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
Most coastal risk assessments have underestimated current sea levels, meaning tens of millions of people face losing their homes to rising waters earlier than expected
Towards the end of 2025, we got the fourth volume of Wild Inc. by Jack MacKenzie: Go, Johnny Go. The covers, both front and back, are clearly inspired by the Bantam Doc Savage volumes, as the main character and organization are a loose pastiche of Doc.
The end-Permian extinction 252 million years ago wiped out over 80 per cent of marine species, but many ecosystems still had complex food webs despite the losses
AI chatbot Claude going down is just one example of a recent IT outage. One of the main vulnerabilities of the modern internet is to blame for the growing number of incidents
Is an evil moron less dangerous than an evil genius?
Microplastics have been found accumulating everywhere from our water to our body tissues, but many of the claims have come under fresh scrutiny. Chelsea Whyte cuts through the research to tell you whether you really need to worry
I don’t systematically collect comic book materials but I pick up Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard related stuff when I see it. Found all three of the Marvel paperbacks above at various book sales.
Chips and Cheese has an excellent deep dive into Arm’s latest core design, and I have thoughts. Arm now has a core with enough performance to take on not only laptop, but also desktop use cases. They’ve also shown it’s possible to deliver that performance at a modest 4 GHz clock speed.
Fifteen months have passed since our last Guix/Hurd on a Thinkpad X60 post and a lot has happened with respect to the Hurd. And most of you will have guessed, unless you skipped the title of this post, the rumored x86_64 support has landed in Guix! ↫ Janneke Nieuwenhuizen and Yelninei at the Guix blog A huge amount of work has gone into this effort over the past 18 months, but you can now download Guix and alongside the Linux kernel, you can now opt for the Hurd as well, in eother 32bit or 64 bit flavour.
A recording from Michael McFaul and Katie Couric's live video
The 13th Warrior (102 minutes; 1999) Written by William Wisher and Warren Lewis. Directed by John McTiernan Based on the novel, Eaters of the Dead, by Michael Crichton, who also served as a producer and uncredited director.
A method for making quantum computers less error-prone could let them run complex programs such as simulations of materials more efficiently, thus making them more useful
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A family in Utah with a disproportionate number of boys has been traced back over hundreds of years, revealing that its lack of female members is probably due to a selfish Y chromosome
Analysing the births of a Utah family over seven generations has revealed that their disproportionate number of boys could be caused by a selfish Y chromosome
From the cost of childcare to the housing crisis, there’s no shortage of explanations for the dramatic global fall in the number of babies being born. These analyses, though, are all missing something, says cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist Paula Sheppard
The microbes that live in our mouth and gut may influence whether an allergic reaction to peanuts is mild or life-threatening, and could be harnessed to ward off a severe attack
The US and Iran are trading blows in the Gulf with a simple drone that costs as little as $50,000 to make. But why is a slow, cheap and relatively primitive drone seeing use in 2026 alongside hypersonic missiles and stealth jets?
The science writer delves into the vast subject of consciousness in his new book A World Appears – and draws some surprising conclusions, finds Grace Wade
Shaped by a different biology or culture, other intelligent civilisations – if they’re out there – might understand the universe in a completely different way than we do. Physicist Daniel Whiteson explores what that could tell us about physics and ourselves
Drones aren't yet licensed to carry passengers, but some may already be airlifting wounded personnel off the battlefield and could be employed for smuggling people
Derek Sivers in Offline 23 hours a day:
Not so long ago, this was the norm. You’d go online to get what you need, then disconnect.
Honestly think this might be the way to go. The being disconnected for most of the day part. The moving into the woods part is optional, I think, but good for you if you can swing it.
Have you bought and set up a new phone for someone else lately, especially someone less technologically savvy? It’s a bit of a nightmare, with an endless list of confusing steps and dark patterns trying to trick you into signing up for all kinds of services.
The fall of tyrants must always be celebrated. The hard part is what comes next.
Microsoft is pushing “AI” hard in Windows, Office, and in their other products, and it’s earned them a cute new nickname: Microslop. It turns out the company really doesn’t like it when you use this nickname, however, and its official Copilot Discord server – yes, there is an official one – has gone into a complete meltdown over people using the nickname.
Physicists are scrambling to understand why dark energy is weakening. In a surprising twist, we must now reconsider the possibility that our reality contains extra dimensions
Last year, our most detailed map of the universe yet suggested our understanding of dark energy has been wrong for decades. The shock result is reigniting the search for a better cosmic story
Black holes that turn matter into energy could explain dark energy and answer two other cosmic questions. Now, the challenge is to find them
This is a New Scientist special package about shock results that have upended cosmology. What do they mean for our models of the universe, and what are the alternative explanations?
When I was reading the recent work by Marcos Legaria on Robert Barlow, The Man Who Collected Lovecraft, I read of an incident when the young Barlow had a dealing with another young fan that went sour. And I learned that a book about this fan’s life had been published by one of his sons, […]
Putting silicate rocks from mine waste on fields could improve crops and limit global warming, but some researchers question where all that rock is going to come from
If you’re following KDE Plasma development, you’ve most likely run into something called Union, a project KDE is working on to unify their various ways of theming their applications. The problem KDE is facing right now is that after so many decades of development and changes in how people want to develop applications, they ended up with various different ways of writing applications, each with their own theming method.
Fungus-farming ants have evolved a remarkable solution to the danger of excess carbon dioxide inside their nests – which could inspire ways for humans to capture CO2
The most comprehensive study to date has revealed what we need to eat throughout the day to sleep well that night
The latest in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series is out this month, along with a speculative retelling of Moby-Dick and a forgotten classic from 1936
Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk have become geek icons. A Knight’s Tale, Castle, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Resident Alien, The Rookie: they’ve built successful careers over the years. Their real-life friendship, and their nerdy idol status, tracks back to Firefly.
Cables underneath New York City are teeming with entangled quantum particles of light thanks to Qunnect, a company that has spent a decade working on building an unhackable quantum internet
Magnesium has been called the “super mineral of the moment”, hailed for its supposed benefits for the brain and body. But columnist Alice Klein finds that the evidence is lacking for many of these claims
I had no idea, but apparently, you can just use newline characters and tabs in URLs without any issues. Notice how it reports an error if there is a tab or newline character, but continues anyway? The specification says that A validation error does not mean that the parser terminates and it encourages systems to report errors somewhere.
If there is one group of people that deserve more praise in the literary community, it’s translators. Recent years have shown us just how vital they are to our bookshelves and TBR lists. Its them we have to thank for every Roadside Picnic and Eternaut that dares to tantalize English speakers the world over.
I'll be out early on Monday morning
Are you not at all interested in upgrading to macOS Tahoe, and getting annoyed at the relentless notification spam from Apple trying to trick you into upgrading? The secret? Using device management profiles, which let you enforce policies on Macs in your organization, even if that “organization” is one Mac on your desk.
If this isn’t catnip to the average OSNews reader, I don’t know what is. Windows 95 is a comprehensive upgrade to the Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 products. Many changes have been made in almost every area of Windows, with the user interface being no exception.
Bootc and OSTree represent a new way of thinking about Linux system deployment and management. Building on container and versioning concepts, they offer robust and modern solutions to meet the current needs of administrators and developers.
Tom’s Crossing (Pantheon, October 28, 2025) Every now and then I reach for a copy of Anna Karenina on my TBR bookshelf, but hesitate to wonder, “Do I really have time to get into this kind of heavy reading of some 800 plus pages right now?” So far, the answer has been, “No.” I really do intend to get to it at some point because, well, it’s Anna Karenina.
What I knew about Sinners before watching it:
Things in Sinners I didn't like:
What a movie. Score is absolutely spectacular.
It's not often I buy new stuff. Just compare my tech stack from December 2025 to what it looked like in December 2024.
Today, though, I made the leap and acquired a new piece of gear!
I bought the Airpods Pro shortly after they were released, in 2020. I've been rocking them since. They've been solid, and well worth the outlay. Except for the microphones, which have been useless for years. That means they're pretty useless in a office setting.
I do have an old pair of Bose QC25, but the cable went years ago and the cheap Bluetooth adapter I bought a few years ago doesn't have enough juice to last through a medium duration meeting. The end result is that I've been using no headphones at all for a few years. That's not really a big issue when I'm at the home office and there's nobody else in the house. When I'm in an open office landscape, though, it's impractical and impacts my ability to concentrate.
As a result, I've been thinking about acquiring a new pair of headphones for years. Throughout this period I've at various times thought about getting a new pair of Airpods Pro, a pair of regular Airpods, the Airpods Max, considered at least a couple of options from Bose, something from Jabra and, most recently, the Nothing Headphone (1).
When I finally decided to pull the trigger, I ended up with the Sony WH-1000XM5:
Being a previous generation product, the price was alright; well under half of what a pair of the MX6 would've cost me. Looking forward to giving these a proper spin the next few weeks, at home and in the office.
The file system of the Windows operating system is NTFS, whether you’re running it on a desktop/laptop or server. It’s the only file system Windows can run on and boot from, at least officially, so you’re not even given a choice of file systems for the boot volume like you are on, say, desktop Linux.
Encryption backdoors, social media bans for children, creepy age verification for applications – what will they think of next? The latest brilliant idea by US lawmakers sure is a hell of a doozy: legally mandated age verification in every single operating system.
FreeBSD has its jails technology, and it seems NetBSD might be getting something similar soon. Jails for NetBSD aims to bring lightweight, kernel-enforced isolation to NetBSD. The system is intended to remain fully NetBSD-native.
A recording from Michael McFaul's live video
Join me for a discussion as we mark four years of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine
We have a global intelligence crisis, in that a lot of people are being really fucking stupid.
As I discussed in this week’s free piece, alleged financial analyst Citrini Research put out a truly awful screed called the “2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” — a slop-filled scare-fiction
As it faces yet another set of delays, NASA’s Artemis programme is being shaken up, delaying an actual moon landing in favour of smaller, faster steps forward
Frailty can typically only be lessened through lifestyle changes, but a stem cell therapy seems to target the underlying causes of the condition, boosting the mobility of frail older people
Neuron-powered computer chips can now be easily programmed to play a first-person shooter game, bringing biological computers a step closer to useful applications
Pouring 65,000 litres of sodium hydroxide into the Gulf of Maine removed up to 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere without harming wildlife, according to the researchers behind an ocean alkalinity enhancement test
Sterner St. Paul Meek was born in Chicago, Illinois on April 8, 1894. He earned as associate of science degree from the University of Chicago in 1914 and continued his education at the University of Alabama, becoming a member of Phi Beta Kappa and earned a bachelor of science in metallurgical engineering.
The dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid, but does that mean we risk suffering the same fate - and should you be worried about the possibility? Leah Crane sets the matter straight
The New Scientist Book Club enjoyed our February read, Tim Winton's far-future-set Juice. Head of books Alison Flood rounds up member thoughts
As the New Scientist Book Club embarks on its read for March, Art Cure, author Daisy Fancourt gives a sneak preview into the myriad ways in which the arts can improve our health
In this extract from Daisy Fancourt's Art Cure, the March read for the New Scientist Book Club, we learn about how art classes transformed life for Russell after he had a stroke
Secret-keeping evolved to maintain social harmony, but it can weigh heavily on us when we can’t stop thinking about them. So, what is the best way to deal with things that we don't want anyone else to know?
Superconducting computing circuits were briefly heralded as the future of computing in the 1980s. Columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan visits a quantum chip foundry where one company is betting this technology’s second act will revolutionise quantum computers
It is a tool, not a replacement.
It is a tool, not a replacement.
The older I get, the more obvious the devastating effects of alcohol become. Even a fairly modest amount, two to four units, leaves me feeling pretty wrecked, pretty quickly. Not just the evening of and the day after. The mental side effects of feeling despondent and generally down linger for days.
I don't indulge too often, but even five to six times per year is starting to feel like too often. Might be time to ditch it altogether.
In the United States, we are losing our fondness for cash. As in many other
countries, cards and other types of electronic payments now dominate everyday
commerce. To some, this is a loss. Cash represented a certain freedom from
intermediation, a comforting simplicity, that you just don't get from Visa.
The congenital condition spina bifida is often treated surgically in the womb, but many children still go on to have mobility issues. The addition of a patch made up of stem cells from donated placentas could improve their long-term outcomes
The Genode OS Framework 26.02 has been released, and its tentpole improvement is the completion of moving configuration from XML to the new human-inclined data syntax, as we talked about a few months ago.
You may not be aware that FreeBSD has a pretty robust set of tools to run Linux binaries, unmodified. The result? A fast, smooth, fully-featured remote development experience on FreeBSD running Linux binaries transparently via the Linuxulator.
It seems the widespread efforts in Europe to drastically reduce its dependency on US technology companies is starting to worry some people. President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered U.S.
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 Stories are being released every few weeks.
