Why are we so susceptible to clickbait? Columnist Jacob Aron traces it to a surprising source: a mathematical framework that paved the way for much of how the modern world works
Even during a solar eclipse, it isn’t safe to look directly at the sun, but with a proper solar filter or a simple pinhole projector, you can still watch it disappear behind the moon
There’s been a small flurry of articles from a variety of sources, all talking about more or less the same thing: Microsoft is trying to explain why Windows 11 is as difficult to develop as it is, in turn justifying why it’s become such a mess over the years.
Once upon a time in the mysterious lands of Mexico, starting in Fall 1996 and through Spring 1997, I coded a windowed operating system in 32-bit machine code, fit it into a floppy, and jumped in excitement as it boot up.
Two years ago, I was Porting my JavaScript Game Engine to C for No Reason. I have since found a reason: making a new N64 game! The result is Xibalba 64 – a Wolfenstein 3D-like FPS. Modretro agreed to publish the game as a physical launch title for their M64 (a modern N64 clone), complete with cartridge, packaging and manual! ↫ Dominic Szablewski The article details the development process, from setting up the correct tooling to actually getting the game to play on a real Nintendo 64, and everything in between – including optimising the game to get it to run at a steady 60fps.
Lord of Light (Avon Books, January 1969). Cover by Ronald Walotsky His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam.
Carbon savings from driving EVs are so large that it makes sense to scrap a working petrol car to make the switch
Much remains unclear, but Russia's improving relations with Morocco and a recent energy deal offers a partial explanation of recent events
An AI model from DeepMind can predict cyclones three days ahead with a level of accuracy that previous models can only hit a day later
This year has left mathematicians reeling as AI models are increasingly solving seemingly intractable maths problems. Terence Tao, the world's leading mathematician, says a rethink of the entire field is the only way out of the crisis
The widespread belief that some foods benefit from a night in the fridge has been put to the test, and it seems to be true for some curries, but not lasagne
Combining archaeological evidence with ancient DNA and data on past climates shows us how long and winding the story of human evolution is, stretching back millions of years to when the first primates arose
Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, has been updated with the release of Milestone 41. According to the release notes, it contains the latest security fixes from Illumos, but beyond that it’s just a number of small point releases for certain components.
A study involving 12,000 adults in the US suggests that taking action to prevent dementia during your 50s can make a big difference later in life
I’ll be taking your questions live on Zoom tomorrow, Thursday 6 August.
This will be one of three postings on U.K. author John S. Glasby (1928-2011). Glasby, surprisingly, had two parallel careers. After graduating from college, he had a long career as a research chemist and mathematician.
Executive Summary:
- Microsoft disclosures and Bloomberg analyses show that OpenAI's compute spend and revenue share accounted for 70% or more of Microsoft's FY26 AI revenues, and more than 7% of Microsoft's overall FY2026 revenues.
- Microsoft has spent $261.3 billion in capital expenditures since
Altering the gut microbiomes of people with peanut allergy using faeces donated from an allergy-free individual improved their peanut tolerance in a clinical trial
Although David Smith’s work in the Robert E. Howard Universe is memorable, his best creations to me are his original stories of Attluma. Attluma is an island continent that evokes the spirit of Atlantis.
The devastating wildfires in Europe demand urgent measures to make landscapes more resilient, but without action to reduce use of fossil fuels, the danger is only going to increase
This week's cartoon from Twisteddoodles
Tom Gauld's weekly cartoon
Humans can see water but not air. So can fish see air? And would it be possible to have anti-black holes, and how could we tell if we were looking at one?
Readers continue to give their examples of dogs who do notice passing aircraft – but also put forward some ideas as to why they generally don’t
A reader weighs in on this one – and finds it will depend on how far you’re travelling
Readers debate how the introduction of bicycles and trains will have led to less closely related prospective partners for our ancestors – and consider various royal dynasties from this perspective
In a flash, I was 16 or 17, at my friend’s house round the back of King’s Cross, and trying to work out what in the world to do next. A link from Gwern had sent me to The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds, in which David Hill took his chances at a Diplomacy tournament.
Those days, we didn’t know we were nerds, let alone alpha nerds.
It has been assumed for decades that tick and flea treatments for pets pose no threat to wildlife or people, but there’s growing evidence that we have got it wrong
People appear to prefer short stories created by AI over those written by humans. They are also no better than chance at telling which is which
Few things in technology are more complex, convoluted, and riddled with literally decades of drama than the Amiga community. Luckily for all of us, a significant step forward has been made today: several of the key corporate players in the community have struck agreements to settle their legal disputes.
Don’t have enough computing devices on your wish list yet? Do you have a need for a graphing calculator? No? What if it can run Linux and even Windows 10? I see I’ve got your attention. The HP Prime is a graphing calculator on the market since 2013, with a hardware revision in 2018 (the G2 model).
Want to switch to 9front, especially with the new release having just been made available, but really need Wireguard? Fret not! Wireguard is now available on 9front, experimentally.
Today, I wanted to show you one of the most fascinating and surprising operating systems ever created. It’s not another Unix, Linux, or Windows. It is an architecture that went its own way and proved that systems engineering design can look completely different.
The laws of physics seemed to forbid a strange variety of black holes that could have zero temperature. Columnist Jacklin Kwan explores research that shows these strange behemoths can really exist – and how they could test the limits of thermodynamics
If you liked this piece, you should 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
Botanists have finally proved what Charles Darwin was unable to nail down – that a genus of plants known to catch insects also digests them, suggesting the extent of plant carnivory has been underestimated
A few years ago, psychologist Sherman Lee experienced a "grief attack". When he set out to study them, he discovered just how powerful and all-consuming grief can be
From which diets work best to the ethics of octopus farming, here’s Liz Else’s round-up of the most interesting popular science books published this month
Having been away from home for a bit, and with nobody here to keep the crows coming by, it took a few days to reestablish our relationship.
Lost solar power due to smoke blocking the sun cost Europe and North America nearly $2 billion in 2023 alone
For the first time since records began, there was no rain at all for parts of southern England and Wales in July, in a “truly exceptional” month of heat and sunshine
Good afterevenmorn Readers! This is going to be a personal post, brought on by the various, incredibly depression discussions around A.I. and artistic creation. As I’m primarily a writer, or, at least, I’m hoping to make a living as a writer.
Join me for another "Ask Me Anything" session this Thursday at 12PM PT / 3PM ET
Jacob Tsimerman won a Fields medal last month – now he is leaving mathematics to work on AI safety
Ten conundrums that stumped human mathematicians for years have been cracked by OpenAI's Astra model, continuing a hot streak of AI-driven breakthroughs that are shaking up the field
The best operating system in the world, 9front, released its latest version, “THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN”. As I’m sure you know, 9front is a fork of plan9, and one that’s actually consistently maintained and developed.
AI chatbots can describe reality in words, but don’t truly understand cause and effect in the real world. Now, a fresh kind of machine intelligence that does just that is emerging
From Europe’s security to China’s global ambitions, the key conversations and lessons that shaped my month.
A beach umbrella might protect you from sunburn, but when it comes to keeping you cool, it makes surprisingly little difference
I picked up A Clue to the Copper: The Complete Cases of Silver Skull by Richard Howells Watkins, published by Steeger Books as part of its Argosy Library series. This volume collects a short, three-story series featuring the adventures of the Silver Skull that ran in Detective Fiction Weekly in 1933.
Cameron Kaiser’s articles are always a right treat, and this one’s no different. It’s about running MkLinux on the Apple Workgroup Server, the regular Mac rebadged into a server product and predecessor to Apple’s first real server product, the Apple Network Server running AIX.
Whenever the EU steps in to regulate the big technology companies, the response from news outlets and bloggers (often funded or outright owned by right-wing extremists) is to claim it’s just a bunch of dumb , tech-illiterate bureaucrats telling the vastly more intelligent and superior technology companies what to do.
This updated essay, a comprehensive chronology, and a Q&A which Steve Hockensmith kindly did with me, represent the deepest dive anyone has done on the terrific Holmes on the Range series. It incorporates all the novels and short stories featuring Otto and Gustav Amlingmeyer, as well as the two novels and one short story for the spin-off Double-A Western Detective Agency.
Beef-liver supplements are said to be more effective at raising iron levels than standard tablets, but is it true? Columnist Alice Klein looks into the evidence behind the claims
This news, which is called true, is so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion. Second Gentleman, Act V Scene ii Over the past several years, I’ve written about three of Shakespeare’s plays; The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Macbeth.
This post is the second in a series reflecting on the world of 1923 as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in February of 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine.
During the heyday of AT&T, it was often said that the telephone system was the
largest machine ever built. The "hello machine" certainly was vast, but whether
or not you consider it to be a single machine raises challenging questions of
definition.
NetBSD, the operating system specifically designed to run on anything from a supercomputer to a toothpick, just released version 11.0. There’s a ton of changes and improvements here, such as a brand new port to RISC-V, which supports a number of the more popular RISC-V SoCs (sadly, not the one I have just yet).
I have a policy to effectively never link to YouTube videos. I’ll gladly make an exception for this one. Reflection is one of the most powerful concepts in Computer Science. Unfortunately, not every programming language is blessed enough to have it.
In case somebody wonders about the 5-digit issue numbers:
We use the issue tracker not only for bugs, but also for feature ideas, remembering TODOs, user support, discussing stuff, etc.
Also, code updates (pull requests) and github discussions share the same number space.
Currently working on borg 2.0.0b23.
Sneak peek: it will be faster!
- zstd and blake3 internal multithreading for big chunks
- by default don't assert id == id_hash(plaintext) for the hot read paths when we already did AEAD authentication
- avoid refetching/reparsing repeated chunks
- serve all-zero chunks without repository access; also cache recently parsed chunks
- likely the default chunker will switch to fastcdc
Steel Beach (Ace Books, August 1993). Cover by Todd Cameron Hamilton My hot take for 2026: books are ephemeral. Old news, perhaps, but did any spec-fic writer know this better than John Varley? In 1992’s Steel Beach, he positively revels in his own unimportance while offering blistering, adroit editorials on everything from indolence to anatomy.
Fascist empires and deadly sea monsters are on offer in the science fiction out this month, says Alison Flood
Tcl, or the “Tool Command Language“, created and released by John Ousterhout in 1990, deserves a place among the greatest products of the human mind. Especially when combined with its better known graphical user interface Toolkit — Tk.
Paradoxically, suppressing wildfires has also made European countries more vulnerable to huge blazes like those seen in France and Spain this week. With global warming also amplifying the danger, some experts are calling for a change of strategy
A great deal of the discussion of the so-called benefits or problems with AI comes down to the theoretical jobs that are (or are not) lost as a result of things LLMs can (or cannot do), or the equally theoretical productivity benefits that’ll come from using LLMs
Global warming may make it too hot for malaria-carrying mosquitoes to survive in parts of Africa, but could also shift the problem to less affected areas
Speaking of OpenBSD: Yes, you read that right. Modern development tools in the form of the LLVM compiler infrastructure is well on its way to supporting OpenBSD/sparc64 along with other more conventional architectures.
Protein is everywhere, but studies – mostly in non-human animals – suggest that limiting our intake could extend our lifespan
As I mentioned in my OpenBSD 7.8 highlights post, development of relayd(8) and httpd(8) had stalled. Many diffs appeared on the tech@ mailing list from different contributors, but few were committed into the repository.
Surgery that aims to enhance the clearance of Alzheimer's-associated proteins from the brain has been banned in China, but only after thousands of people had the procedure
He was asked to discuss policy like an adult and - surprise! - proved incapable of doing so.
He was asked to debate like an adult. And he turned into even more of a child.
This week starts a brief period where these explorations are going to be shorter, for many of these authors have little biographical information available. In the 1972 anthology Clarion II, Damon Knight included an essay entitled “Goodbye, Henry J.
The total solar eclipse on 12 August will only be visible to a lucky few, but eclipses happen all over the world – here are the next ones to look out for, wherever you may be
In this extract from Peter Heller’s novel, the August read for the New Scientist Book Club, we are introduced to pilot Hig, who lives alone after most of the world was killed in a superflu pandemic
Set in an empty world after a superflu pandemic wipes out most of humanity, Peter Heller's The Dog Stars - the August read for the New Scientist Book Club - will be released as a film later this month.
To predict when we’ll have a truly useful quantum computer, we need to know precisely what one is. Columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan finds that’s harder to pin down than you might think
Concluding the thing I started three entries ago, I've replied to
the pile of email I'd let accumulate. And I'm really pleased with
my new hand-rolled personal contact database...
When I had to use Windows 11 for a month because you people paid me to do so, the one seemingly small thing that really ground my gears were Windows 11’s terrible right-click (context) menus. They were full of stuff I didn’t put there, slow to open, and in some places, a modern Windows 11 context menu would have its own old Win32 context menu with even more stuff.
We may all have a disdain for Chrome – OSNews users probably use Chrome a lot less than the average public – but that doesn’t mean the browser doesn’t sometimes do interesting things other browsers should copy.
We all have bits of DNA from a long-lost “ghost ancestor” inside us – and by putting all the different bits together, we might be able to reconstruct their genome
The mummies of two people who lived in Chile more than 400 years ago carry DNA from smallpox, providing the first molecular evidence that the virus was brought to the Americas from Europe
Genetic tests of mammoth remains have found a stark contrast in the sex ratio between sites where the animals died naturally and those associated with humans, offering hints about how our ancestors hunted
A tiny sensor that unfolds within the body could continuously monitor our heart activity and breathing after showing promise in rats
Rebecca Skloot told the story of Henrietta Lacks and how her cells were taken without her permission in a bestselling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Reading it left Alison George with an uneasy feeling - so she spoke to Lacks's family
Networks of pipes carrying chilled water have proven to be an efficient way to cool hospitals and universities. Now, they are expanding into cities as heatwaves increase in the US and Europe
A treatment that turns off the bit of the immune system that goes haywire in Guillain-Barré syndrome may be the first targeted therapy approved for the autoimmune condition
