The errors that quantum computers make are holding the technology back. But recent progress in quantum error correction has excited many researchers
The president is obviously out of his mind. So why don't investors seem to care?
There is no strategy to what the White House does. There is no calculation. There is no sense of logic or application. It is a fucking madhouse.
Toys powered by AI show a worrying lack of emotional understanding. But we need to understand the risks and benefits of the technology so the industry can be regulated, not outright banned
Body mass index (BMI) is used as a global standard for measuring health, but does it actually tell you anything about how healthy you are on an individual level? Carissa Wong explains the problems with this flawed tool
The story of a wildflower that adapted to a severe drought in California raises hopes that evolution will come to the rescue of species hit by climate change, but there are limits
Two popular quantum computing algorithms for problems in chemistry may have very limited use even as quantum hardware improves
Fentanyl-related overdose deaths fell by nearly 30 per cent in the space of a year in the US, which could represent a significant turning point in the country's opioid addiction crisis
Star Nathan Fillion is stoking rumours that cult western-in-space television series Firefly could be rebooted. Emily H. Wilson realises she is being toyed with – but is still praying for its return
Teenagers are being bombarded with highly targeted commercial content on TikTok, despite an EU law that prohibits profiling minors for advertising
Black Gate has been tracking the inception and growth of New Edge Sword & Sorcery (NESS) mgazine, starting with Micheal Harrington’s 2022 interview with Oliver Brackenbury (champion and editor of NESS), through 2023 with NESS’s first two magazine releases (also Greg Mele’s review of #1), and then into 2024 with NESS’s first book “Beating Heart and Battle Axes and its two-novella combo book Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery, and then in 2025 we covered NESS‘s publication of a NEW Jirel of Joiry tale! (2025) and we interviewed one of their...
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Jonas Hieatala in A work week one bag travel:
I’ve been spending five nights away 4–5 times a year on business travels. It’s not a crazy amount but also not negligible, so I figured it’s worth trying to optimize them a bit.
Like Jonas, I travel occasionally for work. (Coincidentally, a few of my travels are in Sweden, too!) Although I've travelled for two nights at most, switching to "one bag travel" took a bit of adjusting.
However, nowadays I wouldn't entertain the idea of checking in luggage or carrying anything else than my backpack kit when I go on these trips. It's a much more convenient way of travelling. This walkthrough from Jonas covers the aspects you have to think about when travelling this way.
My best tip is merino wool t-shirts, sweaters and socks. No problems reusing these items multiple days without washing, which saves quite a bit of space.
Red Hat developer Marcin Juszkiewicz is working on the RISC-V port of Fedora Linux, and after a few months of working on it, published a blog post about just how incredibly slow RISC-V seems to be. This is a real problem, as in Fedora, build results are only released once all architectures have completed their builds.
When you mention John Jakes (1932 – 2023) to the average reader, they’ll probably come back with, “The Kent Family Chronicles guy?” or “the guy who wrote that North and South trilogy they made that mini-series from?” I have some of those books but I’ve never read them.
Now let’s go live to Amazon for the latest updates about this developing story. Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.
Strong magnets tend to be large and power-hungry, but a new design has produced a powerful magnet that fits in the palm of your hand, making it more practical and affordable
Longer summers are allowing more king penguin chicks to bulk up and survive the winter, but the penguins' main fishing area is shifting further away as temperatures rise
Deep canyons in the Andes are the perfect location to catch the most energetic particles in the universe. Carlos Argüelles-Delgado reveals how these intergalactic envoys could help prove the quantum nature of gravity
The reliable internet connections provided by Starlink offer a huge advantage on the battlefield. But as access is dependent on the whims of controversial billionaire Elon Musk, militaries are looking to build their own version
In addition to The Paperback Fanatic, Justin Marriott has put out several other fanzines. Another is Pulp Horror, which I believe has run for eight issues. From No. 5 on, they have been available via POD on Amazon.
The "world smells different" for people with Parkinson's disease, a discovery that could help doctors spot the condition sooner
Two mass strandings involving hundreds of dolphins in Argentina probably happened because the pods were being hunted by orcas, highlighting the role of predators in these mysterious events
Sid in ai;dr:
For me, writing is the most direct window into how someone thinks, perceives, and groks the world. Once you outsource that to an LLM, I'm not sure what we're even doing here. Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write?
What he said.
After resurrecting this blog back in 2023, the first book I wrote about was James Islington's The Will of the Many. I gave it a solid 3 out of 5 and concluded:
…there’s much to explore still, and I’m excited to see how Islington will build on this solid foundation in the books that follow.
The Strength of the Few is the second of four planned books in Islington's Hierarchy series. It came out late last year. As Islington, to my knowledge, does not maintain a website or blog with an RSS feed, I'm not able to keep up with his writing progress. Instead, I only discovered the new book when visiting a local book store with my kids. The Strength of the Few was given ample premium shelf space in the middle of the store. That was the first time I realised just how popular The Will of the Many must have been.
Later that same day I tried to purchase the e-book to add it to my library. I was sad to discover that there were no DRM free options. In fact, for someone located in Norway, Amazon was the only legal option for acquiring the e-book. As I try to avoid spending my hard earned money adding to Jeff Bezos' vast fortune, I gave up and instead bought a second hand copy of the paperback. It arrived in my within a couple of days, and I was off to the races.
Quite literally, as the book features an actual race scene quite early on. It sets the scene for much of what's to come in this particular branch of the story. And, yeah, that's where things get a little complicated. Without wanting to spoil too much for someone who's not read the book, it consists of three stories that evolve in synchronous fashion.
Although each storyline is designated with a particular icon, it took me more than half the book to remember which was which. Instead, I relied on the actual content of the chapters to orient myself. It wasn't too challenging, but at the offset I felt like I was floundering a bit while trying to keep up with what was going on where. A key reason is that it's been a couple of years since I read the predecessor. Strength picks up where Will left off, and it is a direct continuation. The references to the events of the previous book are numerous and mostly presented without any further explanation. As I had forgotten far more than I remembered about The Will of the Many, this doubtlessly made it harder for me to properly enjoy The Strength of the Few from the get go.
About a quarter of the way through, however, I began feeling like I had enough context to follow the story properly. And the book became much more enjoyable.
The three different stories are distinct and compelling in their unique ways. Where one is dystopian and strange, another feels intimately humane and recognisable. And both spring from a central story set in what's probably closest to the world we live in today. Islington's approach felt like a fresh take on telling an overarching story that I hadn't encountered before.
Speaking of, the connective storyline is interesting and kept me guessing and speculating along the way. While there is still much to be revealed — Strength feels like a classic middle book in that it begins and ends in the middle of the story — fantasy fans will see further homage to Brandon Sanderson in "the big reveal" we're treated to towards the end of The Strength of the Few.
I thought this book was a step up from its predecessor. The story feels more compelling, the way it is told more unique, all the while building on that which made The Will of the Many such a success. Anyone who picks up The Strength of the Few will, however, be well served by watching or listening to a recap of the first book before beginning. Or, better yet, treat themselves to a reread.
Either way, I'm really excited to see where James Islington takes the story with the next book in the series.
Back in 2023, John Earnest created a fun drawing application called WigglyPaint. The thing that makes WigglyPaint unique is that it automatically applies what artists call the line boil effect to anything you draw, making it seem as if everything is wiggling (hence the name).
Redox, the rapidly improving general purpose operating system written in Rust, has amended its contribution policy to explicitly ban code regurgitated by “AI”. Redox OS does not accept contributions generated by LLMs (Large Language Models), sometimes also referred to as “AI”.
Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my work, 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 5000 to 185,000 words, including vast, extremely
Good afterevenmorn, Readers! I’ve been receiving a great many emails of late, of a kind that I’m sure many authors are getting, and I think I should probably talk about it, because it’s all such a scam.
When New Scientist reporter James Woodford was assigned to a story about a virus designed to kill rabbits, he never expected to be accused of spreading it
Statistics that quantify a person’s predisposition to diseases such as diabetes and cancer can be reverse-engineered to reveal the underlying genetic data, prompting privacy concerns
Cortical Labs is building two data centres that will house its neuron-filled chips. The technology is still in the very early stages of development
Cortical Labs is building two data centres that will house its neuron-filled chips. The technology is still in the very early stages of development
While FreeBSD 15.x may be getting all the attention, the FreeBSD 14.x branch continues to be updated for the more conservative users among us. FreeBSD 14.4 has been released today, and brings with it updated versions of OpenSSH, OpenZFS, and Bhyve virtual machines can now share files with their host over 9pfs – among other things, of course.
Mushrooms have been used by ancient humans for millennia, but archaeologists have only just uncovered their pivotal role in shaping civilisation
A rapidly brightening burst of light called AT 2024wpp, or "the Whippet", is baffling astronomers. One explanation is that it is the result of an exotic star falling into a black hole
I had previously posted on the excellent Illustration magazine, published by Illustrated Press. It was published quarterly for several years and then ended with issue No. 84 in 2023. It featured articles on a variety of illustration artists who did advertising art, book and magazine covers, and interior artwork, including some pulp magazine artists.
Ryan Gosling stars in the latest adaptation of an Andy Weir novel, another tale of a lone genius battling to survive in space. Bethan Ackerley thoroughly approves
Figuring out what really counts as a galaxy could give us insights into dark matter and potentially shake up astrophysics, cosmology and particle physics, says columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
The speed at which artificial intelligence is gaining in mathematical ability has taken many by surprise. It is rewriting what it means to be a mathematician
An analysis of ancient and modern DNA suggests the extent of convergent evolution in different peoples around the world is even greater than we thought
Charlie Gammell joined me again to discuss the latest in Iran
Changing your mind about the goals of war after you’ve started one is never a good idea
While IBM’s OS/2 technically did die, its development was picked up again much later, first through eComStation, and later, after money issues at its parent company Mensys, through ArcaOS. eComStation development stalled because of the money issues and has been dead for years; ArcaOS picked up where it left off and has been making steady progress since its first release in 2017.
Oh boy. Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI “hallucinations,” or errors, to the resulting article.
Every modifier key starts simple and humble, with a specific task and a nice matching name. This never lasts. The tasks become larger and more convoluted, and the labels grow obsolete. Shift no longer shifts a carriage, Control doesn’t send control codes, Alt isn’t for alternate nerdy terminal functions.
Say what you like about Netanyahu, but he's known what he wanted for years
US-Israeli strikes on oil facilities have caused black rain to fall on Tehran, but the black smoke filling the air is likely to be a bigger health risk
Their species name is well known, but until recently we’ve understood very little for certain about Homo habilis. Columnist Michael Marshall reveals what new fossils are telling us about the hominins that have been considered the first humans
MenuetOS, the operating system written in x86-64 assembly, has released two new versions since we last talked about it roughly two months ago. In fact, I’m not actually sure it’s just two, or more, or fewer, since it seems sometimes releases disappear entirely from the changelog, making things a bit unclear.
We’re learning that frailty can quietly arrive decades before old age, with some people in their 30s or 40s unknowingly in a pre-frail state. There are surprising ways to stay strong – and it’s not all about weight training
Taking a multivitamin every day might slightly slow the rate of ageing, but the extent to which this is relevant to our health is unclear
I continue taking a look at the pulp fanzine The Shadowed Circle with the most recent two issues. The focus of this fanzine is, of course, The Shadow, and I subscribed for issues #7 through 8. While you can get the issues from Amazon, I’d rather subscribe because you get some extras, plus they come […]
Some Samoyeds adjust the pitch of their howls depending on the music being played, showing a form of vocal ability they might have inherited from their wolf ancestors
A single femur found in Bulgaria appears to represent an ape or early hominin that walked on two legs before any known African hominin, but the evidence is far from conclusive
SETI has spent decades listening for a sharp, well-defined radio signal that could indicate it was sent by distant intelligent life. Now researchers believe that space weather could distort and blur such signals – meaning SETI has been scanning for the wrong thing
I’ve read 24 books so far this year, and 17 were audiobooks (we’ve already established I’m not going to say ‘books consumed.’ Listening and physically reading are distinctive, but they’re interchangeable here).
Sonselasuchus cedrus, discovered in fossils from Arizona, was a crocodile relative from the Triassic period that grew into an ostrich-like adult
From beside the queen Gawain to the king did then incline: ‘I implore with prayer plain that this match should now be mine.’ Somehow, I’ve never read Prof. Tolkien’s, let alone anyone’s, translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th cent.), an English poem written by an unknown poet.
Remains, issues 4 and 4. Cover art by Richard Wagner There are readers who, like me, prefer dark fiction in short form, because their suspension of disbelief is too brief to sustain — with a few exceptions — a full novel.
Chris Maddison was just an intern when he started working on the Go-playing AI that would eventually become AlphaGo. A decade later, he talks about that match against Lee Sedol and what came next
It's been 10 years since Go champion Lee Sedol lost to DeepMind's AlphaGo. Has the technology lived up to its potential?
And when a Redox monthly progress report is here, Haiku’s monthly report is never far behind (or vice versa, depending on the month). Haiku’s February was definitely a busy month, but there’s no major tentpole changes or new features, highlighting just how close Haiku is to a new regular beta release.
February has been a busy month for Redox, the general purpose operating system written in Rust. For instance, the COSMIC compositor can now run on Redox as a winit window, the first step towards fully porting the compositor from COSMIC to Redox.
NASA’s DART mission slammed into the small asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, and the impact slowed its orbit around the larger Didymos – and also the pair’s path around the sun
Watch or listen to my discussion with Peter Robinson about today’s autocratic leaders and the implications for U.S. foreign policy.
Looking for molecular evidence of life on other worlds is tricky, but a test based on the reactivity of carbon compounds could be a useful indicator
Persistent inflammation in the gut, lungs and skin might lead to Alzheimer's disease, but lifestyle choices - from getting vaccinated to eating well - can keep inflammation under control
A new book from Rebecca Solnit, promising to bring us hope in these “difficult times”, is among our pick of popular science titles out this month – along with a guide on how to talk to AI, and a look at modern warfare
Models show that as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation gets weaker, the Gulf Stream will drift northwards. There are signs that this is already happening, and a more abrupt shift could warn of more severe climate impacts
Since 2014, the planet has been warming by about 0.36°C per decade, according to an analysis of five temperature datasets, raising fears that climate tipping points could be crossed earlier than expected
Theodora McCormick was born on September 14, 1890 in Brooklyn, New York. Her father died when she was a year old and she was raised by her mother and stepfather. She attended the Barnard School for Girls in Manhattan and the Halsted School in Yonkers.
What do a 20th-century physicist, an 18th-century statistician and an ancient Greek philosopher have in common? They all knew how to extrapolate with incredible accuracy. Columnist Jacob Aron explains how to combine their methods to improve your ability to guess
Everyone knows Yuri Gagarin as the first person to go to space. But was he? Literary historian Vladimir Brljak tells the tale of the intrepid balloonists who first flew beyond the blue terrestrial sky, challenging the definition of where our world begins to end
They don't know what they want to achieve, why they're doing it or what the consequences might be. They are lost in the void.
The war in Iran is a new kind of conflict. It lacks any sense of meaning. It lacks any single articulable objective or even a motivating incident. It is taking place beyond the shores of reason.
Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers (Avon Books, 1964) “I know who you are now,” said Nurse Philliter, slowly. “You — you gave evidence against Sir Julian Freke. In fact, you traced the murder to him, didn’t you?” In Unnatural Death, the third Wimsey novel, Sayers again makes medical issues vital to the plot and the mystery.
One day, I suddenly wondered how to detect when a USB device is plugged or unplugged from a computer running Linux. For most users, this would be solved by relying on libusb. However, the use case I was investigating might not actually want to do so, and so this led me down a poorly-documented rabbit hole.
Oracle’s Solaris 11 basically comes in two different flavours: the SRU (Support Repository Update) releases for commercial Oracle customers, and the CBE (Common Build Environment) releases, available to everyone.
In the world of open source, relicensing is notoriously difficult. It usually requires the unanimous consent of every person who has ever contributed a line of code, a feat nearly impossible for legacy projects.
The memory management in DOS is simple, but that simplicity may be deceptive. There are several rather interesting pitfalls that programming documentation often does not mention. ↫ Michal Necasek at the OS/2 Museum A must-read for people writing software for earlier DOS versions.
A ring of 13 carbon atoms and two chlorine atoms has a remarkable molecular structure that means you would have to go around the loop four times to return to your starting position
Taking psilocybin – the psychedelic component of magic mushrooms – eased symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder among people who did not respond to conventional treatments, and the effects lasted at least several months
Indigenous people in Papua, Indonesia, have helped scientists track down two animals that were thought to have gone extinct thousands of years ago: a relative of Australia’s greater glider and a palm-sized possum with a bizarre, elongated finger
The Alzheimer’s field is being turned on its head as mounting evidence points to the disease beginning outside the brain many years before symptoms start. This may mean we have to totally rethink how we approach preventing and treating the condition
What’s the scroll lock key actually for? Scroll Lock was reportedly specifically added for spreadsheets, and it solved a very specific problem: before mice and trackpads, and before fast graphic cards, moving through a spreadsheet was a nightmare.
Apple today announced the “MacBook Neo,” an all-new kind of low-cost Mac featuring the A18 Pro chip for $599. The MacBook Neo is the first Mac to be powered by an iPhone chip; the A18 Pro debuted in 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro models.
My writing, interviews, and events from February 2026
An exceptionally flexible region of the spine enables falling cats to twist the front and back halves of their body sequentially to ensure a safe landing
Feedback is pleased to discover another delightfully unconventional unit of measurement, which is used to convey amounts of snow on Ottawa's Rideau canal
If up to 20 per cent of us really do score highly on traits related to psychopathy, we are going to need all the help offered by a compelling new book. Start by admitting your own dark traits, finds Sally Adee
The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week
