Sci-Tech news

• 'Poisonous herbicide glyphosate is invading the food chain', experts warn

  20-04-2016 21:52 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  A report by The Alliance for Natural Health USA found detectable traces of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, in 10 of 24 foods tested, including bagels, eggs, wholewheat bread and coffee creamers.
  
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• Your political views are written in your hands: Left-handed people tend to be left-leaning, study finds

  26-08-2026 13:59 via dailymail.com
  
  A new study has revealed that left-handed people tend to be more left-leaning when it comes to their politics.
  
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• SpaceX plans to plant $100B Starbase on Louisiana coast

  26-08-2026 13:29 via theregister.com
  
  SpaceX has announced plans to spend $100 billion on a Louisiana spaceport designed to support thousands of launches annually. According to SpaceX, construction is planned to start in 2027, and the first Starship launch from the facility is earmarked for 2029. The spaceport will have its own propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and an airport. Louisiana Economic Development (LED) was cock-a-hoop about the plans and estimated tha
  
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• Nigel Farage wants to scrap 'suffocating' UK GDPR

  26-08-2026 13:06 via theregister.com
  
  Reform UK says it wants to scrap the UK GDPR after eight years of the regulations “strangling” small businesses. The party’s leader Nigel Farage and economy chief Robert Jenrick announced additional pledges on Tuesday evening, which include scrapping the UK’s data protection regulation for a “light-touch” alternative more akin to New Zealand’s approach. The UK’s Information Commissioner has powers to issue multi-million-pound fines to businesses th
  
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• Robots, they're just like us! Watch the hilarious moment a humanoid falls down the stairs after getting distracted by a crowd of cheerleaders

  26-08-2026 12:59 via dailymail.com
  
  The clip was filmed at the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games, which are taking place in Beijing, China.
  
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• Use vapes to quit smoking, scientists say - despite cancer, depression and wheezing warnings

  26-08-2026 12:52 via dailymail.com
  
  Swapping cigarettes for vapes does not put users 'at risk of serious harm' - is the surprising conclusion of a major review into e-cigarette safety.
  
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• Shakespeare's plays really are complicated - with Antony and Cleopatra the trickiest to get your head around, study finds

  26-08-2026 12:07 via dailymail.com
  
  With their dense wordplay, old English phrases and complex poetic meter, Shakespeare plays can be notoriously difficult to understand.
  
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• UK supermarket scales go 404 on shoppers

  26-08-2026 12:00 via theregister.com
  
  BORK!BORK!BORK! The scales are empty, and so what else can there be but a 404? Today's entry in the pantheon of bork takes us to the UK city of Coventry, where a set of scales at a Tesco store shows the number 404. Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Rowan Archer, the scales have logged off and done the computing equivalent of popping down to the pub. It's an odd number to choose. Hopefully it's a device identifier rather than a message code. After all, netizens have long associated the number
  
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• The safest place to hide during the apocalypse? Scientists say head for Australia (but admit we're all largely doomed)

  26-08-2026 11:38 via dailymail.com
  
  When the apocalypse strikes, scientists say there's no use running for the hills. Instead, anyone who really wants to outlast the end of days should make their way to Australia.
  
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• Debian polls its developers on whether to burn the bots, tame the bots, or let 'em loose

  26-08-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  The Debian project is polling its developers over AI usage: use it, impose limits, or ban it outright. The second Debian vote of the year, General Resolution: LLM usage in Debian is underway. More saliently, it is still underway – Debian Project Lead Sruthi Chandran extended the voting deadline by an extra week. (She was elected in March, in the first project poll of 2026.) Debian is a large and complicated project: the release announcement for version 13 says it has 69,830 packages, which
  
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• Revealed: The surprising reason why scientists named Dolly the Sheep after Dolly Parton

  26-08-2026 11:03 via dailymail.com
  
  Musician, actress, philanthropist - Dolly Parton had done it all.
  But perhaps her most unusual accolade was having the world's first cloned mammal named after her.
  
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• Sopra Steria's £370M Capita spat heads for 2028 courtroom showdown

  26-08-2026 10:29 via theregister.com
  
  System integrator Sopra Steria is set to have its day in court to contest a £370 million contract awarded by the UK government to Capita to run shared services for finance and HR across a number of Whitehall departments. A judge has set a trial date for early 2028, pending attempts to settle the case out of court. Sopra Steria's allegations center on the award of a business process outsourcing deal led by the Department for Work and Pensions valued at £370 million over ten years, les
  
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• Left something behind in your hotel room? Don't expect to get it back! UK's biggest chains deliver disappointing results when put to the test

  26-08-2026 09:04 via dailymail.com
  
  It's easy to leave something behind in a hotel room, but a Which? investigation has found getting it back can be another story.
  
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• India’s crewed space program will fly this year, after missing 2022 and 2025 targets

  26-08-2026 07:22 via theregister.com
  
  India plans the first launch of its crewed space program this year and has expanded its orbital ambitions to include operating a space station by 2035. India’s crewed space program is called Gaganyaan and has already missed deadlines to fly in 2022 and 2025. The nation’s space research organization (ISRO) agency and government did not say anything about the future Gaganyaan schedule after last year’s deadline passed without a launch. That silence ended earlier this week, when I
  
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• Self-hosted email is in steep decline, Microsoft and Google are taking over

  26-08-2026 04:40 via theregister.com
  
  The number of large users hosting their own email servers has halved in the last decade, according to Artem Berezin, a researcher who works at business e-mail company Live Direct Marketing. On the Internet Society blog, Berezin explained that DNS records reveal a lot about email. “The MX record says where the mailbox lives. The SPF record says who may send on the domain's behalf. The DMARC record says what should happen when a message fails authentication,” he wrote. Berezin says he
  
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• Flock ‘Safety’? That’s Not What U.S. Patent Papers Say

  26-08-2026 02:05 via technocracy.news
  
  Flock Group is the ultimate disruptor in the surveillance market. A monster company that has grown from zero in 2027 to over $8.4 billion in less than 10 years. The fact is, Flock wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Y Combinator, which gave them their seed/startup money in 2017 and then mentored/coached them on how to run a startup company, Silicon Valley style. And who was the President of Y Combinator at the time? Sam Altman, who soon thereafter co-founded OpenAI with Elon Musk. 
  
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• Now Perplexity is trying to get into the local AI action

  26-08-2026 01:39 via theregister.com
  
  AI company Perplexity has already tried its hand at search services, advertising, personal assistants, browsers, and a hosted agent platform – and now it's getting into local AI services. The biz, having already built a hybrid agent inference orchestrator that connects cloud and local inference, has crossed that bridge to build a local agent called Portable Computer. That's in contrast to its cloud-based agent platform, Computer. Portable Computer consists of an agent harness, an orchestra
  
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• Is your dog secretly trying to communicate with you? Your pet's blinking could be an attempt to tell you something important, study finds

  26-08-2026 01:01 via dailymail.com
  
  Does your dog blink at you when you look into its eyes? If so, scientists say that it could be trying to tell you something important.
  
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• Intel's 256-core Xeon 7 CPUs are a Diamond in the rough

  26-08-2026 00:54 via theregister.com
  
  DEEP DIVE Intel's Xeon 7 platform, better known by its codename Diamond Rapids, was supposed to launch this year with up to 192 cores backed by a whopping 16 memory channels. But that's not going to happen. This being Intel, the launch was, to no one's great surprise, delayed until 2027 to give what remains of the company's engineering team time to cut and polish the chip — and polish they certainly have. At the Hot Chips show this week, Intel revealed the chip won't ship with 192 cores af
  
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• Apple defies memory shortage with new Mac minis

  25-08-2026 22:18 via theregister.com
  
  Apple on Tuesday heralded the imminent refresh of its headless Mac kit with new versions of the Mac Studio and the Mac mini that you can pre-order now for shipping on September 22, 2026. The diminutive desktops promise a high level of local AI performance with memory prices to match. "[T]he new Mac Studio is our most powerful Mac ever," said Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, in a statement, citing the integration of Apple's Neural Accelerators into processor GPUs and the utilit
  
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• Fleet of 'doomsday planes' spotted over US hours after CIA boss visits Moscow

  25-08-2026 22:11 via dailymail.com
  
  Multiple US nuclear-command aircraft known as 'doomsday planes' took to the skies Tuesday, within hours of the CIA director's unexpected trip to Moscow.
  
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• Claude and Cowork now share what they know about you

  25-08-2026 21:54 via theregister.com
  
  Anthropic’s Claude chatbot knows a lot about its users, and now it's sharing its memories with the company’s everything-but-coding assistant, Cowork. The frontier lab on Tuesday announced that Claude and Cowork now share a memory, meaning that what Claude remembers about users is also available to Cowork. That’s a two-way street: Memories generated through users’ interactions with Cowork will also be available to the regular Claude chatbot. Services like Claude are able t
  
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• World's snake attack hotspots revealed: Map shows the countries with the most encounters - and Australia doesn't even make the top 20

  25-08-2026 20:00 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists from the Liverpool School of Tropical medicine have revealed the countries where the most incidents occur every year.
  
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• McKinsey says enterprise AI is finally 'on the road to ROI'

  25-08-2026 19:44 via theregister.com
  
  Four years into the generative AI revolution, consulting giant McKinsey reckons we've finally started the engine and are officially "on the road to ROI." Whether that road leads to actual profit-making and how long it takes to travel is anyone's guess, because the firm's data suggests most respondents still aren't reporting an enterprise-level earnings contribution from AI. McKinsey surveyed 1,719 professionals and business leaders from around the world and across industries for its report on th
  
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• True tomb of Jesus discovered after 2,000 years as hidden location that aligns with Bible account is found

  25-08-2026 19:43 via dailymail.com
  
  After years of digging beneath one of Christianity's holiest sites, archaeologists uncovered clues that strikingly mirror the Gospel account of Jesus' final resting place.
  
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• Winter snow map reveals 14 surprising US states set to be hammered as Super El Niño arrives

  25-08-2026 19:25 via dailymail.com
  
  Several states throughout the US could see as much as ten inches of snow more than their yearly average as a record-setting El Nino erupts in the Pacific.
  
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• EPA to drop requirement for public notice of polluting datacenters

  25-08-2026 18:40 via theregister.com
  
  Soon, you may not even be able to find out what that new neighborhood bit barn could do to your air quality. A proposed change by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would eliminate federal minimum requirements for public participation in minor-source air permits, a move critics warn could affect some datacenter projects. The Environmental Protection Network, which is made up of former employees of the EPA itself, says the proposed rule change would eliminate mandatory public notice and
  
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• You could've applied all 1,449 Oracle patches and still been hit by this attack

  25-08-2026 18:09 via theregister.com
  
  In late July, Oracle released a mammoth security patch dump with 1,449 patches, in a perhaps unprecedented bad day for database admins. None of them, it turns out, would have prevented the credential theft on an Oracle database server described by security platform Huntress. “Even if it had been fully patched, everything working, it still would have happened,” said Craig Savage, cybersecurity lead at Oracle third-party support vendor Spinnaker Support, referring to the attack. In Jul
  
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• Microsoft warns that transitioning Excel workbooks to new Exchange connectors might not be smooth sailing

  25-08-2026 17:53 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft has issued a warning to Excel users. Want to keep using the Exchange Connector? You'll have to migrate your workbook connections and switch to Microsoft 365 or Office 2024. The software giant just published a timeline for the switchover in its Message Center. The roadmap puts customer validation of the new Exchange Mail and Calendar connectors as starting in August (along with access for early adopters), sets the final phase of the Exchange Web Services (EWS) retirement enforcement in
  
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• Discovered: Stunning 2,000-year-old secret beneath Jesus 'burial site' that perfectly aligns with Bible account

  25-08-2026 17:49 via dailymail.com
  
  After years of digging beneath one of Christianity's holiest sites, archaeologists uncovered clues that strikingly mirror the Gospel account of Jesus' final resting place.
  
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