A series of experiments shows that bees respond differently to tastes depending on their internal states, hinting that they have something akin to our emotions
A cave on the Turkish Mediterranean coast was inhabited first by Neanderthals and then Homo sapiens, but the continuity of tools and personal objects suggests there was some sharing of culture between the two species
In our efforts to keep our brains healthy, how do we know what is working? Helen Thomson explores a new generation of tests that can reveal whether our efforts are paying off
How much sunscreen should you be using, when should you apply it, and are there any downsides to doing so? Skin cancer expert Rachel Neale is here to answer all of these questions and more
Dr. Skull is a serialized thriller from Lewis Clay that ran in 10 issues of Detective Fiction Weekly from Sept. 17, 1938, through Nov. 11, 1938. It was cover-featured with the first installment, and this cover is used by Steeger Books for this addition to its Argosy Library.
A TED talk and then a film, William Kamkwamba’s story of how he worked to provide his rural Malawian village with electricity has now been turned into a musical – and it mostly works, says Bethan Ackerley
The fate of the Atlantic Ocean current that keeps Europe’s climate warm depends on our carbon emissions and the rate of ice melt from Greenland, but there is a chance that a shutdown is already inevitable
“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.
Our brains are large compared with other animals, so it is tempting to assume there was an evolutionary advantage to them – but that may not be true at all
Some marathon runners and other athletes swear by beetroot juice shots, but is there evidence they really do anything for our bodies? Columnist Alice Klein investigates
AI companies are hiring philosophy graduates to help them understand the nature of consciousness, whether it can be replicated and how their systems can be made better and more reliable
Wherever in the world you go, the smartphone landscape is dominated by Android and iOS, and while this has always been problematic, recent events have made the dependency on two American tech giants for what is probably our most personal computing device even more problematic than it already was.
Colour me positively surprised, as I had no idea Alpha emulation had progressed this much. As you might know, I’m involved a bit in the OpenVMS community and the Alpha emulation side via AXPBox. AXPBox (github) is a fork of the es40 alpha emulator by Camiel Vanderhoeven (who is now Chief Architect at VSI, the company that makes OpenVMS, for x86 nowdays).
LineageOS, the de-Googled Android ROM that serves as the backbone for pretty much the entire custom Android ROM community, has published an article about what the Android developer verification changes mean for them.
The Nintendo Entertainment System. Is it the platonic ideal of an 8-bit video game system? Well, only because it’s so prominent and successful– it’s actually kind of an oddball in its expandability and design.
BorgBackup 2.0.0b22 is coming soon (few days to 1 week), including support for packs, improving speed and efficiency of remote repositories!
Due to the big repository/storage changes, it will likely have bugs - help finding them!
Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1955. Cover by Ed Emshwiller Who’s ready for another retro-review of Galaxy Science Fiction? (You are!) And here it is — the April, 1955 issue. The intense cover is “Hostile Reception on Aldebaran” by Ed Emshwiller.
It was six years ago. Six years. Do you remember? Do you remember the lockdown summer of 2020? Things may have been easing up by then where you were, but here in California the ball was just getting rolling.
In 1914 the Department of the Interior, through the Bureau of Reclamation,
investigated the possibilities of developing the Columbia River. Thousands of
arid but potentially fertile acres needed only water to become the Imperial
Valley of the Northwest.
A fairly big moment for the ReactOS project: it has just received its very first system call from NT6. The system call that has been added is NtGetCurrentProcessorNumberEx, which is used for returning the processor number of the logical processor that a caller is running on.
An experiment that involved feeding a dead goat to a Komodo dragon as well as an analysis of thousands of ancient bones suggests that Homo floresiensis was neither a skilled hunter of big game nor a master of fire
The annual reception at Spaso House was more than a party. It was a showcase of the culture, values, and democratic ideals that gave America influence far beyond its military might.
Earth was once covered by a global magma ocean, which later cooled and crystallised – now traces of this primordial event have been found in magma from a young volcano in the Indian Ocean
For how often people invoke it, the concept of “hell” in Christianity is remarkably vague and nebulous, as both the Old and New Testament barely go into detail about the concept. As such, I’m glad Microsoft has now given us a clear vision of hell and what, exactly, it looks like, ending centuries of denominational disagreements.
NetBSD is the only BSD without a Vulkan stack (Mesa and Lavapipe), but that’s about to change. The effort to bring Vulkan to NetBSD is now in beta, with prebuilt binaries coming soon. Mesa configures, compiles, links, installs, and registers the Lavapipe software Vulkan driver on NetBSD 10.1 amd64, against LLVM 19.1.7.
EveryMac turned 30. On July 2, 1996, EveryMac.com launched. Thirty years is a long time — and a great deal has changed since then — but what has not changed is that EveryMac.com has been there to provide you with detailed info on every Mac from the original 128k to the current line.
Leah Bodine Drake was born on December 22, 1904 in Chanute, Kansas to Thomas and Cornelia (née Bodine) Drake. Her father worked in the oil industry. Drake was sent to the Oakhurst School for Girls in Cincinnati and later attended Hamilton College, a junior college operated by Transylvania University, in Lexington, Kentucky as well as Sayre College in the same city.
A very fine month indeed, in all sorts of ways. There was a cinema visit, a birthday party, many meals with friends, and a growing sense of contentment with the life I am privileged to enjoy
Highlights of the month:
Guerilla gardening, still surviving
Moved from idno to micro.blog
BBQs on the terrace
Snagged a lovely bamboo stick for Qi Gong
Dogsitting for a weekend
Open studios at the Spanish Academy
Wandering the old neighbourhood for three hours while the car was serviced
Almost private glorious visit to Lago di Martignano
Off to Umbria for a week with friends old and new.
I succumbed to the offer of a free month with ChatGPT and enjoyed using it to do things like make it easier (but not easy) to move from idno to micro.blog.
Natalya Saprunova's photo series exploring coastal erosion and permafrost thaw across Inuvialuit territories in Canada has won the New Scientist Editors Award at the Earth Photo 2026 competition
The clock is ticking for Android as a (somewhat) open platform. If you are running Android 8 or higher, a virus has been installed on your device and is silently awaiting remote activation. Over the past few months, devices around the world have been infected with this novel strain, with as many as 4 billion Android handsets and tablets estimated to have already been contaminated, meaning that around half of all humanity may be at risk from this threat.
What if you need to do very low-level testing involving the very guts of Windows NT, but don’t need most of the userland that sits on top? In fact, what if that userland only slows you down and complicates the work you’re trying to do? The solution is Windows PE (Windows Preinstallation Environment).
M/PC is a concatenative operating system for Varvara, inspired by Openfirmware, designed to manage files on system without a file browser. It uses the postfix notation, meaning that the function success their operands.
In February 2025, Black Gate covered Molly Tanzer’s release of “Jirel Meets Death” (published with permission from Moore’s estate); and in March 2026 Black Gate’s Dark Muse News covered Tanzer’s next story, “Jirel in the Forest of Night.” These were brought to us by Brackenbury Books, the same outfit that champions New Edge Sword & Sorcery magazine.
It will be some months before the true toll of Europe's worst-ever heatwave is confirmed, but researchers can estimate a death count based on how many people died in Europe during previous hot periods
The question of how gravity interacts with the quantum world has long perplexed physicists, but a non-quantum theory of space-time could present an answer
What makes something alive? We simply don't know, but synthetic biologists are a step closer to providing an answer thanks to SpudCell, the most sophisticated attempt at creating an artificial life form yet
A proposed technique to counter global warming by spraying sun-reflecting particles near the poles would cause commercial flights to pass through clouds of sulphuric acid, posing a danger to passengers and crew
From friendship in a world of chatbots to what it means to be alive, this month’s new popular science books are asking some big questions. Liz Else rounds up the ones she’s most looking forward to
Recently, there has been a surge in slopcoded new/hobby “operating systems”. Such slopcoded projects – which, due to the nature of “AI” tools, effectively consist of stolen code – will not be featured on OSNews and submitting them is fruitless.
European governments are rolling out digital identity wallets, which are to be used by citizens to access services, and to verify their age online. As reported by Follow the Money and Android Authority, there is a serious problem with this: these wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple.
There’s a lot you can say about macOS, but one thing Apple used to be incredibly good at were making beautifully crafted, detailed icons. As with almost every other aspect of macOS, this deteriorated sharply over the years, with the recent macOS releases with Liquid Glass being an absolute low point.
If you have a Sega Mega Drive, you obviously want to run Linux on it. That’s something you can do now. You do need to have an EverDrive, but don’t worry, the port in question contains a custom fork of Qemu for those of us that don’t.
Aya Koda's Tree is an account of the late writer's visits to Japan's most famous, and ancient, trees. Featured in Wim Wenders's film Perfect Days, it is original and thought-provoking, says Rowan Hooper
Feedback is informed of an exciting new development in underwear design from a brand that says it infuses its products with beneficial bacteria to nourish the skin microbiome
The vibrant colours and delicate details of New Zealand's fungi and slime moulds are documented in these images, taken from Jay Lichter's new book The Secret Life of Fungi
They slice. They dice. They bash their way through hordes of foes. They are the heroes of fantasy and just below is a list of some of the greatest. Can you pick out the hero on the right who goes with the author on the left? Twelve to fifteen correct means you know your bloodthirsty authors like Conan knows ale.
The World Cup should have been a soft-power triumph for the US. Instead, visa barriers, travel restrictions and a growing sense of exclusion risk turning this global showcase into a missed opportunity
A form of fibre that boosts the release of the hunger-reducing hormone GLP-1 has been approved as safe by a European regulator, and could be added to foods within a year
Author and pulp historian Will Murray has paused his activities as the new Grant Stockbridge to tackle a different pair of pulp characters. In the first “Wild Adventures” of Secret Agent X, we get Secret Agent X vs.
Sci-fi fans can enjoy a new Red Dwarf novel – the first for 30 years – this month, as well as sci-fi horror from Paul Tremblay and a journey to Planet Happy with Riley August
Scientists worry that a surge of meltwater from Greenland could irreversibly collapse the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, but new modelling suggests the weakening of the current could be reversed if CO2 levels come back down
The most comprehensive database ever compiled of how fast arachnids can run has shown how leg anatomy and evolutionary history influence spiders’ running speed
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is beginning its extraordinary survey of the southern sky, which will use the largest camera ever built to map the solar system, the galaxy and beyond
Astronomers have recently started looking for black holes bigger than galaxies. Brian Lacki explains how these “stupendously large black holes” might be used by alien civilisations, and what makes them such an intriguing possibility
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
When standard leukaemia treatments failed, 13-year-old Alyssa Tapley was told she had only weeks left – but then she was offered an experimental procedure
Last time we discussed the character of Parker, Donald E. Westlake’s master thief and heist planner. This time, we’ll look at why we’re talking about Parker at all, here in the hallowed spaces of this fine magazine.
There’s something poetic about the World Cup taking place in North America while Microsoft keeps scoring own goals like this. Microsoft updated its Surface buying guide to describe 8GB RAM as “great for everyday use like browsing, streaming, schoolwork, and productivity apps.” A companion FAQ adds that 16GB or more is what unlocks Copilot+ PC features.
Astral is a hobby operating system written in C for 64bit architectures, with a collection of ported software like X.org, fvwm, the xbps package manager, and tons more. I think it’s quite a neat system – the code’s on GitHub – made even neater by the fact it can run not only Minecraft, but now also has a working port of Wine that can run a few games.
Imagine your favorite team just scored an incredible, last-second goal at the World Cup. So you log online to celebrate with other fans. But, using data it’s already collected on you, the social media platform you like to post on wrongly guesses that you’re under 16 so it forces you to go to a third-party verification app and provide images of your face or your government-issued ID.
For decades, we’ve thought that childbirth is uniquely challenging for humans, but it turns out that many other primates find the birth process just as difficult
Sleep is essential, yet humans have evolved to need so little of it. When evolutionary anthropologist David Samson delved into our ancient past to find the reasons why, he discovered surprising ways to get a better night’s rest
Women who were vaccinated against covid-19 in the luteal phase of their menstrual cycle reported having a breakthrough infection sooner than those vaccinated during their follicular phase
I had recently reviewed Ken Faig Jr.’s collection Lovecraftian People and Places (2022) from Hippocampus Press. In 2025, he came out with a sequel, More Lovecraftian People and Places. For those not aware, Ken Faig Jr.
Tiny 3D-printed diving suits allow cockroaches to walk underwater for up to 3 hours with no ill effects, which could enable a cyborg insect swarm to explore disaster zones and perhaps even Mars
“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.
The High Crusade (Berkley Medallion, March 1978). Cover artist unknown Two other good novels by Anderson are The High Crusade (SF), a humorous look at 14th Century humans getting loose in the universe with a captured spaceship, and Three Hearts and Three Lions (Fantasy), which follows a modern (1950s) Earthman who is cast onto a parallel Earth where fantasy and magic are real.
If I say “comic book superhero” who do you think of? Superman? Iron Man? Batman? Wonder Woman? Spiderman? Captain Marvel? (The real one please, and don’t give me any of this “Shazam” crap.) Those and many others are all perfectly legitimate choices, of course, only they’re not really heroes — super or otherwise — are they? They’re adolescent daydreams, and no matter how dark or gritty they have gotten in the years since their shiny Golden or Silver Age peaks,...
It’s been quiet for a few days since I’ve been sick, but I’m feeling a bit better since today marks the official end of my one month of using Windows 11 that you people donated for. An article about my experience is definitely upcoming, including whether or not I’ll actually stick with Windows 11 on my laptop or go back to Linux, but before we get there, let’s talk about Microsoft once again capitulating to the reality that a lot of people really don’t want to let go of Windows 10.
It’s been an incredibly long few weeks, and as a result my previously-planned Hater’s Guide just isn’t possible within what little time I have left in this week, which is why I’m starting an ongoing series — Notes From The Bubble
A rare variant of a gene called TP53 means Tracy Hutchinson has an extreme risk of developing cancer anywhere in her body, causing endless anxiety and requiring regular whole-body MRIs and other screening
DNA from ancient humans has been found on a prehistoric cave painting and on cave walls, demonstrating the potential to one day identify individual artists and resolve the debate over Neanderthals' artistic abilities
George Griffith was born George Chetwynd Griffith-Jones on August 20, 1857 in Plymouth, England to George Alfred Jones and Jeanette Henry Capinster Jones. The family did not have roots to any specific place as his father’s role as a clergyman kept him moving from parish to parish.
