Sci-Tech news

• Samsung's VR HEADPHONES send signals to make wearers think they're moving

  16-03-2016 23:51 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  The Seoul-based tech giant is developing headphones to combine with the Samsung Gear VR goggles, which boost the immersive experience by manipulating the wearer’s sense of balance.
  
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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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• Meta halts worker tracking for AI training due to privacy fears

  23-06-2026 19:51 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The company had started just two months ago tracking workers’ computer usage for AI training data.
  
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• Space Force goes to (pretend) orbital war following record-fast Rocket Lab launch

  23-06-2026 18:23 via theregister.com
  
  Rocket Lab has just completed one of the most rapid space launches ever, kicking off a complicated exercise that will test the US Space Force’s ability to respond to and characterize potential threats in orbit. The Victus Haze mission, as the project is known, saw Rocket Lab lob one of its Pioneer spacecraft into orbit for the Space Force on June 19 in just 16 hours and 42 minutes, beating the notice-to-launch record set during the 2023 Victus Nox tactically responsive space mission (TacRS
  
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• O2 joins UK 2G switch-off with summer 2029 start date

  23-06-2026 17:56 via theregister.com
  
  Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) will switch off its 2G network starting in summer 2029, meaning that anyone still operating devices that use the technology must start planning an upgrade. The UK network operator says it will start to switch off its 2G signal in 2029 as part of an ongoing mobile transformation plan. This will see it expand and upgrade its 4G and 5G support, leading to reduced energy consumption and a faster and more reliable service for customers. 2G cell networks first started operating
  
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• “It’s That Bad”: Virginia Residents Battling Constant Noise From Data Center Generators

  23-06-2026 17:11 via technocracy.news
  
  This is blatant hypocrisy. There are rules for Technocrat oligarchs, and then there are rules for the rest of us. Forget the environment. Forget the regulations and laws. Forget the people whose lives you are destroying. They don’t care. They are saving the world, after all. The resistance is building to a fever pitch across the nation, from neighborhoods like this one to corporate workers who have had their fill of AI. ⁃ Patrick Wood Editor.For more than a year, residents living nex
  
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• Millions in UK could claim share of £3bn after Apple case given green light

  23-06-2026 17:01 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Apple rejected the suggestion its practices are anti-competitive, saying many customers rely on third-party alternatives.
  
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• Experts reveal how to stop hay fever immediately - as Britain braces for a 'pollen bomb'

  23-06-2026 17:01 via dailymail.com
  
  The UK is on course to see record-breaking June temperatures of 38C today, and those with pollen allergies - officially known as hay fever - are being warned to brace themselves.
  
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• Missing scientist found dead after 11 months took two shocking items with her that cast doubt on suicide theory

  23-06-2026 16:59 via dailymail.com
  
  The mystery surrounding a nuclear lab employee found dead 11 months after she disappeared has deepened as new evidence emerges about her final movements.
  
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• Apocalyptic weather sweeps the globe: UK and Europe suffer intense heatwaves while a Saharan dust storm hits the US - as experts warn extreme events are becoming the norm

  23-06-2026 16:59 via dailymail.com
  
  Billions of people around the world are suffering the wrath of apocalyptic weather events this week.
  
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• Valve opens Steam Machine pre-orders with queue lottery and hefty prices amid AI squeeze

  23-06-2026 16:46 via theregister.com
  
  Valve has opened pre-orders for its forthcoming Steam Machine – but it is going to cost you quite a lot, thanks to the AI-induced storage shortage. However, the company is expecting such high demand that it is setting up an automated lottery system, so that the lucky people whose orders go through will get random places on the waiting list. The machine will come with an AMD Zen 4 hexacore CPU, as we covered back in November when the company's three new hardware models were announced. The d
  
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• 'Do not drive' warnings issued across five US states as destructive storms batter parts of the nation

  23-06-2026 16:12 via dailymail.com
  
  Thousands of Americans have been warned to stay off the roads as extreme weather could turn cars into deathtraps.
  
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• 21,000 Oracle jobs vanish amid Big Red's big bets on AI

  23-06-2026 16:12 via theregister.com
  
  Oracle's workforce shrank by 21,000 over the last year, according to the company's annual report. In June 2025 [PDF], Big Red reported that it employed "approximately 162,000" employees. By June 2026 [PDF], that figure had fallen to 141,000. US headcount fell by 9,000, while the international workforce declined by 12,000. "Our periodic workforce restructurings and reorganizations can be disruptive," Oracle stated. "Deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may contin
  
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• Bold move, Cotton: Trump administration tells US techies it expects American quantum computer by 2028

  23-06-2026 15:18 via theregister.com
  
  President Trump has ordered the development of a quantum computer to ensure that the US maintains a strategic technical advantage, along with a nationwide migration to post-quantum cryptography to protect sensitive data against just such a computer. In an executive order signed Monday, Trump directed various federal agencies to establish a national program to deliver a quantum computer, aimed at driving scientific discoveries and keeping the US at the forefront of technology. To be precise, it c
  
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• Kylie Jenner collaborates with Meta on £359 AI glasses with built-in cameras - and they even sing 'Rise and Shine' to you in the morning

  23-06-2026 15:07 via dailymail.com
  
  The £359/$399 smart glasses feature a slim oval frame, which is 'inspired by Kylie's personal style'.
  
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• Microsoft Access finally breaks free of its 22-inch form limit

  23-06-2026 14:36 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft has demonstrated that there is life in the old dog yet with an update to the Access relational database management system that addresses a limitation stemming from the days of cathode-ray tube monitors. The fix, currently in beta and set to roll out in the Current Channel preview by July 21, 2026, removes a 22-inch form-size limitation dating back to the era of cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors. It's a weirdly restrictive limitation, considering that widescreen monitors have been around
  
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