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
Three problems that are out of reach for conventional computers have been cracked by quantum computers and show how important the machines could become for scientific research
Certain sleeping positions can lead to babies developing flattened heads, and an analysis of ancient skulls from Italy reveals that this condition affected people in the 9th century BC
The cosmological principle is the foundation of modern cosmology – but its usefulness doesn’t necessarily make it true, says columnist Leah Crane
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! (for at least three months from its posting date) Interconnected via a theme involving a Crown We round up groups every several weeks, but check the Chain Story website for the latest.
A stunningly intact marine reptile named Austronaga minuta that lived around 245 million years ago may have looked like a miniature version of more famous later ocean predators, like plesiosaurs
A recording of my recent talk at the Aspen Institute
There was unusual consensus amongst New Scientist Book Club members about our read for July, with readers falling over themselves to praise this big-concept slice of science fiction
Measures like bans on advertising junk food to children are essential for instilling healthy eating at a young age, but we shouldn't let adults off the hook when it comes to improving our diets
This week's cartoon from Twisteddoodles
Tom Gauld's weekly cartoon
Feedback is delighted by a deep dive into why people sometimes wear "artificially elongated fingernails". But does it do more than just scratch the surface?
If the sun suddenly disappeared, how long would life on Earth last, from humans and plants to subterranean bacteria? And why do humans so readily adopt fiction into our lives, and feel emotion about characters as though they were someone close to us in real life?
An Australian reader with an abundance of flies in their locality tries to answer a question that has intrigued many of our readers
In early 2026, Charles F. Millhouse, creator of New Pulp character Captain Stephen Hawklin, came out with a new collection of short stories set in the 1930s: The Classic Adventures of Captain Hawklin, one for each year from 1930 to 1939.
It’s that time of the week again, I guess. The year is 2026, and I’m still amazed when I find a new entry in my Start menu’s All apps list for an app I don’t remember installing. This time, it’s Microsoft again, and the product is OneDrive Photos, which appears to be yet another photo viewer and editor for Windows 11 that nobody asked to have installed automatically.
Ubuntu Touch, the mobile Linux operating system originally started by, you guessed it, Ubuntu, but now managed by UBports, released versions 24.04-2.0 and 24.04-1.4. The latter is a maintenance release with some bug fixes and minor changes, while the former is a bigger release with quite a few improvements, so let’s focus on that one.
I’ve been fascinated by the idea of attaching multiple mice to one computer, and then having multiple mouse cursors inside of one desktop environment! I just spent three weeks investigating how well that’s currently supported on Linux & Wayland.
Last summer, I noticed an insect bringing a bit of leaf to plug the hole in a bit of bamboo that is part of one of those folding director’s chairs.
This wasn’t my original plan for this guest post. The day before writing this, I was interviewed for the Functional Nerds podcast. During the interview, cohost Tracy Townsend brought up my recent Uncanny Magazine editorial where I said, “Nobody would call a yearly referendum about whether or not your business should exist a stress-free process.” Tracy wanted to know why I kept doing this if that’s the case.
Parker’s first appearance: The Hunter (Pocket Books, 1962) What is it? Parker begins! He’s angry. He’s determined. He’s out for blood. And he’s got big hands! He’s walking across the George Washington Bridge into New York, scaring motorists who glimpse him out the window as they drive by.
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
A jaguar that has been dubbed Gaspar traversed 2100 kilometres of the Amazon, crossing farms and roads. But why he set off on this mission is unclear
Rats are a scourge on island wildlife all over the world. But an island off the coast of Ireland is showing how to successfully gain the upper hand
Climate change is affecting the yields and flavour of the traditional Japanese tea matcha, but studying its seedlings' genetic tolerance for heat could future-proof the crop
After the Chicxulub impact 66 million years ago, trillions of tonnes of rock vapour was launched into space before falling back to Earth at ballistic speeds, creating a global blast of heat strong enough to broil life on land
Flame-generated thunderstorms known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds can make wildfires even more intense, and they are expected to become more common in Europe
The first of a new generation of drugs that works in a completely different way to existing ones has been approved. Columnist Michael Le Page says this approach could transform treatments for all kinds of conditions
Dave Farquhar published an article today about Windows NT 3.1’s place in the market when it was originally released, and while the article is interesting and a fun read, it does mention this: Microsoft took its nascent code that it intended to form the base of OS/2 3.0, renamed it Windows New Technology, and eventually released it as Windows NT 3.1.
