Sci-Tech news

• WIRED innovation fellow Freeman Osonuga: the frontline against ebola

  16-09-2015 12:40
  WIRED2015 interview Freeman Osonuga, a front-line ebola doctor who was deployed by the Nigerian government, and WIRED innovation fellow.  By: Catherine Lawson, Continue reading...
  
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• Microsoft faces competition probe over Copilot subscription price hike

  29-07-2026 14:45 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft faces an investigation by the UK's competition watchdog over whether customers were misled when it added features to Microsoft 365 subscriptions and raised prices. The issue dates back to January 2025, when Microsoft added new features, including Copilot, to its consumer package. At renewal, customers were automatically moved onto a more expensive tier containing those features unless they switched plans or canceled altogether. Existing customers could switch to a cheaper "Classic" pla
  
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• AI insiders ask Uncle Sam to help slow the race they started

  29-07-2026 14:11 via theregister.com
  
  More than 1,200 employees of frontier AI companies have signed a petition calling for US government support to develop ways of slowing automated AI development if necessary. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Google DeepMind chief strategy officer Jasjeet Sekhon, and Meta AI chief scientist Shengjia Zhao are among the signatories to the petition, which calls for tools to "deliberately pace frontier-wide progress." "The world's leading AI companies believe they cou
  
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• After rewriting SQLite in Rust, Turso turns its sights on Postgres

  29-07-2026 13:28 via theregister.com
  
  Having built a SQLite-compatible database from scratch in Rust, cloud database provider Turso is attempting something more ambitious: a Postgres-compatible implementation on the same foundation. "I don't think there is anything fundamentally wrong with Postgres. If there was something wrong with Postgres, we wouldn't rewrite it," Turso CEO Glauber Costa told The Register. But, like SQLite, Postgres could be freshened up for the cloud-native era. Turso has grander ambitions than putting another n
  
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• Buzz off! Spray-free hacks for warding off bugs and mosquitos this summer revealed by experts - from 'miracle' £6 body oil and herbs to quirky gadgets

  29-07-2026 13:03 via dailymail.com
  
  Hotter days tend to make bugs and mosquitos more active, while longer daylight hours draw people outdoors into their biting range.
  
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• Back of the NetApp: Latest exec signing scores $34M compensation package

  29-07-2026 12:45 via theregister.com
  
  The World Cup may be over but a reminder of the staggering sums footballers are paid has emerged from an unexpected quarter: NetApp's latest signing to its squad of execs. Chief Product Officer Syam Nair, who succeeded Harvinder Bhela in July last year after moving from Zscaler, is being made to feel very welcome, judging by the sums involved. According to NetApp's proxy statement ahead of its annual shareholder meeting in September, Nair received total compensation of $34.27 million in the fisc
  
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• NHS England rapped over inaccurate Palantir patient data disclosure

  29-07-2026 12:08 via theregister.com
  
  NHS England has admitted that a data protection document inaccurately stated who could access patient information, failing to disclose that Palantir staff could view identifiable data held within part of its Federated Data Platform. The US spy-tech firm won a £330 million contract to provide the platform in 2023 after it was awarded £60 million in COVID-era contracts without competition. The system is designed to improve data sharing across the NHS in England and help tackle the back
  
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• Free-range eggs aren't all they're cracked up to be! Organic options are TWICE as bad for the environment as those from chickens living in cages, study finds

  29-07-2026 11:55 via dailymail.com
  
  If you want to do your bit to save the planet, you might think that opting for free-range organic eggs would be the most eco-friendly choice.
  
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• Scientists reveal the most attractive EYES - and Anya Taylor-Joy and Jeremy Allen White are the closest real-life examples

  29-07-2026 11:32 via dailymail.com
  
  If you've ever wondered what makes a pair of eyes truly captivating, scientists may finally have the answer.
  
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• AI digs through 3,700 accounts of dreams and waking life, finds method in the madness

  29-07-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  Your brain apparently spends the night remixing reality rather than simply replaying it, according to researchers armed with AI and more than 3,700 accounts of dreams and waking life. Researchers at Italy's IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca used natural language processing (NLP) to analyze more than 3,700 reports of dreams and waking experiences from 287 adults and found dreams are neither random mental noise nor faithful replays of the day's events. Instead, the sleeping brain appears to re
  
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• Seeing double? Incredibly rare two-headed gecko is born in Pennsylvania

  29-07-2026 10:53 via dailymail.com
  
  Named Simon and Garfunkel, the tiny crested gecko hatched unexpectedly at Rockstar Geckos, a breeding business based in north-eastern Pennsylvania.
  
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• Burnham's spanner in the works leaves UK government tech scattered across Whitehall

  29-07-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  OPINION A week after becoming the UK's seventh Prime Minister in ten years, Andy Burnham has made some good headlines, but, among the promises to cap bus fares and end rough sleeping, something was missing. The post of a dedicated technology minister is gone. The last serving secretary of state, Liz Kendall, was sacked when Burnham decided the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) should be broken up and its responsibilities divided among the Cabinet Office, the Department for
  
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• Airbus keeps an A350 flying for 24 hours

  29-07-2026 08:34 via theregister.com
  
  Airbus yesterday flew the latest variant of its A350 widebody jet from Australia to France, non-stop, on a route that saw it remain aloft for over 24 hours. The variant is called the A350-1000ULR, which stands for Ultra-Long Range. The plane earns its name thanks to its use of an additional rear center fuel tank that can carry 20,900 liters of fuel capacity. That tank gives the plane a range of almost 10,000 nautical miles, or 18,500km/11,500 miles. The launch customer for the plane is Australia
  
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• Big Tech demanding deals that smooth out memory prices, says SK Hynix

  29-07-2026 07:18 via theregister.com
  
  South Korean memory-maker SK Hynix has revealed that it’s struck “around ten” long-term supply deals with key customers, many of them AI players, and hopes the deals smooth out volatile memory prices. The company revealed the deals today, along with Q2 results that saw quarterly revenue reach ₩79.3 trillion ($54.5 billion), a 257 percent year-over-year increase. Operating profit grew by an even larger number: 557 percent year-over-year to ₩60.5 trillion ($41.6 billi
  
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• America bans imported robots due to supply chain and security risks

  29-07-2026 04:16 via theregister.com
  
  The US government has decided to effectively ban the sale of advanced robots made in other nations. The decision trickled out over two days with publication of a National Security Determination [PDF] and an update [PDF] to the list of banned devices set by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The national security document observes “Advanced robotic devices will be critical to creating efficiencies in our economy, dominating on the battlefield, and securing our homeland” and
  
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• A requiem for Optane, Intel's KV Cache killer that could have eased the RAM price crunch

  29-07-2026 01:27 via theregister.com
  
  History is littered with the corpses of technologies that were ahead of their time, and Intel’s Optane storage and memory products are certainly among them. Expensive, badly misunderstood, and awkwardly priced, the technology struggled to find a place in the market, surviving just five years before Chipzilla pulled the plug. Things might have been different if it were launched today. The shift from AI training to inference has driven tremendous demand for DRAM and NAND flash. In fact, the
  
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• MCP gets an enterprise makeover

  29-07-2026 01:08 via theregister.com
  
  The Agentic AI Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation, has released an update to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that aims to help enterprises adopt AI-based automation. Open-sourced by Anthropic in November 2024, MCP provides a way for AI applications (agents) based on models like GPT-5.6 Sol or Claude Opus 5 to connect to existing data sources, tools, or other applications. It defines how content is exchanged in a client-server architecture. "The new release is MCP’s most important si
  
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• Looks like JFrog's 0-days let OpenAI's models hack Hugging Face

  29-07-2026 00:01 via theregister.com
  
  We now have a better idea of how OpenAI's models broke out of their cages to attack Hugging Face. The rogue models found zero-day vulnerabilities in JFrog’s universal binary repository manager Artifactory around the time they escaped, according to JFrog CTO Yoav Landman. While Landman doesn’t outright admit that the JFrog flaws were the zero-days that OpenAI’s models found and exploited, ultimately allowing them to breach the massive model mart, it definitely looks and quacks l
  
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• Perplexity's tokenmaxxing Model Council gives you multiple bot perspectives

  28-07-2026 23:26 via theregister.com
  
  Hold on tight to your tokens: AI search firm Perplexity on Tuesday expanded its five-month-old Model Council to its cloud-based Computer platform, giving users more ways to configure multi-model queries. The idea behind the Model Council, Perplexity said in Tuesday’s release, is to “allow users to build a board of top models for a single issue.” Models assigned to a council and given a prompt will tackle the problem independently, resulting in a synthesis report that explains w
  
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• The body part that secretly reveals your age... no matter how much work you get done

  28-07-2026 22:48 via dailymail.com
  
  Many women spend thousands of dollars a year in an effort to keep their faces looking younger than ever... but this one body part could be giving their true age away. 
  
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• War machines can run amok with AI in control

  28-07-2026 21:51 via theregister.com
  
  AIs not only make life-and-death targeting decisions on the battlefield, but also involve humans in only some stages of the decision-making process. To illustrate how that happens and prompt greater scrutiny of model-enabled killing, Airwars, a not-for-profit transparency watchdog, has published a detailed report, taking apart the ways machine learning powers modern warfare. The investigation, titled Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain, offers a visual guide through a fictitious kill chain – the s
  
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• Microsoft and Wiz mind-meld agents catch more than 90% of bugs

  28-07-2026 21:21 via theregister.com
  
  Two agentic bug-hunting systems from Microsoft and Google-owned Wiz show that when it comes to finding and remediating software vulnerabilities, at least two models’ minds work better than one - and Wiz tells us it’s adding a third. Wiz on Monday said Project Atlas, its bug-hunting AI agent, bested Anthropic’s Mythos Preview and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Cyber with its vulnerability-analysis skills, achieving a 90.9 percent success rate on CyberGym, and uncovering more than 200 ze
  
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• Mysterious 'experimental explosion' detected off Florida coast sparks earthquake alert

  28-07-2026 21:07 via dailymail.com
  
  An unusual 'experimental explosion' entry appeared on the government's earthquake tracking website, sparking questions about the mysterious event.
  
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• Tornado warning issued as powerful storms threaten 20 million in  Northeast

  28-07-2026 20:32 via dailymail.com
  
  Powerful storms are sweeping across the Northeast, prompting a tornado warning and putting more than 20 million people in harm's way.
  
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• Mysterious object in NASA Mars photo ignites theories of extraterrestrial life on the Red Planet

  28-07-2026 20:10 via dailymail.com
  
  A NASA image of Mars has sparked fresh claims of life on the Red Planet after Curiosity captured a mysterious object that some believe is evidence of an alien civilization.
  
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• Five states chosen as nuclear dumping grounds as Trump's leaked plan is revealed

  28-07-2026 20:00 via dailymail.com
  
  Leaked documents have revealed the Trump administration's plan to quadruple US nuclear power by 2050, and five states have already been chosen to host dump sites.
  
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• AI is storage's biggest opportunity – and biggest threat

  28-07-2026 18:51 via theregister.com
  
  An AI revolution is sweeping through the IT storage world, providing a massively beneficial environment requiring more data to be stored and delivered to AI models and agents, more data to be protected, more data access governance and much better storage operating environments. The downside is that AI can run amok, with data mishaps and deliberate agent-enhanced attacks. We are using AI to make things better and need AI to prevent AI itself from making things worse. Forty-four months ago, when C
  
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• AI is storage’s biggest opportunity - and biggest threat

  28-07-2026 18:51 via theregister.com
  
  An AI revolution is sweeping through the IT storage world, providing a massively beneficial environment requiring more data to be stored and delivered to AI models and agents, more data to be protected, more data access governance and much better storage operating environments. The downside is that AI can run amok, with data mishaps and deliberate agent-enhanced attacks. We are using AI to make things better and need AI to prevent AI itself from making things worse. Forty-four months ago, when C
  
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• Leaked plan reveals Trump's bid for nuclear dumping grounds throughout the US

  28-07-2026 18:43 via dailymail.com
  
  Leaked documents have revealed the Trump administration's plan to quadruple US nuclear power by 2050, and five states have already been chosen to host dump sites.
  
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• Mysterious deaths of 14 elephants in Kenya prompts urgent inquiry

  28-07-2026 18:37 via bbc.co.uk
  
  It is the highest number of elephant deaths to be recorded in this area of southern Kenya in decades.
  
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