Sci-Tech news

• Scientist pilots a drone using just his thoughts

  26-02-2015 12:59 via
  
  The Brainflight technology was demonstrated at an event in Lisbon. A ‘pilot’ fitted with a EEG cap flew and landed a drone using bespoke software that converted his brainwaves into drone commands.
  
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• Deadly 'fungal storm' barrels toward major Arizona cities TODAY as officials warn residents to stay indoors

  19-08-2026 16:42 via dailymail.com
  
  A potentially hazardous dust storm is heading toward more than one million Americans, carrying the risk of causing a serious lung infection.
  
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• ISS spacewalkers discover there's no such thing as a quick antenna job

  19-08-2026 16:07 via theregister.com
  
  Stubborn electrical connections and bolts thwarted an attempt to replace an antenna on the International Space Station (ISS) yesterday, forcing spacewalkers to leave the new unit for another day. We've all been there. That "quick job" expected to take a few minutes stretches into hours as bolts refuse to budge and unforeseen problems eat into time better spent enjoying a cookie and tasty beverage. A pair of ISS spacewalkers had much the same experience yesterday. Removing a faulty antenna from t
  
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• Comcast gives its Wi-Fi motion detector a security makeover

  19-08-2026 15:14 via theregister.com
  
  Comcast has folded its Wi-Fi-based intruder detection feature into Xfinity Shield, a repackaged bundle of physical and cybersecurity offerings. The US telco launched WiFi Motion in 2025. Xfinity Shield also includes cybersecurity protections built into the Xfinity Gateway router. The Wi-Fi sensing technology harnesses the radio waves beamed around a user's home to detect motion and potential intruders. "Using Xfinity Gateway intelligence, WiFi Motion detects changes in the home's radio frequency
  
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• That's roar-some! NASA's James Webb captures a stunning photo of the Lion Nebula - revealing a dust 'mane' and a stellar core 'nose'

  19-08-2026 15:10 via dailymail.com
  
  Officially known as NGC 2392, the nebula gets its nickname thanks to its resemblance to a lion.
  
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• What words were born the same year as you? Time Traveler tool reveals all the terms added to the dictionary in your birth year

  19-08-2026 14:54 via dailymail.com
  
  A tool from Merriam-Webster can help you discover what words were 'born' in the same year as you.
  
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• Postgres pioneer credits Oracle with helping his database take over the world

  19-08-2026 14:37 via theregister.com
  
  INTERVIEW Oracle inadvertently helped turn PostgreSQL into the database technology now backed by Microsoft, AWS, and Google, according to Postgres creator Michael Stonebraker. Speaking to The Register earlier this month, UC Berkeley professor emeritus Stonebraker said Oracle's decision to retain MySQL after buying Sun Microsystems helped propel PostgreSQL toward dominance, at least among systems that use or support its wire protocol. PostgreSQL was launched 30 years ago this summer, adding SQL s
  
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• GitHub blames 8-hour outage on autoscaling fail and VS Code retry storm

  19-08-2026 13:40 via theregister.com
  
  GitHub has published its account of this week's nearly eight-hour outage, tracing the developer pain to saturated load balancers, a faulty autoscaling policy, and a "latent retry bug in Visual Studio Code." According to GitHub, problems began at 1328 UTC on August 17 and weren't fully resolved until 2115 UTC – a 7-hour, 47-minute incident that produced elevated errors across Issues, Pull Requests, APIs, Actions, and Copilot. The immediate cause was network saturation on load balancers in t
  
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• British festivalgoers are being forced to wear face masks after the record dry summer sparks 'apocalyptic' plumes of dust

  19-08-2026 13:25 via dailymail.com
  
  Festivals across the country have seen huge clouds of dust kicked up by crowds - with attendees complaining of itchy throats, sore eyes and difficulty breathing.
  
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• Scotland's AI Growth Zone gets a wee £300M power-up

  19-08-2026 13:02 via theregister.com
  
  Datacenter operator DataVita has secured £300 million ($406 million) to expand its campus in Scotland's Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone, while Dell is moving into the area – albeit only into a regional office. The AI Growth Zone, unveiled earlier this year, centers on DataVita's server farm campus in Airdrie. The operator has secured financing to expand its existing facility and build another nearby, promising hundreds of construction jobs and 100 permanent roles. The £300 million d
  
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• Apple accidentally LEAKS footage of its widely rumoured camera-equipped AirPods - as shocked fans joke 'someone is getting fired'

  19-08-2026 12:30 via dailymail.com
  
  The video is just 13 seconds long, and was shared on X by MacRumors Analyst, Aaron Perris.
  
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• SAP consultant job ads overshoot final offers by up to 12%, recruiter claims

  19-08-2026 12:10 via theregister.com
  
  SAP consultant job ads across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland typically quote salaries 10 to 12 percent above the eventual offer, according to a recruitment firm specializing in the market. Employers seeking SAP consultants include IT services firms, management consultancies, and large companies overhauling their technology estates. Research into hiring across the ERP vendor's European heartland suggests that the salary advertised may exceed the offer ultimately made to the successful candidat
  
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• Raspberry Pi gets jiggy with batch CM5 provisioning

  19-08-2026 11:42 via theregister.com
  
  Raspberry Pi has unveiled a $600 Programming Jig to take the faff out of preparing batches of Compute Module 5 (CM5) boards for deployment. The device combines the provisioning host and module interface in one box, eliminating the need for a separate IO board. The IO board is, of course, considerably cheaper, but serves a different purpose: it exposes a CM5's interfaces for development and prototyping. It can also be used during provisioning, albeit through a more involved setup. The Programming
  
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• Why are bluefin tuna back in UK waters? As a 746lb fish is caught in the North Sea for the first time in 90 years, scientists reveal how warming seas and strict fishing quotas have brought back the giant predators

  19-08-2026 11:40 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists have revealed why giant bluefin tuna are returning to British waters after a colossal 746lb (338kg) specimen was caught in the North Sea for the first time in almost 90 years.
  
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• UK taxman discovers low code doesn't mean low cost with £657M awards

  19-08-2026 10:44 via theregister.com
  
  The UK tax collector has awarded three contracts worth up to £657 million for low-code software development and support, dispelling any notion that empowering users with tech skills would necessarily mean low cost. HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), which collected £938.8 billion in tax during the latest reported financial year, has awarded French consultancy and outsourcer Atos a contract for "specialist low-code leadership services." These will include "programme oversight, supplier
  
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• NASA estimates the size of the hole SpaceX made in the moon

  19-08-2026 08:15 via theregister.com
  
  NASA has used its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to capture more pics of the mess on the moon left by a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage. As The Register has previously reported, in 2025 private aerospace concerns Firefly and ispace hired a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for their respective Blue Ghost Mission 1 and RESILIENCE moonshots. RESILIENCE did not live up to its name. Blue Ghost did rather better. The trajectory used to get the two craft to Luna meant the upper stage of the Falcon 9 was on a col
  
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• Baidu says Chinese buyers want local AI chips due to ‘supply chain’ issues

  19-08-2026 06:07 via theregister.com
  
  Chinese web giant Baidu yesterday told investors it sees good days ahead for its Kunlunxin chip biz, because local buyers won’t have alternatives. Baidu has previously said it plans to spin out and float Kunlunxin, which makes CUDA-compliant inferencing chips that it uses for its own cloud services and has sold to the likes of Huawei and ZTE, who use them in kit they sell to Chinese telcos. Speaking on the company’s Q2 earnings call, Dou Shen, executive veep of Baidu’s AI Cloud
  
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• Australian hotel chain leaks guests’ PII after breach at third-party database operator

  19-08-2026 04:16 via theregister.com
  
  Australian aparthotel chain Quest has revealed it leaked customer data. A Reg reader kindly shared an email from the chain with the subject line “Important Security Update Regarding Your Quest Data.” That missive opens with unwelcome news that “I am writing to inform you of a recent data security incident involving some of your personal information.” “On Monday, 17 August 2026, we identified unauthorised access to a database system and immediately took steps to cont
  
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• Trump Wants The Strait Of Hormuz As A U.S. Territory. IMEC Is Why.

  19-08-2026 02:55 via technocracy.news
  
  On August 14, 2026, President Donald Trump stood in front of a law-enforcement crowd at the David S. Mack Center for Training and Intelligence in Garden City, Long Island. Trump told them that after “defeating Iran” he would declare the Strait of Hormuz a territory of the United States. Wait for it… The Strait of America?
  NOTUS (News of the United States) recorded Trump’s words:
  “After we finish defeating Iran, I will be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of t
  
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• Cerebras CS-4 rack systems juice chips for every last drop of AI performance

  19-08-2026 02:00 via theregister.com
  
  If high-speed AI inference is what you’re after, memory bandwidth is the bottleneck to beat. At a mind-numbing 21.6 petabytes per second (PB/s) of memory bandwidth, Cerebras' dinner-plate-sized AI accelerators were already 1,000x faster than Nvidia's or AMD’s best GPUs. The chip newcomer unveiled its next-gen Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) and Nexus rack systems on Tuesday. Cerebras aims to extend that lead by boosting throughput per watt tenfold over the previous generation. Putting the '
  
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• OpenAI's overhead will rise 20 percent for some workloads as it hardens security

  19-08-2026 01:36 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI on Tuesday said its decision to suspend model training work, implemented after unreleased, unsupervised AI models hacked HuggingFace, remains in effect as the AI biz tries to implement stronger security measures. Some of those measures will increase compute overhead by 20 percent of the observed inference workload. An OpenAI spokesperson told The Register that those costs reflect internal research and won't be passed on directly to customers. The company has not revealed what portion of i
  
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• Europe's seas are experiencing an 'alarming' surge in temperatures - and scientists say climate change is to blame

  19-08-2026 01:04 via dailymail.com
  
  Europe's seas are warming at an 'alarming' rate - and climate change is largely to blame, according to scientists from the World Weather Attribution.
  
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• Hoover Dam crisis fears grow as stark warning is issued to 40 million Americans

  18-08-2026 23:25 via dailymail.com
  
  Millions of Americans could soon be faced with water shortages, higher utility bills and blackouts as a vital lifeline in the US dries up.
  
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• Expired credit cards revived by researchers to make unauthorized payments

  18-08-2026 22:20 via theregister.com
  
  Researchers affiliated with the University of Massachusetts Amherst have found that you can get payments out of certain expired contactless credit cards, a process detailed at the recent USENIX Security 2026 conference. Raja Hasnain Anwar, Gerard DeCunha, and Muhammad Taqi Raza describe their findings in a paper titled "Zombie Cards Back Online: Reviving Expired Credit Cards for Contactless Payments." Credit cards, the authors explain in their paper, have expiration dates, but the way these date
  
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• Dolphins caught on video displaying never-before-seen ability that shocks marine scientists: 'I was screaming'

  18-08-2026 19:53 via dailymail.com
  
  Dolphins have learned to use a new tool in a shocking sign of growing intelligence that was recently caught on camera.
  
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• Study finds Meta and Google mobile apps gorge on user data

  18-08-2026 18:01 via theregister.com
  
  A study of mobile apps claims that Meta collects three times as much user data on average as tools published by Apple or Microsoft. Google is also one of the worst data-scavenging offenders. The research was conducted by the reassuringly named Surfshark, a VPN and security tools provider. It found that Meta's apps were the most "data-hungry," declaring an average of 25 out of 35 possible data types, compared with seven or eight for apps from Apple and Microsoft. The findings are based on privacy
  
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• Meta and Google mobile apps gorge on user data: Study

  18-08-2026 18:01 via theregister.com
  
  A study of mobile apps claims that Meta collects three times as much user data on average as tools published by Apple or Microsoft. Google is also one of the worst data-scavenging offenders. The research was conducted by the reassuringly named Surfshark, a VPN and security tools provider. It found that Meta's apps were the most "data-hungry," declaring an average of 25 out of 35 possible data types, compared with seven or eight for apps from Apple and Microsoft. The findings are based on privacy
  
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• US government hiding bodies of FOUR alien races, Pentagon's UFO scientist claims: 'I've seen the evidence'

  18-08-2026 17:36 via dailymail.com
  
  A Pentagon scientist has asked for presidential immunity so he can reveal the details about four alien races he allegedly saw in classified military files.
  
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• CISA gives feds 3 days to fix actively exploited Ray RCE bug

  18-08-2026 17:26 via theregister.com
  
  CISA says attackers are exploiting a critical 2025 vulnerability in Ray, the widely used open source framework for scaling Python and machine-learning workloads. Tracked as CVE-2025-62593 and rated 9.4 under CVSS v4, the bug was first disclosed in November 2025. It allows an attacker to use Firefox or Safari to achieve remote code execution (RCE) on a vulnerable Ray system. The open source distributed computing framework is used and supported by major tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, and
  
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• The World Reacts To Sam Altman’s Vision Of The Future

  18-08-2026 17:12 via technocracy.news
  
  Unfortunately, I think Altman is right when he says AI will “have perfect context of your whole life” and that it will occur “sometime in the next six months.” This is reminiscent of the Black Mirror episode, Nosedive, where, based on total transparency of activities, a social credit system took over society. Fantasy aside, for this and other reasons, I have moved my AI Multiplier to 3.3 from 3.5, which forecasts the speed of doubling in capacity.
  The multiplier is curren
  
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