SUNDAY, 05 APRIL 2026, 19:34
“Google has announced that it’s currently testing a new feature for Chrome 148 that could speed up day-to-day browsing,” reports PC World:[T]he browser can intelligently postpone the loading of certain elements. Why load all images at the start when it can instead load images as you get close to them while scrolling? Chrome and Chromium-based browsers have had built-in lazy loading support for...
Plants, toads, and mushrooms “can all produce psychedelic substances,” writes ScienceAlert. “And now their powers have been combined in one plant.”[S]cientists have taken the genes these organisms use to make five natural psychedelics and introduced them into a tobacco plant ( Nicotiana benthamiana), which then produced all five compounds simultaneously. As interest grows in psychedelics as...
Nasa team get deeper into space than any humans have ever ventured
Astronauts on the historic Artemis II mission are expected to reach the far side of the moon on Monday, venturing deeper into space than any humans before them.
Nasa has reported satisfaction with progress toward the lunar fly-round since the team’s launch on Wednesday, with the three Americans and one Canadian on course to...
Artemis II, Nasa’s first crewed lunar flyby in more than 50 years, is a key step toward a long‑term return to the moon and future crewed missions to Mars
Continue reading…
We’ve actually been testing bands since the first Apple Watch launched in 2015. From silicone sports straps to leather bands, I’ve rounded up the best for every occasion.
Letters to US agency raise concerns over tech firms’ plans to use reflective satellites and expand numbers in low Earth orbit
Proposals to deploy reflective mirrors and up to 1m more satellites in low Earth orbit could have far-reaching consequences for human health and ecosystems, leading sleep and circadian rhythm researchers have said.
Presidents of four international scientific societies...
“Canonical is no longer pretending that 4GB is enough,” writes the blog How-to-Geek, noting Ubuntu 26.04 LTS “raises the baseline memory to 6GB, alongside a 2GHz dual-core processor, and 25GB of storage…”Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) set the floor at 1GB — a modest ask when it launched more than a decade ago in 2014. Then came the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) that pushed the number to...
Electricity rates have gotten so atrocious that this Heatbit wants to offset your costs with bitcoin mining. But the math doesn’t add up.
Agentic AI is already reshaping South African banking, writes Absa Business Banking CIO Lindelani Ramukumba.
These smart mowers are expensive alternatives to some good old-fashioned yard work, but they’re finally good enough to consider if you’d rather sip an iced tea and watch the robot go by.
Amid mass displacement and collapsing trust in institutions, digital wallets are becoming critical conduits for aid, connecting diaspora donors directly with communities on the ground.
The current console generation may last longer than anyone expects.
When Syrian government accounts were hijacked in March, the breach looked chaotic. But it revealed something more troubling: a state struggling with the most basic layer of cybersecurity.
Apple’s 50th anniversary got celebrated in weird and wild ways. CEO Tim Cook posted a special 30-second video rewinding backwards through the years of Apple’s products until it reaches the Apple I. Podcaster Lex Fridman noticed if you play the sound in reverse, “It’s the Think Different ad music, pitched up.” TechRadar played seven 50-year-old Apple I games on an emulator, including Star Trek,...
Cabinet has approved a draft AI policy for public comment, but full implementation is only expected in 2027/28.
South Africa’s 5G coverage has surged to 58% nationally but rural areas are being left far behind, Icasa data shows.
“Hackers briefly turned a widely trusted developer tool into a vehicle for credential-stealing malware that could give attackers ongoing access to infected systems,” the news site Axios.com reported Tuesday, citing security researchers at Google. The compromised package — also named axios — simplifies HTTP requests, and reportedly receives millions of downloads each day: The malicious...
Nine days ago Microsoft released a non-security “preview” update for Windows 11 — not mandatory for the average Windows user, notes ZDNet, “but rather as optional, more for IT admins and power users who want to test them.” TechRepublic adds that the update “was to bring ‘production-ready improvements’ and generally ensure system stability by optimizing different Windows services.” So it’s...
A former U.S. spy spoke to The New Yorker about “years of clandestine work for the C.I.A. — which, he said, had ‘prevented Iran from getting a nuke’.”[Kevin] Chalker told me that, as he understood it, the Pentagon had suggested running commando operations to kill key Iranian scientists, as Israel subsequently did. But the C.I.A. proposed recruiting those scientists to defect, as U.S. spies...
Slashdot reader Kirkman14 writes: A year before the Web opened to the public, Texas entrepreneur Don Lokke was trying to syndicate weekly political cartoons to bulletin board systems. His “telecomics,” as he called them, represent an overlooked early experiment in online comics. Lokke launched his main series, “Mack the Mouse” at the height of the 1992 Clinton-Bush-Perot presidential race. His...
MarketWatch looks at “surveillance wages,” pay rates “based not on an employee’s performance or seniority, but on formulas that use their personal data, often collected without employees’ knowledge.”According to Nina DiSalvo, policy director at labor advocacy group Towards Justice, some systems use signals associated with financial vulnerability — including data on whether a prospective...