Sci-Tech news

• Nintendo to launch Miitomo app in the UK on 31 March

  29-03-2016 14:26
  
  Nintendo has announced that its first smartphone game will launch in the UK on 31 March.By: Michael Rundle, Continue reading...
  
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• Is THIS the key to tackling future heatwaves? Scientists propose controversial 'Weather Jiu-Jitsu' technique to combat extreme weather

  24-06-2026 20:00 via dailymail.com
  
  In a new study, researchers claim that a technique called 'Weather Jiu-Jitsu' could be used to 'nudge' weather systems away from harmful trajectories.
  
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• Windows 11 turns five, leaving some important lessons for Microsoft

  24-06-2026 18:32 via theregister.com
  
  OPINION On June 24, 2021, Microsoft announced Windows 11, unveiling a new and controversial operating system. Five years on, how has that worked out for you, Redmond? Windows 11 has always been a problem child for Microsoft. It was announced in June 2021 and became generally available on October 5 that year, while much of its customer base was still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, The Register called it pointless rather than a point release of Microsoft's flagship operating syst
  
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• Panic as earthquake triggers warnings across three US states to 'drop and cover'

  24-06-2026 18:30 via dailymail.com
  
  A major earthquake has sent shockwaves across three states, triggering urgent shelter in place warnings for millions of Americans.
  
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• US Senate Passes Housing Bill With Four-Year Fed CBDC Ban

  24-06-2026 17:49 via technocracy.news
  
  This article rightly concludes, “private crypto has a seat at the table, and the Fed’s version of a digital dollar does not.” As Technocrat-in-Chief, Trump has banded together with the billionaire arch-Technocrats who have taken control of Washington, in order to create a privatized financial system for America run by them. This private system far exceeds the Fed’s CBDC by including tokenization of real-world assets (RWA).
  Who proposed this amendment to the 21st Century R
  
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• How hot is your commute? As temperatures in London hit 36°C, Daily Mail tests popular tube lines and bus routes - with some above the legal limit for transporting CATTLE

  24-06-2026 17:49 via dailymail.com
  
  As the mercury crept up, the Daily Mail's Senior Science & Technology Reporter, Wiliam Hunter, set out on some of the popular Underground lines and bus routes, armed with a thermometer.
  
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• Mutant sewer rats spreading through major US cities as scientists discover disturbing DNA changes

  24-06-2026 17:44 via dailymail.com
  
  Shocking mutations in the DNA of common pests found in every major US city could help spark the next deadly pandemic, researchers fear.
  
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• Deno project is going to add cross-platform desktop apps in next major update

  24-06-2026 17:32 via theregister.com
  
  The next major release of Deno, a JavaScript/TypeScript runtime, will include new commands to build cross-platform desktop applications using web technology. Deno desktop will compile an application from a plain TypeScript file or from frameworks such as Next.js, Astro, Deno Fresh, TanStack Start or Vite SSR (server-side rendering). A distinctive feature is that the native WebView is used by default, rather than bundling the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). The advantage is much smaller applic
  
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• Boffin claims Microsoft's supposed quantum leap does not compute due to 'basic Python errors'

  24-06-2026 17:02 via theregister.com
  
  Prestigious journal Nature has published a peer-reviewed critique of Microsoft's claims to have made quantum computing breakthroughs – and the scientist who wrote the paper has essentially said Redmond got it wrong. Microsoft made its claims of a quantum breakthrough in February 2025 when it revealed tech called Majorana and predicted "this breakthrough will allow us to create a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years." The software giant's ap
  
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• Medical diagnosis AIs can be tricked into telling whose data trained them

  24-06-2026 17:01 via theregister.com
  
  AI models used to help diagnose medical conditions have a problem: They’re ready and willing to identify patients whose data was used to train them. German researchers reported in a Nature paper published Wednesday that discriminative AI models - those used to classify data and make predictions about new inputs based on their training sets - are particularly susceptible to membership inference attacks (MIAs) that query the models in an attempt to figure out whether a particular datapoint i
  
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• British Home Office seeks techie to herd nearly 1,000 engineers looking after 600 systems

  24-06-2026 16:31 via theregister.com
  
  The Home Office is looking for a software engineering boss ready to support systems that when they go down can ruin the day of many thousands of people and make headlines internationally. The Director of Engineering for Home Office Digital will be responsible for managing and deploying nearly 1,000 engineers working on more than 600 systems. Among many other things, these systems enable 76 million e-gate border crossings, 140 million police checks on people, vehicles, and property and seven mill
  
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• UK government wants 'trusted' news sources promoted above the social media noise

  24-06-2026 15:45 via theregister.com
  
  The British government wants "trusted" news sources to be made more prominent on social media in plans that seem set to cause controversy with free speech advocates. In a Green Paper published Tuesday, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) laid out its aim to improve access to reliable news sources on online platforms. This is part of broader reforms to the UK's public service media system, intended both to ensure it continues to serve the British public and to support an eventual m
  
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• AI coding agents could soon cost more than the developers using them

  24-06-2026 15:04 via theregister.com
  
  Gartner has slammed AI vendors' lack of transparency, saying developers are facing sharply increased costs from coding agents. Since the main AI coding agent vendors have shifted from seat-based licensing to consumption-based pricing, developer teams now face highly variable cost structures. Developer teams face an emerging problem of escalating costs, said Nitish Tyagi, senior principal analyst at Gartner. AI coding bills were leaping from $20 or $100 to $2,000 to $5,000 per developer per month
  
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• London cops bring live facial recognition to West End

  24-06-2026 13:45 via theregister.com
  
  The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) will start using static live facial recognition (LFR) cameras in London's West End and Soho by the end of this year following a six-month pilot in the south London borough of Croydon. Static LFR involves the police temporarily attaching cameras to lampposts or similar infrastructure, with the feeds monitored remotely and officers on the ground stopping people whom the technology matches to images on its watchlist. The MPS said that each of the 24 deployments
  
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• Microsoft rivals line up to tell UK watchdog where the software behemoth hurt them

  24-06-2026 13:09 via theregister.com
  
  The UK Competition and Markets Authority's (CMA) investigation into Microsoft's business software ecosystem has attracted a full range of comments from the unsurprising to the hyperlocal. The watchdog is looking at whether product bundling, the alleged embedding of in-house AI products like CoPilot, and licensing practices are limiting UK customer choice. Asking for submissions from customers and rivals allows the regulator to weigh Microsoft's arguments against the concerns and grievances of th
  
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• From 'Lean on Me' to 'Bad Blood': Song lyrics have become less focused on friendship and loyalty and more about cheating and betrayal over the past 60 years, study finds

  24-06-2026 13:04 via dailymail.com
  
  Older generations often complain that they don't make songs like they used to. Now, a study confirms that this really is the case, as song lyrics have shifted from moral virtues to vices.
  
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• Database vendors pitch themselves as the cure for runaway AI costs

  24-06-2026 12:15 via theregister.com
  
  Irresistible force, meet immovable object. Tech leaders are under pressure to satisfy growing demand for AI while keeping a lid on costs. That is becoming harder as Anthropic, OpenAI, and GitHub shift some services away from flat-rate subscriptions toward usage-based billing. Database vendors claim they can help by cutting the number of calls made to AI models and handling the new workloads generated by developer agents. According to IDC research director Devin Pratt, "demand for the underlying
  
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• The REAL cost of the heatwave: Study reveals how hot weather could knock 3% off your income

  24-06-2026 11:57 via dailymail.com
  
  The powerful heatwave gripping the UK and Europe could make a dent on your income, a new study has warned.
  
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• Alpine Linux 3.24 scales new desktop heights with COSMIC

  24-06-2026 11:35 via theregister.com
  
  Alpine Linux 3.24 is out, bringing a new desktop environment that should make for a very high-performance combination. Version 3.24.1 followed just four days later to fix some OpenSSL security issues. The 3.24 series contains new versions of GRUB, LLVM, Rust, Go, Qt, and NGINX. Alpine isn't an entirely GNU-free Linux distro, but it doesn't use many components from the GNU Project: it's systemd-free and doesn't use the GNU standard C library, replacing it with musl libc. Even so, version 3.24 off
  
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• Ordering a trip back to 2009, with a side of nostalgia

  24-06-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  BORK!BORK!BORK! A blast from the past greets customers at a coastal McDonald's, or is it just that the kiosk is seeking a return to the happier and simpler times of 2009? An eagle-eyed Register reader spotted a very unhappy terminal at a branch of the McDonald's fast-food chain in Worthing, England. Where a customer might normally smear a finger over suggestions for ways to sate their desire for grease, the display instead reveals the kiosk's clearly PC origins: a BIOS utility. It's not clear wh
  
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• Explainer: Why your legacy storage is choking your expensive GPU

  24-06-2026 10:00 via theregister.com
  
  When your accelerators sit idle, the problem usually isn't the chips. It's everything between them and the data. Rather than thinking purely about GPU performance, it's time to think about storage as an active engine for throughput, rather than a passive archive. Legacy storage architectures aren't built that way. What is GPU starvation? A starved GPU is an accelerator waiting around with nothing to do because data isn't arriving quickly enough. Sometimes the network is choking; in other cases,
  
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• Germany went off the rails as wireless outage saw all trains cancelled

  24-06-2026 08:05 via theregister.com
  
  Train services are resuming across Germany this morning, after rail operator Deutsche Bahn (DB) last night shut down operations after its wireless network failed. At 10:30 PM local time on Tuesday night, DB advised that its GSM-R network was down, meaning all trains had to be held at stations. GSM-R is a version of the 2G GSM standard tuned to the needs of rail operators, who use it to power private networks that carry information necessary to keep their services rolling. The tech is considered
  
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• You have got to be KDDI-ng – Japanese telco exposes 14.2 million managed email credentials

  24-06-2026 06:56 via theregister.com
  
  Japanese telco KDDI has messed up by allowing an attacker to access systems powering an email service it manages for itself and other local ISPs, and which stores info on up to 14.2 million users. The company yesterday posted a confession [PDF] that it detected unauthorized access to the email system it offers to third-party customers on June 17th. Machine translation of the confession suggests that KDDI investigated the situation and found attackers exploited a vulnerability in third-party soft
  
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• Chinese supercomputer using local processors heads TOP500 list

  24-06-2026 05:34 via theregister.com
  
  The TOP500 list of Earth’s mightiest supercomputers has a new leader: the 2.198 Exaflop/s LineShine machine housed at the National Supercomputer Center (NSC) in Shenzhen, which took the top spot without using any kit from Nvidia, Intel, or AMD. Which is not to say that LineShine is an entirely Chinese creation. As explained in a pre-press paper, the machine’s LX2 processors are a local effort but use Armv9 designs – so chalk up a win for Blighty, the home of Arm. The machine al
  
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• Religion can have same effect as taking DRUGS: Rituals trigger the release of opioids in the brain, study reveals

  24-06-2026 01:01 via dailymail.com
  
  Religious rituals are practised all around the world - and experts may now have worked out why they're so popular.
  
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• World's oldest known asteroid impact: Crater in Western Australia was created when a space rock smashed into Earth 3 BILLION years ago, study reveals

  24-06-2026 00:04 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists have identified the world's oldest recorded asteroid impact, revealing new evidence of Earth's violent history.
  
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• OpenAI Codex bombards SSDs with needless write operations, costing millions

  23-06-2026 22:50 via theregister.com
  
  Modern SSDs have a limited number of write cycles before they expire. Now, OpenAI is scrambling to fix a flawed logging implementation that has been shortening the lives of Codex users' solid state drives (SSDs) with excessive data writes and lowering the devices' value by a significant amount of money. A bug report opened last week for the company's Codex coding agent warns of the consequences in its title: "Codex SQLite feedback logs can write ~640 TB/year and rapidly consume SSD endurance #28
  
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• Anthropic reimagines Claude in Slack as nosy, always-on agentic AI coworker

  23-06-2026 22:16 via theregister.com
  
  Anthropic is killing off its existing Claude in Slack app in favor of an always-on agentic alternative dubbed Claude Tag that will listen and learn from everything it’s given access to. Claude Tag can now join organizational Slack instances “as a team member,” according to Anthropic’s announcement, where it will have access to whatever channels domain administrators decide upon, as well as the tools, data, and codebases they contain. Anyone in a channel with Claude Tag ca
  
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• Mythos discovers 'Squidbleed,' a memory leak that's gone undetected since Clinton era

  23-06-2026 20:07 via theregister.com
  
  Sometimes it takes a while to detect a vuln. A 29-year-old, Heartbleed-style vulnerability in Squid, a popular open-source caching proxy server, silently leaked users' plaintext HTTP requests and potentially revealed sensitive data, including credentials and session tokens, for decades - until AI (and a few humans) saved the day. A security researcher and Mythos Preview found the flaw and reported it to project maintainers, who fixed the code earlier this month. Squid is widely used by large cor
  
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• 'Frankenstein' rabbits with tentacles sprouting from their heads invade several US states

  23-06-2026 20:05 via dailymail.com
  
  Sightings of rabbits transformed into grotesque, horned-looking creatures with dark, tentacle-like growths emerging from their heads are increasing in the US.
  
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