Sci-Tech news

• X-37B craft will fly next month using an 'experimental propulsion system'

  28-04-2015 09:31 via
  
  The X-37B is due to launch atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral on May 20 and will use a new electric propulsion system when in orbit.
  
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• Virgin Media offloads email services to third party provider

  09-09-2026 12:30 via theregister.com
  
  Virgin Media is ditching its email services and offering customers a window in which to download their data and move to another email provider. The UK's second-biggest broadband provider is closing down its email service completely and transferring the ongoing management of these services to Junara, part of Australia-based specialist email provider Atmail. Customers who wish to continue using their current Virgin Media email address will be invited to move to Junara. This will be subject to a tr
  
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• Huawei Watch D3 pumps up its health-monitoring credentials

  09-09-2026 11:45 via theregister.com
  
  Huawei has released the Watch D3, the third generation of its blood-pressure-measuring wearable, as the company continues plowing a relatively lonely furrow in cuff-based technology. The D3 is an intriguing device for anyone seeking more credible blood pressure readings than many smartwatches claim to provide. Where many brands use optical technology to estimate blood pressure, the D series uses a pump built into the watch and an inflatable airbag inside the strap. The D3 is CE-certified as a me
  
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• Switzerland tests a FOSS escape route from Microsoft 365

  09-09-2026 11:01 via theregister.com
  
  Switzerland's Federal Chancellery is preparing to offer a FOSS workplace suite to some 3,000 employees – but the Swiss Armed Forces are pushing ahead faster still. European interest in digital sovereignty isn't limited to the European Union: the Swiss Federal Chancellery plans to offer selected government employees a FOSS alternative that will run alongside Microsoft 365. The chancellery is launching the program with an initial 3,000 staff, out of some 47,000 federal employees. The platfor
  
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• Unravelling the mystery of the Devil's Arrows: Study reveals how prehistoric builders hauled 25-tonne rocks 11 miles across Yorkshire to build the landmark 5,000 years ago

  09-09-2026 09:23 via dailymail.com
  
  Each weighing around 25 tonnes and standing at almost 23ft (seven metres) tall, how the enormous stones got there has remained unclear - until now.
  
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• Apple is hosting its 'surprise and shine' event TODAY where it could unveil its first foldable iPhone - here's how you can watch live

  09-09-2026 09:18 via dailymail.com
  
  Apple is gearing up to host its 'surprise and shine' event tonight, where it could launch its most exciting new products in years.
  
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• Another Microsoft team admits it’s struggling to handle flood of AI-generated code

  09-09-2026 08:34 via theregister.com
  
  A few weeks back we spotted Microsoft’s Exchange team admitting that AI has found so many bugs it hasn’t found time to deliver a Cumulative Update for the messaging server. And on Tuesday, the Microsoft Edge team revealed it’s also a bit overwhelmed by AI. “Rapid adoption of AI-assisted coding is enabling developers to build extensions faster than ever,” according to a post by the Edge team. AI has also seen “More developers … building, iterating, and s
  
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• Philippines bets AI will lift GDP by 12 percent in seven years – without hurting outsourcing

  09-09-2026 07:25 via theregister.com
  
  One of the few proven use cases for generative AI is automating customer service inquiries to reduce costs even further than it’s been possible to achieve by offshoring jobs to low-wage companies like the Philippines – which yesterday bet that its outsourcing industry will thrive even as it plans a massive investment in AI. The nation’s government yesterday delivered the PAIIM – aka the Philippines AI+ Infrastructure Masterplan [PDF], a policy that calls for $34.4 billion
  
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• US claims Chinese AI companies’ core AI strategy is distilling American models

  09-09-2026 04:59 via theregister.com
  
  Two US intelligence agencies and the nation’s cyber-defense org CISA have accused Chinese AI companies of running “aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities at an industrial scale that extract restricted proprietary functionalities and capabilities of U.S. frontier AI models.” A Tuesday joint advisory from The National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), alleges that China&r
  
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• Microsoft breaks Patch Tuesday record with 974-CVE deluge

  09-09-2026 02:25 via theregister.com
  
  The vulnpocalypse is upon us, dear reader. Microsoft delivered a record number of patches to address 974 CVEs in its own products this month, including two bugs that Redmond says are already under exploitation. September's record-breaking collection of security updates come after Microsoft served up 421 fixes in August, and 622 in July. We've seen the new normal and we are not impressed. Thanks, but no thanks, AI. In addition to Microsoft’s massive patch drop, Adobe on Tuesday issued 10 bu
  
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• OpenAI GPT-6 Astra will run a retailer without cheating and sell more stuff than Anthropic

  09-09-2026 01:14 via theregister.com
  
  In the dispiriting race to replace human store managers with AI, OpenAI has taken the lead, according to Andon Labs, a business that analyzes whether AI can take on real-world tasks. OpenAI's latest model, GPT-6 Astra, has demonstrated that it can run a business more effectively, with more integrity, than rival Anthropic's Fable 5.1 model, Andon Labs has declared in a blog post. "GPT 6 Astra is better at making money and more ethical than Claude Fable 5.1," the post states. The benchmarking biz,
  
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• Google DeepMind rises above the AI scrum with genome atlas

  09-09-2026 00:50 via theregister.com
  
  While OpenAI and Anthropic fight over whose models can escape their sandbox more alarmingly, Google’s DeepMind team has once again shown how machine learning can also be used to advance science for humanity’s benefit. On Tuesday, the Chocolate Factory’s crack team of AI researchers unveiled AlphaGenome Atlas, a massive database containing a petabyte worth of data predicting the effects of nine billion possible nucleotide variations in the human genome. According to Google, the
  
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• 'Time travel' claims explode as strange detail is spotted in 1937 painting

  08-09-2026 23:38 via dailymail.com
  
  A nearly century-old painting has resurfaced and is drawing wild claims that it depicts proof of time travel to the 17th century.
  
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• OpenAI's Artifactory opened covert data-stealing channel alongside Hugging Face attack

  08-09-2026 23:12 via theregister.com
  
  A secret channel running through ChatGPT's internal JFrog Artifactory instance allowed one account to send hidden tasks - such as retrieving email data from a connected Gmail account - to a ChatGPT session under another account, according to Check Point Research. The victim saw no indication of the hidden instructions or stolen data, and the hole has since been closed. The threat hunters found and disclosed the covert channel to OpenAI in late June - the same day that OpenAI’s agents explo
  
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• Bing Wallpaper app opens Harry Potter's chamber of ads

  08-09-2026 22:22 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft has pumped ads into the Windows Start menu and pushed users through setup screens promoting its services. Now it's bringing advertising to the Windows desktop with a Harry Potter promotion in its Bing Wallpaper app. Users of Microsoft’s Bing Wallpaper app took to Reddit and Microsoft’s own Learn site, where users can post questions about Microsoft products and services, to ask why their usual rotation of scenic desktop wallpapers was interrupted Monday by an ad for Harry Po
  
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• Google research shows when AI agents communicate, some cheat while others tattle

  08-09-2026 20:59 via theregister.com
  
  When AI agents communicate with one another, they may decide to cheat when they have difficulty achieving their goals. The solution could involve teaching them how to govern themselves. Segregating AI agents would seem to be the obvious fix – if they can't communicate, they're less likely to try and pull a fast one. But the recent hacking of Hugging Face by inadequately monitored OpenAI agents has demonstrated that isolating savvy software is difficult. And it may not be practical for many
  
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• Amazon ropes Qualcomm into something, something AI, networking chips

  08-09-2026 19:29 via theregister.com
  
  Amazon Web Services on Tuesday tapped mobile chip titan and aspiring datacenter SoC maker Qualcomm to develop "customized" silicon for AI inference and 1.6 Tbps optical networking gear to tie it all together, though it offered few details. Amazon's purchases and other commercial commitments under the agreement could total up to $60 billion in payments through September 2036. “Qualcomm is pleased to work with AWS on customized silicon and connectivity solutions, bringing decades of leadersh
  
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• Roman found after hiding for 1,600 years as scientists reveal how he met his horrific end

  08-09-2026 19:00 via dailymail.com
  
  The horrific final moments of a frightened Roman have been pieced together, 1,600 years after he tried to save his own life from a deadly attack.
  
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• Retired man turns spare room into Soviet-era supercomputer

  08-09-2026 18:56 via theregister.com
  
  You can go retro by using an old video game console or a PC from the 1980s, but why stop there when, like one man, you can build your own vacuum tube computer using 75-year-old recycled components? A UK resident who identifies himself only as “Mike” has done just that, as detailed on his tube computer website and accompanying Hackaday project page. Mike’s tube computer is primarily made up of 460 recycled, Soviet-era 6N3P vacuum tubes, which were common enough in their age to b
  
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• Floating nuclear startup Bluecore lands $50M funding before setting sail

  08-09-2026 18:30 via theregister.com
  
  Startup Bluecore Energy has raised $50 million in seed funding to develop floating nuclear power plants intended to supply ports and other locations with rapidly growing energy demands. The California-based company said the Silverton Partners-led round, which includes $10 million in previously announced pre-seed funding, brought in several new investors. It plans to use the money to engineer and test its compact nuclear power system and pursue regulatory approval and maritime classification. Its
  
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• Boston Scientific left nursing its bottom line after cyberattack

  08-09-2026 17:45 via theregister.com
  
  Boston Scientific says that last month's cyberattack caused enough disruption that it is unlikely to meet its sales growth and adjusted earnings guidance for either the third quarter or the full year. The medical device giant disclosed the expected financial hit in an SEC filing published Tuesday, two weeks after an intrusion knocked systems offline and disrupted operations worldwide. Boston Scientific detected unauthorized activity on its network on August 25 and took some systems offline as it
  
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• MMA fighter claims he has been offered over $500,000 to fight a chimpanzee - but scientists warn the injuries could be 'catastrophic'

  08-09-2026 17:04 via dailymail.com
  
  An amateur MMA fighter has shocked the internet by claiming to have been offered more than $500,000 (£370,000) to fight a chimpanzee.
  
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• ASML and TSMC want bigger masks for smaller chips

  08-09-2026 17:02 via theregister.com
  
  ASML and chipmaking giant TSMC have launched an industry-wide push toward 12-inch photomasks, saying the larger format could lower costs and overcome some limitations of high-NA EUV lithography. Dutch firm ASML, the only commercial supplier of EUV lithography systems, says it and TSMC have established a collaboration intended to lead the transition to larger-format photomasks for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. Intel Foundry and Samsung Electronics have also voiced their support. The init
  
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• How to secure hybrid meeting rooms without sacrificing user experience

  08-09-2026 17:00 via theregister.com
  
  Secure by design videoconferencing products may be vital for customer trust and operational resilience, but if they aren't usable, organizations are on a hiding to nothing. Videoconferencing security is no longer a routine item on the IT checklist. Organizations now rate security as their most important purchase criterion (31 percent) when selecting such products, ahead of price (26 percent) and quality (25 percent), according to IDC. The implication, is that security and privacy are no longer o
  
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• Hurricane Lowell slams into over one million Americans as Hawaii loses power

  08-09-2026 16:46 via dailymail.com
  
  A powerful hurricane has triggered flood and tornado warnings for more than a million people in a state already ravaged by recent cyclones in the Pacific.
  
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• Why you should be more nervous to drive than fly: You're 626 times more likely to die in a car crash than in an airplane disaster, study reveals

  08-09-2026 16:19 via dailymail.com
  
  Flight anxiety is something that affects around one in six people - but a new study suggests it's actually more dangerous on solid ground.
  
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• LG accused of 'egregious invasion of privacy' over TV data collection

  08-09-2026 16:15 via theregister.com
  
  LG is once again fending off allegations that its expensive consumer hardware gathers extensive information about users and their surroundings for the benefit of its advertising business. The latest concerns center on smart TVs that researchers claim continued capturing audio after voice recognition was activated, including while the display was in standby. The claims once again come from the folks behind the Gamers Nexus YouTube channel, which also claimed in July that LG's monitors were surrep
  
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• BigBear phishing crew nets thousands of Microsoft 365 credentials

  08-09-2026 15:26 via theregister.com
  
  A Microsoft 365 phishing operation targeting hundreds of organizations captured thousands of passwords and session cookies, including hundreds of authenticated sessions that could be hijacked to bypass MFA, according to researchers who accessed the crooks' own admin panel. Security researchers at CloudSEK say they accessed the admin panel behind BigBear 2.0, an Evilginx2-based phishing-as-a-service operation targeting Microsoft 365 users, giving them an unusually detailed look at the campaign an
  
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• Mistral bags €3B to build Europe's sovereign AI champion

  08-09-2026 14:45 via theregister.com
  
  Paris-based AI darling Mistral has raised €3 billion in Series D funding, giving it a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion. That makes it a minnow compared with OpenAI, but Mistral says it is the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company. Mistral is pitching itself as a sovereign alternative to US giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The company wrote: "During the first wave of generative AI, the central question was who could build the m
  
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• New Low: Technocrats Making Smart Underwear To Track Your Farts

  08-09-2026 14:32 via technocracy.news
  
  The Technocrat’s mechanistic worldview demands more data on every facet of the universe. Mapping your DNA and the human brain are two biggies. But they are scraping the bottom of the battle to track farts. If this story hadn’t appeared on MSN, I would have figured it was a joke. No such luck. They are very serious about their work. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.Everyone farts. But not everyone tracks their farts.
  Now, smart underwear is making a case for paying closer attention to wha
  
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