Biogerontologists are exploring the upper limit for human life. A recent study has it verging on two centuries – but columnist Graham Lawton finds reason to be sceptical
In 1952, a science fiction fanzine, Sky Hook, began publishing a series of critical essays by William Atheling, Jr. When its publisher, Redd Boggs, suspended publication, the science fiction writer James Blish publicly revealed that this was a pseudonym he had adopted.
Researchers spotted an unusual gamma-ray signal in three galaxy clusters, which may be a telltale sign of dark matter – or some even more exotic phenomenon
A personalised mRNA cancer vaccine has produced positive results in a final-stage trial involving skin cancer, raising hopes that this approach could work against many cancers
I recently read one of H. Bedford-Jones‘s series dealing with a Denis Burke. Bedford-Jones had three series of stories featuring men with this name who are probably descendants. The third and final one, featured in Invitation to a Crime: Further Adventures of Denis Burke, ran for six stories, all set in French Morocco in the […]
For the past decade, depression has been linked to a shrunken hippocampus, which has a vital role in memory. But a large study using up-to-date scanning techniques suggests this may not be the case
You can help with benchmarking borg 2 (master branch) on your machine:
AI companies have begun embedding watermarks in the output of their models to improve transparency and help crack down on misinformation, disinformation and cheating on homework, but there are limitations to this approach
I’ve been quietly seething for months now about the dumb emails I get from people wailing about my podcast’s invisibility on YouTube. Increasingly urgent, promises that this is the last time, more in sorrow than in anger, blah, blah, blah.
When I wrote about using Windows 11 for a month as part of the ongoing OSNews fundraiser (keep donating to get me to do the same for macOS!), one of the things I mentioned was that “the modern desktop context menu has its own classic Win32 context menu”.
ADHD is a real condition that can have serious consequences if undiagnosed. An ill-informed documentary that suggests it is a modern, social construct could cause harm, says Caroline Williams
Sometime Lofty Towers (Brackenbury Books, December 2025). Cover by Saša Đurđević I’ve just finished reading what may be David C. Smith’s best work — Sometime Lofty Towers. My first contact with Smith was from the Robert E.
Kimon de Greef's The Ego Trip chronicles the rise of a potent psychedelic drug, from the toads that secrete it to the man who claimed it has amazing powers. Olivia Goldhill discovers an extraordinary tale
For decades, women have felt the need to hide the impact of changes in their hormones, while scientists have excluded women from research to avoid hormonal fluctuations complicating their research. Thankfully, this is starting to change
A rich widow, a disillusioned cop and a dim hypersled driver are caught in the machinations of the oppressive party ruling the Decurion Empire in Richard Swan's The Infinite State. Sci-fi columnist Emily H.
Why do humans have a common sense of beauty for things like sunsets, and do other animals share this appreciation? And why can’t we cool water as quickly as we can heat it?
Answers continue to pour in as New Scientist readers ponder this question, with one reader widening it out to consider dragonflies, and another focusing on cluster flies
As a fan of Sherlock Holmes who enjoys many of the pastiche stories written by others, I am also open to seeing stories that make use of various secondary characters in the canon. There have been a few stories written focused on Holmes’s older brother Mycroft, and one I recently picked up is S.F.
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter.
It's $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of
Having faced the prospect that our minds are random fluctuations in a dead universe, quantum cosmologist Sean Carroll suggests that we may be stuck in an eternally repeating reality
A CRISPR-based tool can perform sex reversal on male mouse embryos, reliably turning them into healthy females – a feat that could be valuable for conservation
Evidence from hunter-gatherers suggests humans aren't diurnal but cathemeral, with bouts of activity at nighttime – a sleep pattern similar to some lemurs
A great and concise history of the run-up to MS-DOS 2.0. Yet, there was a nagging feeling that a single-tasking CP/M clone was inadequate for the new generation of personal computers. Digital Research released multi-user, multitasking MP/M-86 in September 1981 and announced the single‑user multitasking Concurrent CP/M in early 1982.
If you thought pervert glasses weren’t bad enough, Apple is taking it up a notch by adding cameras to its AirPods. Apple is working on camera-equipped AirPods that appear to be nearly ready to launch, based on a video MacRumors found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate.
I was around when Quake was launched, but I was entirely unaware of this story. By June 1996, after three years of hard work, id Software had completed their next title, Quake. As for their previous title, they were going to release both a shareware version and a full version of their game.
Earlier this year, Natalie Vock made a splash with a set of patches to the Linux kernel that greatly increased performance on AMD GPUs with lower amounts of VRAM. With that work now accepted by upstream, Vock decided to turn their attention to another interesting problem: what if you run out of VRAM, and how can we improve performance when we do? Regardless, what I hope this blogpost can demonstrate is that even if you end up with some memory evicted to system RAM, the slowdown can be manageable.
Operation Blue Skies is the world’s first trial to deploy contrail avoidance measures across an entire airspace, aiming to lower the climate impact of flights on a large scale
The Touch Bar arrived in 2016 seemingly already pre-doomed, on a generation of machines that had a “we’ve run out of ideas” smell all around them. The arrow keys were reshaped, the keyboard got a slimming down, and even the beloved MagSafe wasn’t, in fact, safe.
When we put our literature, games and films into AI models, we risk replacing our cultural history with a mishmash of auto-generated works. We desperately need to preserve human writing, says columnist Annalee Newitz
Good afterevenmorn, Readers! I made an attempt this past fortnight to return to social media. As a small author, it’s really important to make attempts at getting seen if I have any hope of selling my books.
Since the 1990s, researchers have wondered if unexpected results from gallium-based neutrino detectors are a sign of a new kind of particle, but a new study suggests that revising their calculations could explain the anomaly
Let me start with a hypothesis: For human developers, using coding LLMs magnifies their difference in skill levels. I am one that rarely thinks things are always black and white. Back in March, I wrote Artifial Intelligence: Shades of Gray.
Water flow in the river Thames has dropped low enough to warrant the use of England’s only large-scale desalination plant, but it hasn’t been switched on at all this year
People with ADHD are unusually sensitive to hormone shifts. Psychiatrists have started to pay attention, creating strategies to address the intense emotions and cognitive challenges caused by these changes
I recently received the 14th issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, the excellent magazine series focused on men’s adventure magazines, now into its fourth year of publication. This is one of the issues I’ve been looking forward to, as they focus on “Bigfoot.” As a kid in the 1970s, Bigfoot was everywhere.
Version 7.2 of the Linux kernel has been released. Significant features in this release include common attributes support in the bpf()vsystem call, cache-aware load balancing for the CPU scheduler, large-folio support in the Btrfs filesystem, further swap subsystem improvements, improvements to the Landlock security module, support for block devices with inline encryption hardware via the dm-inlinecrypt device-mapper target, and much more.
We talked about the latest release of Delphi a few days ago, and that brought me to Hans Otten’s website. This site is about my experience with the Wirth school of languages, based on the ideas and implementations of Prof Niklaus Wirth, Kenneth Bowles, Per Brinch Hansen, colleagues, and their students.
Blood tests may give different results depending on when in the day, or the year, they are taken, which could result in people missing out on an anaemia diagnosis
One of the most surprising aspects of the Nix language is that it is lazy, especially if you have never used a lazy language before. This laziness is what makes much of Nixpkgs possible, and its complexity.
“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.
A review of thousands of scientific papers about quantum computers finds that most don’t provide code that can be tested on independent devices or that the code doesn’t work
Attackers with no technical skills can now use AI models to find and exploit loopholes quickly and they can deploy them on a massive scale, raising fears that organisations without large budgets for cyber defence will be much more vulnerable
This post is the third in a series reflecting on the world of 1923, and the 1920s generally, as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine.
This is a man’s, man’s, man’s world — James Brown One blustery Maine spring day, I blew off class to spend an hour hanging out with a friend in the math department’s student lounge.
Today, you can get low-quality knockoffs of just about any popular smartphone on sites like AliExpress or Temu, whether they be iPhones, Galaxy phones, or whatever else. They have terrible build quality, bottom-of-the-barrel components and specifications, and all run outdated versions of Android – badly.
In the last few days, I built a shoot ’em up game by embedding a tiny custom bytecode VM and rendering the graphics using a fullscreen pixel shader. The result is a 3kB Windows executable. This was done for Langjam Gamejam, a 7-day challenge where you create a programming language and then use it to build a game.
A while back, when chatting with a colleague over their computer, I noticed that a logo did not look exactly the same as it did on mine. It looked thinner on theirs and more faithful to the original image.
I’ve heard from people in the past that my articles are too long, and I wanted to start by saying that, for the most part, they’re going to stay long, because I feel like the only way for me to make my arguments is to be
To cut the cost of key stage 2 assessments, a UK government project proposes to use scripts generated by ChatGPT instead of real children's writing as examples supplied to moderators who check that grades are awarded fairly
The use of explosives to kill fish is widespread across the tropics, and acoustic monitoring in an Indonesian archipelago detected more than 3500 explosions in 483 days
Edwin K. Sloat was born on March 1, 1895 in Denmark, Iowa. The attended State Normal College in Edmond, Oklahoma (now University of Central Oklahoma), graduating in 1916. Following his graduation, he worked as a newspaperman, an employee of the post office, and as a band leader during World War I, in which he was a Musician 1st Class Petty Officer.
Almost three-quarters of England is now in drought conditions, resulting in restrictions on water use in many areas and severe wildfires – here's how it's affecting farming, wildlife and trees
A reconstruction of East Africa's environment 1.75 million years ago suggests wildfires spiked during wetter times, which may have influenced human evolution
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
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
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.
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.
