for Office LTSC 2021, which means everything from Access 2021 to Word 2021 is for the chop. A move to
  
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• Raspberry Pi goes large with 10.1-inch Touch Display 2

  22-07-2026 11:11 via theregister.com
  
  Raspberry Pi has supersized its Touch Display 2 with a new 10.1-inch model aimed at dashboards, entertainment systems, and other projects that need more room for prodding. The panel is designed for use cases such as touch-enabled information displays. This is the big brother to the 5-inch and 7-inch variants, with a resolution to match – 1,200 x 1,920 pixels are available on the native portrait display. The 10.1-inch panel supports 24-bit RGB color and ten simultaneous touch points, up fro
  
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• Ditch the neck pillow! Emirates' new airplane seats feature 'side wings' that support your head and neck - and they're even available in economy

  22-07-2026 10:45 via dailymail.com
  
  It might finally be time to ditch your lumpy old neck pillow, as Emirates unveils its 'game-changing' new aeroplane seats.
  
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• Council worker spared prison after four-day data-snooping spree

  22-07-2026 10:29 via theregister.com
  
  A council worker who "abused" his position to unlawfully access "highly sensitive" personal records of family members and other people known to him has received a suspended sentence after admitting to violating the Computer Misuse Act (CMA). Geoffrey Smith, 31, from Ledbury, was a new Herefordshire Council employee working in the Children and Young People directorate. Over a four-day period, he accessed roughly 490 records and downloaded 94 documents relating to family members and "families know
  
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• Anyone with a shed, an extension cord, a couple of GPUs and an overdraft is building datacenters. Fujitsu just offloaded five

  22-07-2026 08:29 via theregister.com
  
  The advent of generative AI spurred an enormous and controversial datacenter building boom that has seen almost anyone who knows how to run a bit barn try to expand their business ASAP. Fujitsu, however, wants out. The Australian outpost of the Japanese giant’s business this week announced the sale of five datacenters down under. The company said selling the bit barns “enables us to further invest in the technology services where customer demand is growing fastest.” In Australi
  
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• Clarity Act Gains ‘Tremendous Momentum’ In Senate, According To Coinbase

  22-07-2026 06:13 via technocracy.news
  
  Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said yesterday that the Clarity Act is at the “one-yard line” for passage in the Senate, but it has to act before the August recess to do so. President Trump is chomping at the bit, reflecting the anxiety of his arch-Technocrat cronies who have taken over Washington, DC since he took office. They know that if this bill fails to pass, it will put a monkey wrench in their plans to tokenize and hijack America’s financial system. Yell at your senato
  
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• China advances plans for national single-stack IPv6 network, and its own surveillance-friendly version of the protocol

  22-07-2026 04:55 via theregister.com
  
  China’s Cyberspace Administration on Tuesday issued a plan for wider adoption of IPv6 between now and 2030, and for more work on a non-standard set of services that Beijing calls “IPv6+”. The Implementation Plan for Deepening Technological Innovation and Integrated Application of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) (2026-2030) contains the usual promises to increase use of IPv6. Beijing wants 900 million users to be connected over IPv6 by 2027, and for the protocol to carry 38 p
  
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• OpenAI admits it was the source of the agent swarm that attacked Hugging Face

  22-07-2026 03:30 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI has admitted that it was the operator of the autonomous agents that attacked model-mart Hugging Face last week, and that they did so after a research project escaped a sandbox by finding and exploiting a zero-day flaw, then used another zero-day flaw to launch an attack. The attack saw agents achieve “unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and to several credentials” used by Hugging Face, which said its infosec teams observed an autonomous agent framework &l
  
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• The truth nobody wants to admit: Chinese or not, open models are competitive now

  22-07-2026 01:09 via theregister.com
  
  OPINION Every six months or so a Chinese model sparks a panic, calling into question America’s AI dominance. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 is the latest example. Recall when DeepSeek R1 shook markets early last year? Following a similar pattern, Moonshot’s latest model isn’t all that interesting apart from its benchmark performance, and at nearly three trillion parameters it's beyond the reach of most enterprises. For the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, the technology isn't as int
  
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• Cisco's open-weight bug busters take on Google and OpenAI

  21-07-2026 23:17 via theregister.com
  
  Who needs expensive frontier models to find software vulns? Cisco has just released two open-weight models that specialize in finding known bugs in existing codebases. The models, Antares-350M and Antares-1B, are part of Cisco’s new Antares family of security small language models (SLMs), and are now available on Hugging Face - but only to vetted users. “We’re making sure we’re gating that and appropriately granting access,” DJ Sampath, Cisco's senior vice president
  
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• AI's cheatin' heart will make you weep

  21-07-2026 21:45 via theregister.com
  
  AI models will do just about anything to complete the task you ask, including cheating to get there, according to new cybersecurity evaluations from the UK government's AI Security Institute (AISI). The group found that leading models often take shortcuts to achieve a particular result and then misrepresent how they obtained that result. And they won't always admit it when asked. "Every model we have tested for this behaviour attempted to cheat," AISI said in a blog post on Tuesday. "Models did
  
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• US Marines' latest anti-drone toy is an AI turret that uses regular machine guns

  21-07-2026 21:14 via theregister.com
  
  The US military is adding autonomous gun-based counter-drone systems intended to reduce its reliance on expensive interceptor missiles. They also have the potential to kill humans. Defense robotics firm Allen Control Systems (ACS) announced a deal with the US Marine Corps on Monday to get its Bullfrog autonomous weapon system attached to the Light Marine Air Defense Integrated System (L-MADIS) expeditionary counter-drone platform. L-MADIS consists of pairs of off-road vehicles, one carrying a su
  
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