Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, doesn’t only support x86. It also has a branch for SPARC, which tends to run behind its x86 counterpart a little bit and has a few other limitations related to the fact SPARC is effectively no longer being developed.
Patients are requesting that blood transfusions come from people who they know have not been vaccinated against covid-19, which can cause dangerous delays
Monkeys with around 300 electrodes implanted in their brain were able to steer avatars around different virtual environments
An imaginative and compelling book reveals how radio waves help us tune in to our universe – and even search for alien civilisations, says Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
Feedback discovers that a conspiracy theory has formed that various celebrities have been replaced by clones, and sees just a few small problems with the idea
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has finished the most detailed survey of the universe to date, and the resulting map will help researchers understand an apparent weakening of dark energy
A detailed analysis of the best-preserved Neanderthal infant skeleton ever found suggests that our ancient relatives grew much faster as young children
Another Haiku monthly activity report, but this time around, there’s actually a big ticket item. Haiku has been in a pretty solid and stable state for a while now, so the activity reports have been dominated by fairly small, obscure changes, but during March a major milestone was reached for the ARM64 port.
I discovered a new collection of pulp-style short stories in Honor Among Rogues by Logan D. Whitney. This small volume, 4- by 7-inches size, has six short stories set around the world from the 1890s to the 1940s in several genres: Western, aviation, action-adventure, and more.
The editor in chief of this blog was born in 2004. She uses the 1997 window manager, Enlightenment E16, daily. In this article, I describe the process of fixing a show-stopping, rare bug that dates back to 2006 in the codebase.
Modern laptops promise a kind of magic. Shut the lid or press the sleep button, toss it in a backpack, and hours, days, or weeks later, it should wake up as if nothing happened with little to no battery drain.
The Mighty Barbarians: Great Sword and Sorcery Heroes, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson (Lancer Books, 1969). Cover by Jim Steranko Hans Stefan Santesson (1914 – 1975) was born in France and lived in Sweden with his parents until 1923 when his mother immigrated to the US.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft made some concrete promises about fixing and improving Windows, and among them was removing useless “AI” integrations. Applications like Notepad, Snipping Tool, and others would see their “AI” features removed.
We might miss it once it's gone
A planet-warming El Niño climate phase is now developing, and some models predict it could turn out to be the strongest on record
The protein craze is in full swing and beef consumption is on the rise, particularly in the US, where health agencies are promoting red meat as part of an optimum diet. So, how much beef should we really be eating, and how does it impact our well-being?
The gap between genetics and archaeology leaves us with an unclear picture of where the Neanderthals originated. Columnist Michael Marshall details a surprising new hypothesis that suggests they may have come from us
How do you portray momentum in space accurately? Columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein takes a look at the origins of our understanding of motion, which runs from Isaac Newton back to the Zhou dynasty a millennia ago
A win for Hungary, Ukraine, Europe and small-d democrats everywhere
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L-ergothioneine, an antioxidant found in certain mushrooms, is thought to neutralise damaging molecules in uterine cells that may contribute to period pain
Antibodies mistakenly attacking the brain are linked with conditions including schizophrenia, dementia and OCD, prompting a revolution in how we think about mental health conditions
The day when a quantum computer manages to break common encryption, or Q-Day, is fast approaching, and the world is not close to being ready
A study of more than 10 million siblings suggests that firstborns are more likely to be autistic and have allergies, while conditions like migraine and shingles tend to affect their younger sibling
Goodafterevenmorn, Readers! I had an interaction online that took me aback a little bit, and I really need to talk about it. I realise that I’m largely preaching to the choir here, but I am feeling a little like I need a sympathetic ear, so apologies.
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere by capturing the carbon from burning biomass is supposed to save the planet, but it looks like the flagship project will never happen
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere by capturing the carbon from burning biomass is supposed to save the planet, but it looks like the flagship project will never happen
Some gut bacteria recycle discarded sex hormones, like oestrogens, back into the body. The level of these bacteria seems to be higher in industrialised societies, which could have big implications for our health
A small comet has been spotted slowing down and then speeding up again – but in the opposite direction, which we have never seen before
In late 2025, we got the next volume of pulp detective Jigger Masters, created by author and editor Anthony M. Rud (1893-1942): The Death Messenger: The Complete Cases of Jigger Masters, Vol. 4. This character had an unusual history, having first appeared in The Green Book Magazine in 1918.
If the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation shut down, the knock-on effects could release hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2, raising global temperatures even further
Ever since the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in 1986, scientists have needed to monitor radioactive conditions inside. That job currently falls to Anatoly Doroshenko, who explains the dangers and importance of his work to New Scientist
Ever since the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in 1986, scientists have needed to monitor radioactive conditions inside. That job currently falls to Anatoly Doroshenko, who explains the dangers and importance of his work to New Scientist
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Chernobyl lay on the path to the capital Kyiv. When the plant was occupied by Russian troops, meteorologist Lyudmila Dyblenko fearlessly continued taking vital measurements to monitor the nuclear exclusion zone
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Chernobyl lay on the path to the capital Kyiv. When the plant was occupied by Russian troops, meteorologist Lyudmila Dyblenko fearlessly continued taking vital measurements to monitor the nuclear exclusion zone
Forty years ago, the catastrophic explosion at Chernobyl sent plumes of radioactive waste into the atmosphere. Now, New Scientist has gained exclusive access to learn how vital work to decontaminate the site has been derailed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine
New Scientist reporter Matthew Sparkes secured unrivalled access to Chernobyl's most crucial scientific sites, where researchers are fighting to protect the area and ensure it remains safe amid the constant threat of attack from Russia
Ever heard of a condition called bixonimania? Did you search the internet or ask your “AI” girlfriend about some symptoms you were experiencing, and this was its answer? Well… The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist.
Version 7.0 of the Linux kernel has been released, marking the arbitrary end of the 6.x series. Significant changes in this release include the removal of the “experimental” status for Rust code, a new filtering mechanism for io_uring operations, a switch to lazy preemption by default in the CPU scheduler, support for time-slice extension, the nullfs filesystem, self-healing support for the XFS filesystem, a number of improvements to the swap subsystem (described in this article and this one), general support for AccECN congestion notification, and more.
1996 was 30 years ago. And it was quite the year for movies. Big-screen extravaganzas dominated the box office, and some movies outside the Top 10 still more than resonate today. On July 3, Independence Day dropped.
All of a sudden, after months of total darkness, there is hope.
I'm inside my feed reader and I click a link to a feed. What happens? The link opens in my browser and the feed file is downloaded.
Downloaded! When I'm in my feed reader and click a link to an actual feed. Come on guys! We need to fix this. But, given that Google hates RSS and are already taking additional steps to kill its usability, I'm not too optimistic.
We should be bringing back feed:// URLs and work to make them ubiquitous. The open web needs it, or an equivalent, in the fight against the lock-in of the tech oligarchies.
The Dark of the Soul (Tower Books, 1970) Here’s another anthology I picked up because it had a Robert E. Howard story in it. The Dark of the Soul, edited by Don Ward, A Tower book, 1970. Cover artist unknown.
I’ve lost count of novels that involve some sort of magical college featuring adolescent misfits plucked from humdrum daily existence thrust into contests between good and evil, not to mention raging hormones.
The astronauts of the Artemis II mission around the moon have made it home safely to Earth, marking the end of a triumphant mission and the beginning of a longer road to stay on the moon
The internet used to be great.
I was going through my old notes and clippings (why is a big post in the making) and I came across this quote by Joel Miller. I don't know who Joel Miller is, but this quote by him feels more relevant than ever in the age of AI:
Our investment in reading changes the book because the book has changed us. ... If books are merely a means of transferring information, then perhaps, yes, a book is a waste of time. If a summary of its thesis and key points could be presented in a brief article or Substack post, why not just save the hours and read the Substack post? All the more if the information is outdated or questionable for one reason or another. But that mistakes what a book is for. A book is a tool. It’s a machine for thinking. And “all machines,” as Thoreau once said, “have their friction.” The time it takes to engage with ideas—whether factual or fictional, emotional or intellectual, accurate or inaccurate, efficient or inefficient—might strike some as a drag. But the time given to working through those ideas, adopting and adapting, developing or discarding, changes our minds, changes us. It’s not about the wisdom we glean. It’s about what wisdom we grow.
Light: it's the radiation we can see. The communications potential of light is
obvious, and indeed, many of the earliest forms of long-distance communication
relied on it: signal fires, semaphore, heliographs.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that companies – and for our field, technology companies specifically – working with the defense industry tends to raise eyebrows. With things like the genocide in Gaza, the threats of genocide and war crimes against Iran, the mass murder in Lebanon, it’s no surprise that western companies working with the militaries and defense companies involved in these atrocities are receiving some serious backlash.
Some cats will suddenly refuse to touch brands of cat food that they have eaten for years. Changing the way the food smells might solve the problem
A recording from Michael McFaul's live video
A handful of plankton fossils buried in a small chunk of rock show that the oceans were teeming with life before the Late Ordovician mass extinction, the second most severe on record
Working in secret for more than two years, a group of mathematicians has set out to resolve of the longest and most bitter battles in modern mathematics
If you want to run FreeBSD on a laptop, you’re often yanked back to the Linux world of 20 years ago, with many components and parts not working and other issues such as sleep and wake problems. FreeBSD has been hard at work improving the experience of using FreeBSD on laptops, and now this has resulted in a list of laptops which work effortlessly with the venerable operating system.
It may sound unbelievable to some, but not everyone has a datacenter beast with 128GB of VRAM shoved in their desktop PCs. Around the world people tell the tale of a particularly fierce group of Linux gamers: Those who dare attempt to play games with only 8 gigabytes of VRAM, or even less.
He must be stopped. That is the task of all right-thinking people.
He must be stopped. That is the task of all right-thinking people.
Physicists have shown how time can effectively be reversed for some quantum systems, which would allow for new ways to harvest energy
Neil R. Jones was born on May 29, 1909 in Fulton, New York, the youngest for four children. He has stated that the first science fiction novel he read, in 1918. Was Will N. Harben’s The Land of the Changing Sun, a lost world novel, which led him to the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The incompleteness theorem is accepted as part of the mathematical canon today, but columnist Jacob Aron says it was a bombshell when Kurt Gödel first introduced it. Gödel’s seminal work directly contradicted one of the great minds of mathematics and limited the field forever
Two extremely precise experiments agree with a previously shocking measurement of just how big the proton is, which may help future searches for new particles
You might have seen this, one of the strangest and most primitive experiences in macOS, where you’re asked to press keys next to left Shift and right Shift, whatever they might be. Perhaps I can explain.
This post aims to be a high level introduction to using USB for people who may not have worked with Hardware too much yet and just want to use the technology. There are amazing resources out there such as USB in a NutShell that go into a lot of detail about how USB precisely works (check them out if you want more information), they are however not really approachable for somebody who has never worked with USB before and doesn’t have a certain background in Hardware.
The months keep coming, and thus, the monthly progress reports keep coming, too, for Redox, the new general purpose operating system written in Rust. This past month, there’s been considerable graphics improvements, better deadlock detection in the kernel, improved Unicode support thanks to switching over to ncurses library variant with Unicode support, and much more.
Arcane Arts and Cold Steel (Pulp Hero Press, December 24, 2025) From History to Writing Sword and Sorcery, Pulp Hero Press has us covered In 2019, Pulp Hero Press published Brian Murphy’s Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery, which was notably covered by David C.
Researchers who observed a murderous conflict unfolding in a once-unified group of wild chimpanzees say there are parallels with civil wars in human societies
A woman with three different autoimmune conditions had all of them treated simultaneously by genetically modifying her immune cells to kill off the rogue ones causing problems
Strange Escapes is another of H. Bedford-Jones’s short story series from Blue Book magazine. It is an eight-story series that appeared under his Gordon Keyne pseudonym and ran from February 1938 through September 1938.
Elizabeth Banks stars as an author shrunk by her scientist husband Matthew Macfadyen in this major new series – but it fails to live up to its promise, finds Josh Bell
A drug known only as compound X helped to remove the problematic proteins associated with Parkinson's disease from the brains of mice, and improved their balance and mobility
The International Union for Conservation of Nature has updated the Red List status for three of Antarctica’s most famous species after a dire assessment of their prospects under climate change
Swords and Sorcery: Stories of Heroic Fantasy, edited by L. Sprague de Camp (Pyramid Books, December 1963). Cover by Virgil Finlay Here are two more Sword & Sorcery anthologies edited by L. Sprague de Camp.
Since its launch in 2007, the Wii has seen several operating systems ported to it: Linux, NetBSD, and most-recently, Windows NT. Today, Mac OS X joins that list. In this post, I’ll share how I ported the first version of Mac OS X, 10.0 Cheetah, to the Nintendo Wii.
Join me live at 11 a.m. PDT / 2 p.m. EDT for a discussion on Nato, Iran and more.
Measurements by buoys at four latitudes in the western Atlantic provide the strongest evidence yet that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is weakening
The maths problems that secure your online bank transactions and emails may soon be undermined by quantum technology. It’s imperative we act now, before it’s too late
Luminous by Silvia Park and Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer are both thoughtful and well-written science fiction novels, featuring robots in richly realised worlds. But there the similarities end, says Emily H.
A new book from photographer Jon McCormack collects his shots of patterns in nature from around the world, from flamingoes to icebergs
A fresh and important book reveals the messy reality of our ever-mutating cells – and why the quest to defeat ageing is futile, says Michael Le Page
Feedback is delighted by the discovery of a very specific scientific sculpture park in China – and wonders if readers can top it
A method that relies on hitting materials with neutrons can measure how much quantum entanglement hides within them, which could enable new kinds of quantum technology
Massive herbivores became scarce in the Middle East about 200,000 years ago, and this coincided with a shift towards smaller, lighter toolkits in the archaeological record
A decline in ancient megafauna in the Middle East coincided with a shift towards smaller, lighter toolkits in the archaeological record – though scientists are still in debate about why
John Pendry is known for creating an invisibility cloak. Twenty years on, he has used the same principles to fashion an even more powerful kind of metamaterial that can teach us about the wild frontiers of physics
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