A few weeks ago, we talked about a project within KDE to revive two of their classic themes, Oxygen and Air, and polish them up to make them usable on the current versions of KDE. The developers and designers working on this project say they’ve been utterly surprised by just how popular this news has proven to be, and Filip Fila published a blog post with some thoughts on this unexpected popularity.
The news that Google is working to move Chrome OS to the Android technology stack, and that it wants to start putting Android on laptops, is not exactly news, as the company has been talking about it for years.
Trump is weaker, and Xi is stronger, since their last summit in Beijing. But the U.S. does not have to remain in this state of weakness forever.
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We’ve long tried to control the weather by engineering rainfall. Now such cloud-seeding efforts are escalating, creating conflict between countries and stoking conspiracy theories. But do they work?
Carbon credits bought by companies to offset their emissions really have reduced deforestation, but not by as much as credit developers claim, according to a rigorous analysis
There's a chance for decorum and perhaps even a bit of dignity. It's fading fast.
PCOS will now be known as PMOS (polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome), and for Alice Klein, who has the condition, it's been a long time coming
The concept of a field plays a key role in particle physics, but what exactly is it? From its origins in the study of magnetism to the quantum fields of today, columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein goes exploring
Good afterevenmorn, Readers! This past Saturday, I headed out with a few of my martial arts students, past and present, to watch the second installment of the recent Mortal Kombat adaptations. I’m not going to lie, the draw for me was the involvement of Karl Urban as Johnny Cage.
Gases collected from boiling mineral springs in Zambia contain the chemical signature of having come directly from the Earth’s mantle, a sign of a rupture in the tectonic plates and the possible beginning of a new continental boundary
Every single software product is dealing with the question about what to do with “AI”-generated code, but the question is particularly difficult to answer for open source operating systems like Linux distributions and the various BSDs, which often consist of a wide variety of software packages from hundreds to thousands of different developers.
Microsoft is currently testing a brand new performance-enhancing feature in Windows 11. Microsoft, too, is introducing something to Windows 11 called “low latency profile” and it this will work irrespective of the processor, be it AMD64 CPUs like Intel or AMD or ARM64 ones like from Qualcomm.
Microsoft acquired GitHub and applied their unique brand of enshittification. Amongst their achievements was the spawning of the Copilot circle of hell. Now they’re effectively DDoSing themselves with slop.
An analysis of ancient human artefacts finds that the container, a simple but critical tool, may have originated 500,000 years ago. Columnist Michael Marshall explores how slings, ostrich eggs and wooden trays helped our ancestors survive
A US start-up is putting autonomous data centres in the ocean, powered by wave energy, but experts warn that the harsh environment could make maintenance challenging
The rules governing gravity and other laws of nature seem like eternal truths, but cosmologist João Magueijo has always questioned their origins. Now, he has a bold new proposal
After the release of The Singular Papers of Solar Pons, the next collection of new stories by David Marcum, we got the next issue of the scholarly journal devoted to Solar Pons: The Pontine Dossier, Millennium Edition, Vol.
Genetic analysis of 1039 people buried in Britain between the Bronze Age and the Norman conquest highlights the impact of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings on the island’s ancestry
So, last week, I talked about ten movies that you can stream for free over on Tubi. I could easily list ten or twenty more. There’s a lot of good stuff there. I’m also watching TV shows on Tubi. Of course, a multiple season show takes a lot longer to work through, than a single movie.
Big news from the Debian release team: Debian is going for reproducible package builds. Aided by the efforts of the Reproducible Builds project, we’ve decided it’s time to say that Debian must ship reproducible packages.
ymawky is a small, static http web server written entirely in aarch64 assembly for macos. it uses raw darwin syscalls with no libc wrappers, serves static files, supports GET, HEAD, PUT, OPTIONS, DELETE, byte ranges, directory listing, custom error pages, and tries to be as hardened as possible.
Ada is incredibly well designed. One way this shows is that it takes the big, monolithic features of other languages and breaks them down into their constituent parts, so we can choose which portions of those features we want.
Sculpt OS, the operating system based on the various components that make up Genode, has seen a new release, 26.04. A lot of the new features and changes to Genode that we’ve been talking about for a while now are part of this release, most notably the new human-inclined data syntax that replaces XML as the configuration language for Genode.
Sprite scaling. It is the coolest effect of the 2D arcade era, a must-have for games from Space Harrier to Real Bout Fatal Fury Special. Home consoles pretty much lacked it– sorry, Nintendo, but Mode 7 only scales a background, not sprites.
A veritable cornucopia of dodgy barbarian and barbarian-adjacent movies that I have never watched before, and will probably never watch again. Enjoy Part One here. Gor (1987) – USA/Italy Another nail in the Cannon coffin lid, this effort to start a franchise based on the uncomfortable series of novels by John Norman spawned one sequel, and then went belly up before things could get worse.
A deeper discussion of the arguments behind this week’s essay on Russia’s mounting political and economic pressures.
Minuscule silicon wafers propelled by lasers could be used to steer light sails, helping them travel beyond the solar system
The Vanishing Tower (DAW Books, June 1977). Cover by Michael Whelan Here’s another in my series of reviews of “mostly obscure” 1970s/1980s books — the last one was of Evangeline Walton’s The Children of Llyr.
The strange historical echoes of Trump's Persian misadventures
If a key ocean current collapses it could plunge northern Europe into a big freeze. Now researchers are weighing up a drastic intervention – building a 130-kilometre-wide dam between the US and Russia
The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early,
primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought
to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the
whole thing difficult.
The ways in which Google can lock you into their ecosystem are often obvious, but sometimes, they’re incredibly sneaky and easily missed. CAPTCHA tests are annoying, but at the same time, they can help protect websites from bots.
With that context, I always found it strange that the designers of ASCII included 6 characters after uppercase Z before starting the lowercase letters. Then it hit me: we have 26 letters in the English alphabet, plus 6 additional characters before lowercase starts: 26 + 6 = 32.
Many Bourne shells go slightly beyond the POSIX sh specification to also support a ‘-l’ option that makes the shell act as a ‘login shell’. POSIX’s omission of -l isn’t only because it doesn’t really talk about login shells at all, it’s also because Unix has a special way of marking login shells that goes back very far in its history.
The US Department of Defense has released hundreds of documents and photographs related to UFOs, some of which have been declassified, in the first of many drops to come
Predictions of Putin’s demise have been wrong many times before, but something is happening in Russia now that deserves more attention.
Many flowering plants have duplicated genomes, which could have helped them evolve to deal with extreme stress in times of environmental upheaval
A drone has crashed in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, causing a fire that has spread to 12 square kilometres of land. Dry weather, strong winds and the presence of land mines are complicating efforts to bring the blaze under control
Satellite measurements show that in the early 2010s sea level rise suddenly accelerated to a rate of 4.1 millimetres per year, possibly in response to an increase in the rate of global warming
Early days yet, but let's take a punt anyway.
How important is thinking about your breath for calming yourself down? We now know that slow breathing is effective even without conscious involvement
Miles J. Breuer was born in Chicago on January 3, 1889, but the family moved to Crete, Nebraska when he was four years old so his father could attend medical school. He attended the University of Texas and went on to medical school at Rush Medical Center.
An impression made in clay around 175,000 years ago could be a kneeprint left by one of the builders of a strange stalagmite circle found deep inside Bruniquel cave in south-west France
A secret society of French mathematicians has been revolutionising the field of mathematics under a pseudonym for nearly a century. Columnist Jacob Aron finds that this mythic collective provided maths a rigorous and useful foundation, and did some real harm along the way
On the Fedora forums, there’s a long-running thread about a proposal for Fedora to build a variant of the distribution aimed specifically at “AI”. The “problem” identified in the proposal is that setting up the various parts that a developer in the “AI” space needs is currently quite difficult on Fedora, and as such, a bunch of technical steps need to be taken to make this easier.
In August 2025, we hailed the emergence of a second Chain Story project championed by Michael A. Stackpole. This is a Sword & Sorcery-focused, contagious set of connected (“chained”) stories. Each is: A standalone tale Readable in any order Free to read! Interconnected via a theme involving a Crown We round up groups every several weeks, but check the Chain Story website.
Another month, another progress report, Redox, etc. etc., you know the drill by now. This past month Redox saw improved booting on real hardware by making sure the boot process continues even if certain drivers fail or become blocked.
Time for another Sun Ray blog post! I’ve had a few people email me asking for help setting up a Sun Ray server over the last few months, and despite my attempts to help them get it going there’s been mixed results with running SRSS on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10.
If you’re sick of Chrome OS on your Chromebook, or can find a Chromebook for cheap somewhere but don’t actually want to use Chrome OS, have you considered postmarketOS? Since I was kind frustrated with ChromeOS, I decided to take a look at something that I knew supported my Lenovo Duet 3 for some time: postmarketOS.
The World Health Organization sought to quell worldwide fears over the hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius and reassure the public that the risk of widespread transmission is low
Only 3 per cent of those with polycystic ovary syndrome reach perimenopause by the age of 46, which may allow them to conceive when older
A comprehensive study exploring coffee’s physiological effects finds that some of its benefits are down to polyphenols and their influence on gut bacteria
The Man With the Rubber Face reprints the entire series of stories starring John Cabot, the titular “man with the rubber face,” in his crusade against criminals. Written by H. Bedford-Jones, this series ran in Mystery magazine.
A guide to walking, a look at the world’s Google searches and a deep dive into the secrets of our DNA are some of the topics tackled by the popular science books out this month
A device made using a tiny bead floating in a beam of light can measure extremely small pressures and could help find a mysterious kind of neutrino
Dipping back into the Sword & Planet genre for the day, here’s one of the odder items I have. Bigfoot: Sword of the Earthman, subtitled as “The Galaxy’s Greatest Action-Adventure Hero.” As far as I can tell, Josh Henaman is the writer, with Andy Taylor (Penciller), Tamra Bonvillain (Colorist), and Adam Wollet (Letterer).
Research into dating has until now almost exclusively focused on younger people, but we’re finally beginning to investigate how romance changes in later life
The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week
Eric Lusito crossed the former Soviet Union to explore vast scientific sites, some of which have been deserted for years, for his new book
An analysis of 150 artefacts from a site in Wales shows that the ancient practice of making tools out of bone persisted even after the advent of metal-working
Solving society's problems with evidence is a work in progress, argues a must-read new book. The process is surprisingly new – and riddled with complexities, finds Michael Marshall
Feedback discovers that the prevailing themes of Eurovision songs may come and go, but the urge to win stays the same.
People often ask who might replace the nature broadcaster, who turns 100 this week. The truth is that he’s irreplaceable, but a wide range of voices are attempting to fill his shoes.
Red-light therapy promises to treat everything from acne and hair loss to depression and chronic pain. Many of these claims are overhyped, but evidence suggests it can have healing powers
At least 15 per cent of the Amazon has already been lost, and further destruction could unleash widespread rainforest dieback with as little as 1.5°C of global warming
If you liked this piece, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI&
I picked up The Fighting Heart of Man, Vol. 1, published by Veritas Entertainment. This small volume, 4- by 7-inches, has 11 stories by Nathanael Hummel and L.S. Goozdich. These stories are very short, sometimes being vignettes.
When the slope of a mountain above Tracy Arm fjord, in Alaska, gave way on 10 August 2025, 64 million cubic metres of rock fell into the fjord, causing a 5.4 magnitude seismic event
This 2013 book by an Indigenous botanist is a quietly urgent act of healing that forces Western science to look at the world in a different way
Prize-winning young writer Hasset Kifle, 17, explores how the world of super-competitive running is being transformed by so-called “super shoes” – and what cost this will have on the sport
Fossils reveal that there were at least two kinds of koala when humans first arrived in Australia, but one died out about 30,000 years ago when the west of the continent dried out
There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a terminal, it is inherently accessible. The logic assumes that because there are no graphics, no complex DOM, and no WebGL canvases, the content is just raw ASCII text that a screen reader can easily parse.
Backing up in modern times, we’ve had ZFS snapshots and replication to make this task extremely easy. However, you may not have access to another ZFS endpoint for replication, need to diversify risk by using a non-ZFS tool for backup, or are simply using UFS2, living the old skool life.
Robin Hood (Unrated Director’s Cut) (156 minutes; 2010) Written by Brian Helgeland. Directed by Ridley Scott. What is it? What it is, is a criminally underrated film. Maybe it would’ve been more successful if they had titled it Robin Hood Begins.
Creating quantum entanglement inside a solid material is tricky in the lab – but crystals buried in the earth could be growing it naturally. Now one scientist says he has proof he’s found them
NHS England is pulling its open-source software from the internet because of fears around computer-hacking AI models like Mythos. Opposition is growing among those who say the move is bad for transparency and efficiency, and will also do nothing to improve security
Three people have died on board the cruise ship MV Hondius due to an outbreak of hantavirus, a rare illness transmitted by rodents
Three passengers on the cruise ship MV Hondius have died due to an outbreak of hantavirus, a rare illness transmitted by rodents
A biopsy of a woman's cancer seems to have triggered an immune response against the tumour, putting her into remission
One of the best-performing models in cosmology is also one with the least physical rationale behind it. Columnist Leah Crane says this leaves us with a puzzle that could make or break physics as we know it
Doug Whitney has a genetic mutation that means he should have developed Alzheimer’s disease decades ago, but his long-term work in hot engine rooms may have protected him in a similar way to sauna therapy
Doug Whitney has a genetic mutation that means he should have developed Alzheimer’s disease decades ago, but his long-term work in hot engine rooms may have protected him in a similar way to sauna therapy
Two quantum computers and two supercomputers teamed up to break the record on the biggest molecule yet to be simulated using quantum hardware
Earlier this year, Mac OS and Windows NT-capable ROMs were discovered for Apple’s unique AIX Network Server. Cameron Kaiser has since spent more time digging into just how capable these ROMs are, and has published another one of his detailed stories about his efforts.
