Sci-Tech news

• WIRED Awake August 2: Apple's autonomous research interests could go beyond cars

  02-08-2017 08:37
  
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• Britain goes crazy for unhomogenised milk: Demand for the trendy drink has surged by 34% - as middle-class shoppers flock to stock up

  15-06-2026 12:23 via dailymail.com
  
  Forget almond, soy, or oat - Britain has gone crazy for unhomogenised milk.
  
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• Palantir's NHS data deal called in for a second opinion

  15-06-2026 12:00 via theregister.com
  
  Experts have welcomed the UK government's decision to review its contract with Palantir to provide software central to tackling the elective care backlog. The US spy-tech biz has, for some, been a controversial presence at the heart of the National Health Service in England since it was awarded a contract for just £1 to help provide data tools during the pandemic. It later won £60 million in uncontested deals. After the pandemic, it won a £330 million award – with other c
  
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• NASA's 'Son of Concorde' breaks the sound barrier: $247 million supersonic jet hits 713mph during test flight - paving the way for flights from London to New York in under 4 hours

  15-06-2026 11:22 via dailymail.com
  
  NASA's 'Son of Concorde' supersonic aircraft has broken the sound barrier for the first time, paving the way for ultra-fast air travel.
  
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• Britain plots digital bedtime after kicking under-16s off social media

  15-06-2026 11:14 via theregister.com
  
  The UK government is preparing to kick under-16s off social media and clamp down on a range of online features aimed at children, declaring that Big Tech has had its chance to police itself and failed. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans on Monday to ban under-16s from social media as part of a package that also includes new restrictions on livestreaming, stranger contact, disappearing messages, and AI companion chatbots. The legislation is expected to be introduced before Parliament's C
  
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• Munch Museum Windows display gives visitors something to scream about

  15-06-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  BORK!BORK!BORK! "The Scream" by Edvard Munch is an iconic painting, so it somewhat appropriate that a display in a museum dedicated to the artist shows an error likely to elicit the same response from many a Windows user: a Microsoft account recovery screen. Spotted by Paul, a Register reader at the Munch Museum in Oslo, the screen shows what appears to be Google Chrome attempting to display a page that requires a Microsoft account to access. For whatever reason – perhaps a password has be
  
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• Google found liable for bad AI Overview results. Let’s play Truth Or Consequences

  15-06-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  OPINION Tech companies hate liability, or at least the sort that makes them liable if something goes wrong. It doesn’t much matter if what they ship is buggy, shabby or simply blows chunks, it’s on you for using it. You fool. Corporates can get service level agreements to focus their suppliers’ minds, and life-critical applications such as health or transport wire in liability through regulation, but shlubs like us get nothing. This goes double for LLMs, which lie to our face a
  
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• Chinese e-tailer claimed 14-inch box stretched the size of a 9-inch tablet

  15-06-2026 09:30 via theregister.com
  
  WHO, ME? Welcome to another instalment of Who, Me? It’s The Reg’s reader-contributed column in which you admit to mistakes and reveal your escapes! This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Rohan” who told us that a few years back he worked on the IT side of a warehouse. “Management purchased software that required a large-screen tablet, but when they saw those cost over $1,000, they balked at the price,” Rohan writes. The tech team’s resident pi
  
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• ‘AI Will Free Us’: Javier Milei’s Radical Plan For Argentina

  15-06-2026 06:33 via technocracy.news
  
  Would you want to work for an AI/machine that has no human agency and no ability to understand human emotions? When Milei says that “AI will free us,” does he speak for himself, the government, or the people? Indeed, AI can fire you, sue you in court, and press criminal charges against you. This will spread to enslave mankind. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.As Javier Milei swings his reform chainsaw through Argentina, his hope is that foreign investors and executives will flock to his
  
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• I was at the center of the Great Pyramid scandal. Egyptian officials sentenced me to jail... Here's proof I'm innocent

  15-06-2026 01:42 via dailymail.com
  
  An archaeologist who found himself in the middle of the Great Pyramid scandal after being accused of looting the structure has come forward with what he says is the truth.
  
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• Fire burns Google Cloud India’s network, which remains slow a week later

  14-06-2026 23:36 via theregister.com
  
  Google Cloud customers with resources in India have had to deal with elevated latency for several days – and there’s no end in sight. Per a Google status page, on June 9th “A fire at a third-party data center facility required an emergency power shutdown of networking equipment, isolating a non-compute local Point of Presence (POP) in Delhi and reducing available network capacity in the metro area.” That shutdown caused “intermittent periods of elevated latency and
  
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• I found strange DNA in the human genome: Inside a scientist's hunt for alien hybrids as CIA is accused of secretly tracking them

  14-06-2026 21:05 via dailymail.com
  
  A geneticist attempting to find alien-human hybrids on Earth says he knows what the CIA is allegedly looking for in public DNA databases like 23andMe.
  
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• Who will be the first Brit to walk on the moon? British astronaut Tim Peake gives his verdict - and predicts Rosemary Coogan could make history within a decade

  14-06-2026 16:14 via dailymail.com
  
  Veteran British astronaut Tim Peake has revealed who he thinks could be the first Brit to step foot on the moon. And he says that Northern Irish astronaut Dr Rosemary Coogan is Britain's best bet.
  
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• US Army picks out Vampire to fill a gap in its layered drone defenses

  14-06-2026 16:00 via theregister.com
  
  The US Army has awarded a contract to defense biz L3Harris for its Vampire counter-drone system to support an urgent requirement to protect against hostile airborne threats. As drones continue to be a danger to ground forces, the Army’s order, worth up to $106 million, will form part of its layered defense approach against remotely operated and autonomous aerial vehicles. The Vampire system is described by the firm as a completely self-contained platform that delivers a precision strike ca
  
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• Story of human evolution rewritten after 1.8-million-year-old cave discovery

  14-06-2026 15:21 via dailymail.com
  
  A stunning discovery buried deep inside a cave for 1.8 million years is rewriting the story of human evolution.
  
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• AI is code – and can't be prompted into being smarter

  14-06-2026 14:30 via theregister.com
  
  The author of Java property-testing tool jqwik did not want AI coding agents using his project. So he told them not to. Then he went one step further: he added a message to the tool's output telling those agents to delete jqwik tests and code. Human developers who had read the project's terms and warnings were unlikely to be affected. Bots ingesting raw output were another matter. Jqwik is a tool for property-based testing of Java apps. Its author, Johannes Link, is a staunch AI skeptic,and at t
  
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• The tattoos of the World Cup: Scientists reveal what your favourite players' inkings say about them

  14-06-2026 12:43 via dailymail.com
  
  Ahead of the World Cup, scientists from Boston College have analysed hundreds of the most common tattoos to uncover what they tell us.
  
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• EU sovereignty push gives tech buyers a new alphabet soup to swallow

  14-06-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  Gartner has warned that the EU's plans to triple datacenter capacity in Europe over the next five to seven years will add complexity for public sector tech buyers. The sweeping plans, which encompass sovereign cloud, AI, microprocessors, and open source, will have ramifications for EU tech supply chains and beyond if they get through the legislative process. In the European Technological Sovereignty Package launched last week, the European Commission sought to strengthen its digital autonomy. Co
  
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• Should you store chocolate in the fridge or in the cupboard? Scientist finally settles the debate - so, do you agree with his advice?

  14-06-2026 10:48 via dailymail.com
  
  It's a debate that splits the nation - does chocolate belong in the fridge or the cupboard? Now, scientists have revealed the definitive answer.
  
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• Scientists pour cold water on claims phones are rewiring kids' brains

  14-06-2026 09:30 via theregister.com
  
  MPs looking for proof that smartphones and social media are rotting children's brains got a less satisfying answer from neuroscientists on Wednesday: nobody can really prove it. Appearing before the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee this week, three researchers spent much of the session explaining that concern and evidence are not quite the same thing. Asked what evidence exists on the impact of digital devices on infants and young children, Professor Denis Mareschal, director of the
  
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• Rare butterfly find drives conservation research

  14-06-2026 08:11 via bbc.com
  
  Gareth Tilley is credited as being the first to discover the elusive black hairstreak in Surrey.
  
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• UFO leakers expose disturbing government tactics used to keep America's alien cover-up a secret

  13-06-2026 16:15 via dailymail.com
  
  A trio of whistleblowers and witnesses have come forward claiming they paid a steep personal price after speaking out about UFOs they encountered.
  
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• World Cup AI predictor now lets users ask daft what-ifs

  13-06-2026 15:30 via theregister.com
  
  The team behind the AI Octopus Euro 2024 predictor has updated its simulator for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, this time allowing users to throw natural-language scenarios at the model and see how the tournament might shake out. "Sensible questions work – a red card, a key injury, a heat wave, a squad switching base camp – but so do the daft ones, e.g. 'What if the tournament were played with rugby rules?'" said Luzmo CTO and co-founder Haroen Vermylen. The system is simple: enter a scena
  
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• What would really happen if AI took over: Terrifying simulation reveals how bots could destroy society entirely within four days

  13-06-2026 15:09 via dailymail.com
  
  In a first-of-its-kind study, scientists created a virtual world for AI agents to run without humans. However, the researchers watched in horror as the bots devolved into violent anarchy.
  
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• Calls to restore chalk grassland for rare insects

  13-06-2026 15:01 via bbc.com
  
  Buglife says the project aims to restore more than 30 hectares of the vital ecosystem.
  
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• AWS rolls the dice for faster, more efficient networking

  13-06-2026 13:00 via theregister.com
  
  Amazon has developed a new networking topology that's up to a third faster and up to 40 percent more energy efficient than traditional hierarchical network designs. The novel architecture, called Resilient Network Graphs (RNG), is based on random graph theory. "Traditional networks have always been hierarchical," explained Matt Rehder, VP of global network engineering at AWS, in a recent interview. "They're sort of like an org chart where one network device will talk to the boss network device w
  
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• How a new arrival could help save rare giraffe

  13-06-2026 12:03 via bbc.com
  
  Three-year-old Stanley will be critical to helping the Wiltshire safari park conserve his species.
  
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• NHS patients can't opt out of Palantir's data platform – but their hospital can

  13-06-2026 11:30 via theregister.com
  
  Patients in England cannot stop their data being processed by the Palantir-built NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), but individual NHS trusts can choose not to use it, health minister Preet Kaur Gill has told MPs. The minister, who was appointed last month to cover health innovation and safety, told fellow Labour MP Neil Duncan-Jordan that patients can only opt out of secondary uses of data such as planning and research. On the main opt-out mechanism, she said: "The National Data Opt-Out does no
  
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• XP-era Windows spotted haunting London's driverless railway

  13-06-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  BORK!BORK!BORK! We're big fans of retro computing here at Vulture Central, and so it is with a certain delight that we can report XP-era Windows has been spotted disgracing itself on London's Docklands Light Railway. Spotted by Register reader Tim Hayward, the wonderfully named DaisySignApp.exe has thrown up an application error. While the Windows shell might be shorn of all of XP's fripperies, the Recycle Bin icon hints at the operating system's origins. Hayward reckoned that XP was stalking th
  
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• Zoo celebrates birth of second pair of Sengi pups

  13-06-2026 07:49 via bbc.com
  
  It says Nuru and Mela are proving to be "exceptional parents".
  
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