We've perhaps been conditioned to not ask too many questions, in case it comes across as rude or prying. But columnist David Robson argues that asking people open-ended questions benefits our wellbeing, and doesn't have to be complicated
Learn the lore and allure of Black Gate! Building on our June 2026 coverage of The Legend of Top-Shelf Books Open Mic, the near-mythical, yet true, confluence of many Black Gate contributors and authors, this Dark Muse News post corners Chief Editor John O’Neill to detail the history of the magazine.
Memories in mice persisted even after they lost the connections that we thought were needed for recall, expanding our knowledge of memory in the mammalian brain
Highlights from conversations about democracy, autocracy, American foreign policy, and the new global disorder.
Descent passed from mother to daughter rather than from father to son, a study of more than 500 Iron Age individuals from north-east England suggests
Analysis of a mathematical puzzle that Leonhard Euler deemed unsolvable in the 1700s reveals that the crucial ingredient for cracking it after all is quantum entanglement
Photographers in Spain captured spectacular images of the rare alignment of the moon and the sun, as it cast a dark shadow over much of the country
The critical current could remain stable beyond 5°C of warming, but only if the warming happens very slowly
Almost all mammals give birth rather than laying eggs, and we have new clues about when they began to do so
Another month started almost two weeks ago, so we’ve got a new monthly report from Redox, the general purpose operating system written in Rust. The month of July – it seems the report was published with a bit of a delay, regardless of what the date on their site says – brought improvements to the installer, with new options commonly found in most installers, such as a choice of installation method, network-based installation, and more.
How Komatsu machines help build Atlassian Williams F1 Team’s FW48
David C. Smith also wrote a trilogy of fantasy novels under the collective heading of The Fall of the First World. These were all released in 1983 from Pinnacle Books and are: 1. The Master of Evil, January 1983.
The OSNews Fundraiser, to celebrate the fact I posted 20000 stories in 21 years, is still underway. The first major incentive was reached, and I, a long-time Linux user, published my experiences using Windows 11 for a month.
Raymond Chen explains what, exactly, the file winstart.bat in Windows 95 is used for. In Windows 95, you could create a winstart.bat file in your Windows directory. During startup, the virtual machine manager initializes and creates the so-called “System virtual machine” (the “System VM”), which is the virtual machine that all Windows programs run in.
Delphi is still very much a thing, and still very much in active development. The current stewards of Delphi, Embarcadero, released the Delphi 13 Community Edition today. Delphi Community Edition is a full-featured, free edition of Delphi for building native applications with the Delphi language.
Pushing a pram while running may reduce the force produced with each foot strike, decreasing the risk of injuries
That’s one of the questions my Stanford colleague Stan Christensen challenged me to address on his All Things Negotiation podcast.
OpenAI and its competitors want to dictate the role that artificial intelligence will play in our society – it's time to take back control of the narrative
This week's cartoon from Twisteddoodles
Tom Gauld's weekly cartoon
Feedback is a little nonplussed by an experiment that involved wearing (or not wearing) compressing shapewear, and then playing cards
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?
Our readers do the maths on what one of their mothers calls the family forest
One reader explains how the moon’s drift will lead to longer (and warmer) days
I have previously posted on the excellent juvenile series starring The Three Investigators. Created in 1964 by Robert Arthur Jr., a former pulp author, this series had Jupiter Jones, Peter Crenshaw, and Bob Andrews, all living in California near Hollywood.
Does this thing still work?
Edit: Apparently yes, it does still work.
The slow but steady march to the grave for the Android Open Source Project continues. Every few months Google hammers another big nail in the coffin of Android as an open source effort, and I’ve documented them all here on OSNews (nail, nail, nail, nail, nail), coming to the conclusion long ago that for all intents and purposes, Android is no longer an open source operating system.
The GNOME Shell user interface has mostly seen minor refinements and quality of life updates in recent cycles, but on the design side we’ve explored a lot of longer-term things we’d like to do. Some of these we have relatively complete plans for, others are more vague ideas that need more research and prototyping.
Payback: Theatrical Cut and Straight Up (The Director’s Cut) 1999 theatrical release; recut, direct-to-home-video DVD in 2006. Written by Brian Helgeland (with Terry Hayes) and directed by Brian Helgeland (with Paul Abascal).
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
Bacteria-killing phage viruses souped up with DNA-destroying CRISPR appear to have helped clear up a very serious infection caused by antibiotic-resistant E. coli
Having surgery for a heart condition is thought to have triggered an immune response that put the patient into remission for his severe skin cancer, but also caused him to develop a serious allergy to bee stings
Two research teams have independently created devices within which sound waves could be separated by frequency, creating the most complete sound rainbows yet
I have 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.
This was bound to happen. According to a new report from Taiwanese publication United Daily News (UDC,) Microsoft is raising the cost of Windows license fees for hardware makers by a much higher amount than normal.
I found some ambiguous wording in the c89(/c90) standard, where GCC and Clang disagree on the interpretation. It concerns the behavior of implicit function declarations, which were removed in c99, so this was never disambiguated.
Enlightenment desktop is a low on resources desktop environment without sacrificing on visuals. NetBSD support for this BSD-licensed desktop has been left a few years behind. The aim of this project is to port the newest version of the desktop to pkgsrc and commit upstream portability fixes when necessary to ease future versions updates for NetBSD.
Akihabara, Tokyo’s famous “Electric Town,” is overflowing with foreign tourists these days, drawn by anime shops, maid cafes, and duty-free electronics megastores. But there is one storefront most of them walk past without a glance: Akizuki Denshi Tsusho.
Two leg bones found on the seabed near Taiwan have been identified as Denisovans, and their size suggests these hominins stood up to 190 centimetres tall
A total solar eclipse is set to be visible across parts of Europe, while a partial eclipse will sweep across about a quarter of the planet – here’s how to catch it
Our understanding of the internal structure of protons is largely based on classical physics, but data compiled from accelerator experiments has uncovered quantum behaviour that has never been seen before
The standard model of physics is one of the most successful scientific theories in existence, but do we need it all? Columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein explores whether it’s carrying any excess baggage
Cookies are ancient technology, and in no way necessary of even particularly desirable to track you. Modern fingerprinting doesn’t need them at all. A live demonstration of everything a website learns about you before you click anything with no cookies.
Keeping pets seems to be fairly recent behaviour in the timeline of human evolution. Columnist Michael Marshall turns to the latest research on primates to understand how long we’ve had the impulse to adopt furry friends
Over the last nine months, I’ve travelled the country to speak about the ideas in my book, Autocrats vs. Democrats. Here are my biggest takeaways.
Since the 2000s, our light exposure has changed drastically as we make our buildings more energy-efficient. Now, we’re discovering how this may mess with our mitochondria, contributing to diabetes, dementia and more
H. Warner Munn (1903-81) was an author of horror and fantasy works, and a member of the Lovecraft circle of friends. He is probably best known for his early work for Weird Tales. His most well-known works are “Tales of the Werewolf Clan” and his unfinished “Merlin’s Godson” series.
There are measurable changes in the way we run when we are short of sleep, which give us a clearer picture of how a lack of shut-eye affects our risk of injury
Back in 2014, Microsoft released the source code to the first Windows version of Word, version 1.1a. Now, Justin Marshall has ported this code to modern versions of Windows, so you can run it as if it were any other modern application.
Top supplier of great articles Nicole Branagan is at it again. We’re back into the strip mahjong games today, here going back to 1991. Video System is a company that’s probably best known in retro-gaming circles for Aero Fighters/Sonic Wings, but mahjong games (usually branded Idol Mahjong) were one of their bigger moneymakers.
A salt-loving microorganism found in places like the Dead Sea can not just survive but actively grow in conditions close to those that may be found just under the Martian surface
In an election, how can you make sure that everyone's votes are counted but also kept entirely secret? Quantum mechanics may have the answer
“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun.
John Crowley has died, at 83. He was my favorite living writer, and remains one of my favorite writers of all time. He was born in 1942 in Maine, and grew up in Vermont, Kentucky and Indiana. He went to the University of Indiana, then to New York, originally with a goal of working in film, and indeed he has written numerous scripts for documentary films.
The second issue of Weird Tales, on sale from March of 1923 through to April, looked much like the first: a pulp magazine 6 and a half inches by 9 and a half, with 192 pages. The black-white-and-red cover was more striking than the previous issue’s, with the main image contained in a thick red frame, and the date and price more easily visible under the title.
The Year’s Best Horror Stories XVI (DAW Books, October 1988). Cover by J.K. Potter The Year’s Best Horror Stories: XVI was the sixteenth in the lineup and the eighth volume edited by the great Karl Edward Wagner (d.
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act keeps delivering for EU citizens. Apple is working on a new feature that will support cross-device copy and paste between iOS devices and Windows PCs. Microsoft asked for the feature using Apple’s EU interoperability request system for developers, which Apple implemented to comply with the Digital Markets Act.
IceWM, the venerable X11 window manager, has put up a new maintenance release, version 4.1.0. It’s got a small number of fixes, two very minor new features, as well a few updated translations. That’s it.
A good month, much of it away from home where, happy to relate, most of the plants survived the endless heat; heat that has been the worst of the time at home.
Highlights of the month:
- The Umbrian week continued into July
- Real lamb for one dinner, not too-young abbacchio
- Kinda sorta got into attempted macro photography
- Bad computer trouble with overheated SSDs, but recovered
- Grape harvest; a little sharp but better than letting the birds feast
- A night in Bari and a week in Puglia
- BirdNET now configurable as a USB gadget and available via Tailscale
- Emergency visit back to Umbria; good to be wanted and useful
- Got phished; phuck
- Launched into Couch to 5k.
Listening to James G talking to Rachel on the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast, one thing in particular caught my attention, and that was when she was telling James about her studio.
A small trial suggests a supplement containing dead bacteria could offer a cheaper alternative to weight-loss drugs such as semaglutide, but further evidence is needed
The CMS engine that drives this site — Grav — has now been updated to version 2.0.18. Kudos to the Grav team for a very smooth process, very well explained.
We've become obsessed with the past and fallen out of love with the present
Mullets, Oasis and lava lamps: We've become obsessed with the past and fallen out of love with the present
An out-of-control SpaceX rocket that crashed into the moon earlier this week did, in fact, leave an impact crater, according to images from a Korea AeroSpace Administration lunar orbiter that caught before-and-after photographs
John T. Phillifent was born in Durham, England on November 10, 1916. As with last week’s entry, Henry J. Kostkos, Phillifent worked as an electrical engineer. Although Phillifent wrote some short fiction and three The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Researchers are investigating whether artificially thickening ice blockages between Canada and Greenland could prevent huge amounts of sea ice from flowing south to melt
High temperatures and low water levels have forced several countries to shut down nuclear reactors just as citizens turn up their air conditioning, forcing energy prices to spike and raising the threat of blackouts
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.
