In central Laos, the landscape is littered with enormous stone jars, some 3 metres high, and we may be closer to understanding how and when they were used
To celebrate my 21 years and 20000 posts as OSNews’ managing editor, it’s time for a massive fundraiser: €1 for every story I’ve posted over the past 21 years, for a long-term total goal of €20000.
Big news from the Haiku forums: the Haiku ARM port is running on M1 Macs now. This is bare metal, no VM. m1n1+u-boot deal with the Apple-specific parts of booting, so we can boot UEFI images from USB like any PC.
Despite the pomp and ceremony, the summit made little progress in advancing American national interests—at least for now
Maui in Hawaii experienced some of the worst wildfires in US history in 2023. Amid concerns of a PTSD epidemic, floatation tanks are being deployed to the island to help restore people's mental health
Scientists recently gathered for a conference called Love, Actually and in Theory, but didn't settle on a definition of the topic at hand
Work, illness, divorce: life is riddled with stressors out of your control. But research is revealing new ways to cope with these challenges and find hope instead of despair
I’ve seen some wild projects in my day, but this one is definitely up there as one of the more ambitious. Stock Microsoft Windows CE 2.11 running on a real Nintendo 64. A custom HAL drops the unmodified nk.lib kernel onto VR4300, brings up the CE 2.11 GWES desktop and shell, mounts the EverDrive-64 X7’s SD card under \SDCard, treats the N64 controller as a mouse, plays sound through the N64 AI hardware via the standard CE wave stack, and runs third-party CE 2.11 EXEs straight off the SD card.
There is one specific way in which the non-corporate open source projects typically document how their infrastructure work: not at all, and Flathub is no different. The full picture likely lives only in my brain, and while it could be sorted out by anyone (especially in this LLM age, yay or nay), why should it only be me thinking at night about all the single points of failure? Like any system that evolved naturally, it’s all over the place.
Microsoft is finally rolling out one of the most requested set of features to Windows 11: a movable and resizable taskbar. Windows 11 did away with the ability to move the taskbar to any side of the screen, as well as a various other taskbar customization options, that had been there since the very first iteration of the taskbar in Windows 95.
Why have so many people become fixated on protein? Donald Layman is one of the people behind the research showing the benefits of getting more protein in your diet, but he thinks things have gone too far and wants to set the record straight
The fifth volume in the chronological reprinting of Semi Dual stories from Steeger Books came out last year. I am holding off on the three Semi Dual serials that were reprinted from later in the series.
A little-known strain of Ebola virus is behind an ongoing health emergency, prompting researchers to call for the acceleration of vaccine candidates against such infections
We think of our body clock ticking over on a 24-hour cycle, but evidence is growing that it has seasonal rhythms, which could affect our response to vaccines
It’s mid-May, and I’ve been in something of a hardboiled mood lately. So with Summer looming, here’s a Black (Gat) in the Hand. More Pulp is coming, like a gumshoe with a gasper and a rod. I am fortunate to be part of a star-studded roster of writers who provide intros to Pulp reprints from Steeger Books.
The floating ice shelf of world’s widest glacier – Thwaites glacier in Antarctica – is detaching, with worrying implications for global sea-level rise
Inside some very special black holes, there may be a boundary called a Cauchy horizon. Columnist Leah Crane explores the place beyond which physics breaks and anything is possible
There are few authors whose works bring me greater joy than Roger Zelazny. Zelazny was a master of craft and style who could present in a terse style that seamlessly evolves into evocative prose without any awkwardness or jarring transitions.
From Dark Horse Comics and DC comes Superman Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle, written by Chuck Dixon with interior art by Carlos Meglia. Cover art on the original issue covers was by Humberto Ramos. This is a 3-issue comic arc that riffs off the original Tarzan story by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Almost exactly 21 years ago, in June 2005, at a mere 20 years old, I took over the managing editor role at OSNews from Eugenia. I had already published a few articles in the years prior, and had given Eugenia enough confidence to suggest me as her replacement.
In Ladakh, Himalayan wolves are increasingly breeding with feral dogs, giving rise to a new animal known as khipshang that could injure humans and outcompete other carnivores
Google recently launched something called Health Coach, an “AI” thing that’s part of the company’s new Fitbit products. Let’s check in with how that’s going. Put simply, Google’s paid replacement for Fitbit Premium immediately began hallucinating, even admitting to having made up the data before asking if, you know, maybe I’m the one who actually forgot to input a run.
One of the top pieces of customer feedback in the graphics driver area is clear: “Windows Update downgrades my drivers.” Today, we are announcing a policy change to how display drivers are published through Windows Update — allowing 2-Part HWID + Computer Hardware ID (CHID) targeting for new devices.
Every day I read some sort of wrongheaded extrapolation about the future of AI — that today’s models are somehow indicative of AGI creating a “permanent underclass” of people that stops people from building software companies, or really doing any kind of job on the computer:
Adding olivine to the ocean could remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and a pilot project in New York state found no signs of adverse effects on seafloor organisms
A record-breaking new version of Starship, due to launch within days, could form the basis of NASA's ambitious Artemis programme that aims to put humans back on the moon as soon as 2028
Global warming already threatens to destabilise the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, and new research shows that regional clean-air policies could reduce its strength further
It's been a week of chaos, but there is now a pathway to change. And with change, there's hope.
It's been a week of chaos, but there is now a pathway to change. And with change, there's hope.
If Paul W. Fairman’s name is known, it is likely as an editor or the ghostwriter who wrote several of the juvenile novels published under Lester del Rey’s name when the latter author suffered from writers block.
CAR T-cell therapy has been hugely successful in treating certain types of tumours, and stiffening up cancer cells beforehand could make it even more effective
People who imagine their self to reside in their head or their heart have different approaches to life. Columnist David Robson explores the benefits of learning to shift where you sense your self, and how this practice could improve your relationships and decision-making
No comment on this PR may mention the following topics:
- Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs
- The environmental impact of LLMs
- Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output
- Moral judgements about people who use LLMs
We have asked the moderation team to help us enforce these rules.
– Add an LLM policy for rust-lang/rust, GitHub
The performance of blake3 multithreaded is very impressive:
hmac-sha256 1.00 GB 0.327s <-- with hw accelerated sha256
blake2b-256 1.00 GB 0.952s <-- pure sw, used in borg 1.x
blake3 1.00 GB 0.442s <-- pure sw, single-threaded
blake3-mt 1.00 GB 0.078s <-- pure sw, with MT.
#blake3 🚀 🚀 🚀
The EU’s Digital Markets Act has been in effect for a mere two years, but despite all the obstructionism, malicious compliance, and steady stream of lies from US tech companies and Apple in particular, it seems this rather basic consumer protection legislation is already bearing fruit.
I started intentionally looking for science fiction to read in elementary school. Our city library had one big room full of fiction for young readers, from preschool through high school, so I found books that were meant for readers older than I was — but I enjoyed reading them, even if I didn’t understand everything that happened to their protagonists.
Looks like rust platform support (blake3-py is implemented in rust) is good now for most platforms.
Couldn't solve the rust-related issues on Haiku OS yet though.
Interest in classic user interface design is spiking, and today we’ve got another great example, highlighted yesterday by Micheal MJD. Classic 7 combined Windows 10 LTSC with a whole slew of themes and deep modifications to deliver Windows 10, but made to look, feel, and even act like Windows 7.
The creaky noise known as vocal fry that people generally associate with young women – and some find irritating – is actually more common in men
Partially burnt trees still standing after a wildfire are typically felled and burned, but a US start-up claims burying them instead will trap the carbon underground for centuries
What use is a quantum computer? Perhaps both more and less than you think, according to quantum computing expert Shayan Majidy
Seismic surveys and sediment cores suggest that dozens of deep pockmarks on the sea floor were created when Arctic methane stores were disrupted by climate change after the last glacial maximum – and scientists warn it could happen again
Muscle stem cells, which are crucial for building new muscle, don’t work as well as we get older, but giving them an artificial boost could rejuvenate them
A couple years before I got my first GPS watch, this was how I tracked my workouts:
This was a ‘10k’ (ish) run. Based on my understanding of what someone had told me was the course of a local 10k race.
To be honest, it worked just fine. I'm not sure adding GPS and other sensors for a multitude of advanced metrics has made me any fitter than I would've been if I'd just continued running with my old iPod Nano in hand. But it does make my workout log look a little better, so there's that.
The months, they don’t stop coming, so here’s another progress report for Haiku, our beloved successor to BeOS, the best operating system ever made. This past month the team’s added basic support for SMP on ARM64 (enough to use it in QEMU), the MIME sniffer’s internals have been overhauled for some serious performance gains, and a long list of smaller, but no less important or impactful, changes.
The Iron Tower Trilogy: The Dark Tide, Shadows of Doom, and The Darkest Day (Signet, August 1985, September 1985, and October 1985). Covers by Alan Lee I recently posted some of my thoughts about High Fantasy.
The European Union is considering rules that would restrict its member governments’ use of U.S. cloud providers to handle sensitive data, sources familiar with the talks told CNBC. ↫ Kai Nicol-Schwarz at CNBC The fact that this has only just become a possible reality now, and not decades ago, is beyond me, but better late than never, I suppose.
A Neanderthal tooth shows clear signs of human intervention to treat bacterial decay, showing that the earliest dentistry began at least 59,000 years ago
Winner of an environmental photography award, this shot of a sea turtle seen under ultraviolet light shows how forensic evidence is being used to help catch poachers and animal traffickers
A study of soils around the Arctic and boreal forests has found that some wildfires are releasing carbon stored over millennia, meaning higher CO2 emissions than assumed
Rowan Hooper met ecologist Suzanne Simard under an oak tree in Kew Gardens, London, to talk about her new book, criticism of her work, and getting a call from James Cameron's people
The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week
Why did humans decide they weren't like other animals, or animals at all? Has this exceptionalism twisted us out of shape? Michael Bond's book Animate offers a page-turning account of where we are now
Scientific disciplines often shy away from asking fundamental "what if" questions. But philosophy – if unencumbered by dogma or ideology – has much to offer evidence-based enquiry
Asteroid 2026JH2 will zoom past Earth at a distance of only 90,000 kilometres next week. It has enough mass to wipe out a city, but simulations suggest there is no chance of an impact for at least the next century
Asteroid 2026JH2 has enough mass to wipe out a city and will zoom past Earth next week
After a career spent grappling with the neural underpinnings of autism, Uta Frith is unwavering in her controversial call to scrap our current view of the condition and start again
Six teeth roughly 400,000 years old have yielded some of the first ancient proteins thought to belong to Homo erectus, providing molecular clues to their relationships with other hominins
Genetically altered bacteria can synthesise gadusol, a naturally occurring compound found in zebrafish eggs that could be developed as an alternative to existing sunscreen products that can harm marine life
This time I look at a fanzine that just recently ended, The Paperback Fanatic. Produced by Justin Marriott, it focused on, of course, paperback book collecting. It’s one of several such fanzines he has put out over the years.
Government departments and other public bodies in the UK must consider requests to release information about AI-produced content, regulators have confirmed. The move follows a successful request by New Scientist for the release of a minister's ChatGPT logs
A few weeks ago, we talked about a project within KDE to revive two of their classic themes, Oxygen and Air, and polish them up to make them usable on the current versions of KDE. The developers and designers working on this project say they’ve been utterly surprised by just how popular this news has proven to be, and Filip Fila published a blog post with some thoughts on this unexpected popularity.
The news that Google is working to move Chrome OS to the Android technology stack, and that it wants to start putting Android on laptops, is not exactly news, as the company has been talking about it for years.
Trump is weaker, and Xi is stronger, since their last summit in Beijing. But the U.S. does not have to remain in this state of weakness forever.
If you liked this piece, 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 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI&
We’ve long tried to control the weather by engineering rainfall. Now such cloud-seeding efforts are escalating, creating conflict between countries and stoking conspiracy theories. But do they work?
Carbon credits bought by companies to offset their emissions really have reduced deforestation, but not by as much as credit developers claim, according to a rigorous analysis
There's a chance for decorum and perhaps even a bit of dignity. It's fading fast.
PCOS will now be known as PMOS (polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome), and for Alice Klein, who has the condition, it's been a long time coming
The concept of a field plays a key role in particle physics, but what exactly is it? From its origins in the study of magnetism to the quantum fields of today, columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein goes exploring
Good afterevenmorn, Readers! This past Saturday, I headed out with a few of my martial arts students, past and present, to watch the second installment of the recent Mortal Kombat adaptations. I’m not going to lie, the draw for me was the involvement of Karl Urban as Johnny Cage.
Gases collected from boiling mineral springs in Zambia contain the chemical signature of having come directly from the Earth’s mantle, a sign of a rupture in the tectonic plates and the possible beginning of a new continental boundary
Every single software product is dealing with the question about what to do with “AI”-generated code, but the question is particularly difficult to answer for open source operating systems like Linux distributions and the various BSDs, which often consist of a wide variety of software packages from hundreds to thousands of different developers.
Microsoft is currently testing a brand new performance-enhancing feature in Windows 11. Microsoft, too, is introducing something to Windows 11 called “low latency profile” and it this will work irrespective of the processor, be it AMD64 CPUs like Intel or AMD or ARM64 ones like from Qualcomm.
Microsoft acquired GitHub and applied their unique brand of enshittification. Amongst their achievements was the spawning of the Copilot circle of hell. Now they’re effectively DDoSing themselves with slop.
An analysis of ancient human artefacts finds that the container, a simple but critical tool, may have originated 500,000 years ago. Columnist Michael Marshall explores how slings, ostrich eggs and wooden trays helped our ancestors survive
A US start-up is putting autonomous data centres in the ocean, powered by wave energy, but experts warn that the harsh environment could make maintenance challenging
The rules governing gravity and other laws of nature seem like eternal truths, but cosmologist João Magueijo has always questioned their origins. Now, he has a bold new proposal
After the release of The Singular Papers of Solar Pons, the next collection of new stories by David Marcum, we got the next issue of the scholarly journal devoted to Solar Pons: The Pontine Dossier, Millennium Edition, Vol.
Genetic analysis of 1039 people buried in Britain between the Bronze Age and the Norman conquest highlights the impact of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings on the island’s ancestry
So, last week, I talked about ten movies that you can stream for free over on Tubi. I could easily list ten or twenty more. There’s a lot of good stuff there. I’m also watching TV shows on Tubi. Of course, a multiple season show takes a lot longer to work through, than a single movie.
Big news from the Debian release team: Debian is going for reproducible package builds. Aided by the efforts of the Reproducible Builds project, we’ve decided it’s time to say that Debian must ship reproducible packages.
ymawky is a small, static http web server written entirely in aarch64 assembly for macos. it uses raw darwin syscalls with no libc wrappers, serves static files, supports GET, HEAD, PUT, OPTIONS, DELETE, byte ranges, directory listing, custom error pages, and tries to be as hardened as possible.
Ada is incredibly well designed. One way this shows is that it takes the big, monolithic features of other languages and breaks them down into their constituent parts, so we can choose which portions of those features we want.
Sculpt OS, the operating system based on the various components that make up Genode, has seen a new release, 26.04. A lot of the new features and changes to Genode that we’ve been talking about for a while now are part of this release, most notably the new human-inclined data syntax that replaces XML as the configuration language for Genode.
Sprite scaling. It is the coolest effect of the 2D arcade era, a must-have for games from Space Harrier to Real Bout Fatal Fury Special. Home consoles pretty much lacked it– sorry, Nintendo, but Mode 7 only scales a background, not sprites.
A veritable cornucopia of dodgy barbarian and barbarian-adjacent movies that I have never watched before, and will probably never watch again. Enjoy Part One here. Gor (1987) – USA/Italy Another nail in the Cannon coffin lid, this effort to start a franchise based on the uncomfortable series of novels by John Norman spawned one sequel, and then went belly up before things could get worse.
A deeper discussion of the arguments behind this week’s essay on Russia’s mounting political and economic pressures.
Minuscule silicon wafers propelled by lasers could be used to steer light sails, helping them travel beyond the solar system
The Vanishing Tower (DAW Books, June 1977). Cover by Michael Whelan Here’s another in my series of reviews of “mostly obscure” 1970s/1980s books — the last one was of Evangeline Walton’s The Children of Llyr.
