News and Analysis Results
High-speed train toilet attempts to eat Frenchman
Emergency services were on Sunday obliged to cut free a TGV passenger whose arm was swallowed by the high-speed train's sucking dunny, the BBC reports. The unnamed 26-year-old victim - travelling from La Rochelle to Bordeaux - dropped his mobe into the bog and ill-advisedly attempted to retrieve it from the lav's depths. Cue a …
Captain Cyborg to chew the fat with Ultra Hal
Reading Uni's cybernetic media strumpet Kev "Captain Cyborg" Warwick is poised to put six computer programmes to ultimate test - that devised by Alan Turing in which the machine must engage in convincingly human banter, thereby heralding "the most significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence since the IBM supercomputer …
Fire-breathing black cabs: Shock eyewitness photo
Our recent shock piece on an attempted incendiary uprising by the TX4-type cab prompted the neoLuddite Resistance Army to place all London cadres on Defcon Laguna. Well, the reality is worse than we thought. Here's an image caught by an NRA operative last night during a furious firefight in the capital: Last eyewitness photo of …
London battles fire-breathing black cabs
Transport for London last week announced the temporary withdrawal of 500 black cabs following eight spontaneous combustion events in three months - the first incendiary transportation incidents in the capital since Red Ken Livingstone's removal from office apparently contained the fire-breathing vehicle menace. Sadly not. TfL …
South African survives exploding fridge attack
It's been suspiciously quiet of late on the murderous white goods front, but confirmation that your kitchen is still out to get you comes in the form of a chilling exploding fridge attack in South Africa. According to the Pretoria Times, Adrian Coetzee, of Silver Lakes, Pretoria, "narrowly escaped death" on Wednesday when the …
Welcome back, WiReD!
More than a decade after it crashed and burned so spectacularly, WiReD - the house magazine for the Children of the Corn - is returning to the UK. Publisher Conde Nast, which acquired WiReD after the first UK version shut down, says it will launch next year and has hired an editor, David Rowan. He's already fully buzzword …
Captain Cyborg creates human bat with Reg baseball cap
It's come to our attention that the media's favourite cybernetically-enhanced human - Kev "Captain Cyborg" Warwick of Reading Uni - earlier this week demonstrated an echolocation hat for blind people on the Beeb's The One Show. Nothing remarkable about that, you might think, but check out just whose hat had the honour of bearing …
Captain Cyborg plans to milk you, human scum
Reg chiefs have been holding daily crisis meetings for several months over what has become of Professor Kevin "Captain Cyborg" Warwick. "He's been quiet... too quiet," one old-timer told this reporter only last week. Imagine the cheer yesterday then, when Reg reader Chris reported a sighting of the good Cap'n in Scientific …
Dutch fire up petrol-pumping robot
The indolent Dutch may come to rue the day they ever heard the name of Nico van Staveren, petrol station operator and co-developer of a gas-pumping robot which can allegedly recognise your make of car, whip off the petrol cap and deliver the required amount of combustible. The TankPitstop in action Reuters has quite correctly …
Aliens responsible for Italian machine uprising
Italian authorities have confirmed what we at the neoLuddite Resistance Army (NRA) have known all along - that the 2004 machine uprising in the Italian village of Canneto di Caronia was probably caused by aliens. For three weeks, locals battled against spontaneously-combusting TVs, fridges, cookers and mobile phones which …
Never trust a robot with anal beads and a fixed grin
The flying car, that which we Reg hacks demand of all and sundry after a few pints, looks like becoming a reality. The Terrafugia Transition® is a bit more like a plane that can drive, but it seems to fit the bill anyway. You shared our excitement: "Marty, where we're going, we won't need roads, just a runway. Oh, and you might …
HP boffin predicts preggers spy bog
HP has wheeled out a futurologist to tell everyone we're going to need a lot more enterprise-class storage, printer ink and and branded glossy photo paper in the year 2057. As well as fattening photo albums, ubiquitous monitoring devices could be a threat to liberty, according to a groundbreaking speech by Martin Sadler, …
NASA to unleash 'mind meld' intelligent machines
All members of the neoLuddite Resistance Army are hereby ordered to go to Defcon "Armageddon"* and prepare to battle a new breed of mind-melding intelligent machines and systems under development by NASA's Ames Research Center and the Machine-to-Machine Intelligence Corporation (M2Mi). According to the NASA's chillingly frank …
EU slaps 'Davros tax' on mobility scooters
The EU has moved to restrict the number of mobility scooters available to a machine uprising on the UK streets by slapping import duty on the vehicles, the Telegraph reports. Our artist's impression of a Terminator granny astride a mobility scooter The ruling means a £250 price hike on the average £2.5k cost of the mostly …
DARPA to create brain-chipped cyborg moths
Famed US military mad-scientist bureau DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is engaged in an effort to grow/build cyborg moths for use as spies. No, really. The program is called Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, or HI-MEMS. In it, the arguably over-caffeined DARPA boffins aim to construct a tiny …
Captain Cyborg pushes kid chipping via Maddy abduction case
It is with heavy heart and grim sense of inevitability that The Register and its long-time readers note the attachment of the Captain Cyborg agenda to the McCann abduction investigation. Under the headline "Would an implanted chip help to keep my child safe?", The Times reports that laughable Reading University Professor Kevin …
Captain Cyborg invades Second Life
Kevin Warwick - aka Captain Cyborg - will this afternoon be entertaining the crowds on Second Life's Uvvy Island with a chat on the benefits of linking your brain to "that of an intelligent machine network" entitled "Upgrading Humans: Why not?" The appearance has been organised by the "Second Life Chapter of the World …
Self-combusting toilets menace Japan
We're not sure if "Japan's leading toilet manufacturer" Toto builds city centre cyberloos for the UK market, but its domestic products have evidently fallen under the control of the Lizard Alliance. According to the BBC, the company is offering free repairs to no less than 180,000 Z-series bogs after some of them spontaneously …
Future warfare and all that Jizz
This week, the MOD took to gazing into a crystal ball, and came up with a number of scary sounding predictions for what the future might hold. Many of you felt that this shameless pilfering of the best of cyberpunk might have been better avoided. Perhaps the MOD's think tank could lend its future diagnosticator to Des Browne …
Carnivore ATM bites Florida kiddie
A light-fingered Florida nine-year-old has learnt the hard way that you don't mess with ATMs after getting bitten by an Orange County carnivore cash machine. According to a chilling video report on WSMV Nashville, what for Angelica Santiago should have been a routine trip to the store with her parents ended as a four-hour …
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