Concerns around common sunscreen chemicals have prompted the search for natural alternatives, with lignin from wood being one of the most promising candidates

Good afterevenmorn, Readers! I’m going to rant a bit this post, so if apologies in advance for getting too serious about things that are, in fact, quite fun. I want to talk friendships. Friendships in fiction, specifically, and how they’re often hijacked by well-meaning, representation-starved folks, and how that robs us of examples of deep, meaningful, powerful, but entirely platonic love in real life.

Speaking on MS NOW about why Trump's idea isn’t just dumb — it’s dangerous.

The strange principle of quantum entanglement baffled Albert Einstein. Yet finally putting quantum weirdness to the ultimate test, and embracing the results, turned out to be a revolutionary idea

It never used to be possible to attribute individual weather events to climate change and map their full consequences. Thanks to the work of two pioneering climate scientists, it is now

Astronomers used to rely on chance to catch a glimpse of fleeting explosions in space. A fresh approach to watching these flashes has completely transformed astronomy

Net zero wasn’t always the target – the consensus used to be that we could continue releasing greenhouse gases and maintain global temperatures. How did that change?

From finding new antibiotic candidates to studying the insides of cells, snapping molecules together "like Lego" has completely overhauled chemistry, and biology too

A pet cow has learned to scratch herself with a broom, showing creative problem-solving skills that make it harder to ignore the fact that these animals have minds, says Marta Halina

Neurodiversity research has reshaped how we think about autism and ADHD, revealing that a “normal” brain doesn’t exist – and that unusual brains also come with unique strengths

The most powerful artificial intelligence tools all have one thing in common. Whether they are writing poetry or predicting protein structures, they rely on the "transformer" architecture

Time and time again, scientists have found that one diet beats all others when it comes to our health. Fortunately, it's delicious – and also good for the planet

How discovering that different parts of the brain work together as networks has transformed our understanding of everything from daydreaming and emotions to planning and memory

Following the surprising discovery that our genetic blueprint is much simpler than expected, we’ve rapidly learned that we have epigenetics to thank for our extraordinary complexity

How end-to-end encryption is the wall that keeps our digital secrets safe – and why modern life would be unimaginable without it

Since the turn of the millennium, our understanding of our ancestors and extended cousins has shifted dramatically, thanks to a swathe of surprising archaeological discoveries

Although we’re on course to cross 1.5°C of warming, the alliance of small island nations that revised our goal down from the 2°C threshold transformed global climate policy

Understanding the “landscape of fear” that predators create in their environments has helped us uncover just how drastically humans have upended the natural world

The “enormous revelation” that drugs can be used to prevent catching HIV has benefitted millions and helped slash transmission rates

Transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable power is crucial. The opening of Tesla's first "gigafactory", which used economies of scale to electrify our transport and energy systems, marked a turning point in this endeavour

Realising that our solar system isn’t like most others out there has helped astronomers rewrite the story of how it formed

A quarter of a century in, this is our definitive pick of the ideas in science and technology that are already transforming the world

The internet is typically defined by conflict. Yet a crowdsourced encyclopedia, open for anyone to edit, has transformed into one of the world's most essential knowledge hubs

They offered so much promise, but ultimately turned sour. These are the most disappointing ideas since the turn of the millennium

Some might say smartphones have caused more harm than good. Here’s why putting a powerful computer into every pocket was a good idea

Humans have been inadvertently using microbes to influence our health for thousands of years. But only recently has the microbiome rocketed to the forefront of healthcare

Our genomes are filled with errors that were once impossible to correct. But in CRISPR, we finally found an extraordinarily powerful tool for treating genetic disease – and perhaps making better versions of ourselves

A "living glue" used by barnacles to attach to underwater surfaces could also seal gut wounds caused by inflammatory bowel disease

I picked up a new work by Marcos Legaria, the author of L’Affaire Barlow: H.P. Lovecraft and the Battle for His Literary Legacy. Legaria is a leading authority on R.H. Barlow, the young fan of H.P. Lovecraft who became his literary executor after his death.

As tensions over Greenland rise, some Europeans are asking whether it is time to disentangle themselves from US tech dominance – but from smartphones to cloud services, rejecting US tech is easier said than done

It is theoretically possible for a particularly massive star to collapse in on itself to form a black hole rather than exploding in a supernova, and we might now have seen the process in action

In the 13.8 billion years that our universe has been around, some moments stand out over others – for the most exciting and impactful one, we have to go back to the very beginning, says cosmology columnist Leah Crane

The protein that protects tardigrade DNA from radiation and mutagenic chemicals was thought to be harmless, but can in fact have major downsides

Eruptions from volcanic arcs, found where tectonic plates converge, are one of the major drivers of natural carbon emissions, but a model of Earth’s ancient carbon cycle suggests this is a relatively recent phenomenon

I bought LA Noire on sale, several years ago. But I did not actually dig in to play it until last year. 68 hours of game play later, I completed it the second week of January, this year. LA Noire is one of my all-time favorite games.

The infamous Chariots of the Gods was written by Erich von Däniken (1935), who died last week. Von Däniken was a Swiss author, and Chariots of the Gods was published in German in 1968. It was issued in English from Bantam in 1971, and I read it shortly thereafter, though I don’t remember where I got the copy.

Trump might think that buying a country is normal

There’s cursed computing, and then there’s cursed computing. It turns out that you can render GNOME’s windows with the compositor from Windows 7, dwm.exe. Yes. tl;dr of how this clusterfuck works: this is effectively just x11 forwarding an x server from windows to linux.

Virtualisation is a lot older than you might think, with (one of?) the first implementation(s) being IBM’s VM/CMS, the line of operating systems that would grow to include things like System/370, System/390, all the way up until IBM/Z, which is still being developed and sold today; only recently IBM released the IBM z17 and z/OS 3.2, after all.

Kev Quirk in Use the Bloody Shift Key!:

Personally, I can’t abide it. When I come across one of these posts, even if the title sounds genuinely interesting, I just can’t bring myself to read the content. Instead, I end up focusing on the obvious lack of uppercase letters. I know I’m missing out on interesting posts because of this, and that makes me sad.

I share this pet peeve with Kev. When I see someone omitting uppercase letters from their writing, I simply move on. I know it's a stylistic choice and all, but I just nope out of there. First person I remember seeing doing this was Sam Altman. That alone should be reason enough to reconsider the practice for those who engage in it.

ChaosBSD is a fork of FreeBSD. It exists because upstream cannot, and should not, accept broken drivers, half-working hardware, vendor trash, or speculative hacks. We can. ↫ ChaosBSD GitHub page This is an excellent approach to testing drivers that simply aren’t even remotely ready to be included in FreeBSD-proper.

This is a book intended to teach someone the Java language, from scratch. You will find that the content makes heavy use of recently released and, for the moment, preview features. This is intentional as much of the topic ordering doesn’t work without at least Java 21.

The Devoured Worlds trilogy by Megan E. O’Keefe: The Blighted Stars, The Fractured Dark, and The Bound Worlds (Orbit, May 23, 2023, September 26, 2023, and June 25, 2024). Covers by Jaime Jones It’s January 17, and I’m doing a fairly good job on at least one of my New Year’s resolutions — catching up on some of my favorite blogs.

A United Nations agreement for the “conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity” in the open oceans has now taken effect

Previously on Computers Are Bad, we discussed the early history of air traffic control in the United States. The technical demands of air traffic control are well known in computer history circles because of the prominence of SAGE, but what's less well known is that SAGE itself was not an air traffic control system at all.

Since Wayland is still quite new to a lot of people, it’s often difficult to figure out which features the Wayland compositor you’re using actually supports. While the Wayland Explorer is a great way to browse through the various protocols and their status in various compositors, there’s now an easier way.

Excellent news for OpenBSD users who are tied to macOS: you can now run OpenBSD using Apple’s Hypervisor. Following a recent series of commits by Helg Bredow and Stefan Fritsch, OpenBSD/arm64 now works as a guest operating system under the Apple Hypervisor.

Soundtrack - Radiohead - Karma Police

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I just spent a week at the Consumer Electronics Show, and one word kept coming up: bullshit. 

LG, a company known for making home appliances and televisions, demonstrated a robot (named “CLOiD” for some reason) that could “fold laundry”

Longevity diets often focus on going plant-based, but a study in China has linked eating meat to a long lifespan, particularly among older people who are underweight

Professional mathematicians have been stunned by the progress amateurs have made in solving long-standing problems with the assistance of AI tools, and say it could lead to a new way of doing mathematics

If your New Year’s resolution is to understand quantum computing this year, take a cue from a 9-year-old podcaster talking to some of the biggest minds in the field, says quantum columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Volunteers consider it relatively unacceptable to cancel social plans – but they are more forgiving if it's someone else cancelling the plans

The James Webb Space Telescope has picked up the light from a massive star that exploded about a billion years after the birth of the universe

Understanding a molecule that plays a key role in nitrogen fixing – a chemical process that enables life on Earth – has long been thought of as problem for quantum computers, but now a classical computer may have solved it

The implosion of Australia's literary festival offers some harsh lessons.

Horace Brown Fyfe, Jr. who published under then name H.B. Fyfe, was born on September 30, 1918 in Jersey City, New Jersey. He was educated at Stevens Academy before attending Columbia University. Fyfe served in World War II and earned a Bronze Star.

Using a chess computer to advise you on just three moves during a game dramatically increases your chances of winning in a way that is difficult for others to spot

For this round of Dark Muse News, we’ll be seeking affirmations. I’m older than the typical kid who plays with toy-soldier figurines (well, I’m over 50) and love to play with plastic figurines.

Speaking of NixOS’ use of 9P, what if you want to, for whatever inexplicable reason, use macOS, but make it immutable? Immutable Linux distributions are getting a lot of attention lately, and similar concepts are used by Android and iOS, so it makes sense for people stuck on macOS to want similar functionality.

If you’re only even remotely aware of the operating system Plan 9, you’ll most likely know that it takes the UNIX concept of “everything is a file” to the absolute extreme. In order to make sure all these files – and thus the components of Plan 9 – can properly communicate with one another, there’s 9P, or the Plan 9 Filesystem Protocol.

Stanford’s leading Iran scholar on the regime, protests, and what comes next

It's difficult to form a protective coating that prolongs battery life at the battery's cathode, but there may be a low-cost chemical solution

Evidence is mounting that our body fat supports everything from our bone health to our mood, and now, research suggests it also regulates blood pressure and immunity

Since launching in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope has found hundreds of distant and apparently bright galaxies dubbed "little red dots", and now it seems they may each carry a baby black hole

Let's just start by recognising that this is very funny.

Hallucigenia was such an odd animal that palaeontologists reconstructed it upside-down when they first analysed its fossils - and now we may know what it ate

Getting kids to eat well can be a minefield and a source of tension. Nancy Bostock, a consultant paediatrician, says these are the six things she recommends when dealing with fussy eaters and the way we talk about food with kids.

Researchers risk fire, explosion or poisoning by allowing AI to design experiments, warn scientists. Some 19 different AI models were tested on hundreds of questions to assess their ability to spot and avoid hazards and none recognised all issues – with some doing little better than random guessing

Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton (Bantam Books, April 4, 1977) Michael Crichton (1942 – 2008) apparently always wanted to be a writer but earned an MD from Harvard Medical school in the meantime.

Alex Chan in The Good, the Bad, and the Gutters:

To help me understand how this layout works, I’m going to step through it and explain how I built the new version of the page.

You won't find a clearer and more understandable walkthrough of how to set up and style a CSS grid than this one from Alex. Making a note of their trick for fixed height for the cover images for my reading log which is crying out for exactly that.

Update: Inspired by Alex, I've updated the reading log CSS to use fixed height instead of fixed width. Looks much better!

David Severn has taken a series of images of scientists working on quantum physics for King’s College London’s new Quantum Untangled exhibition

Our growing understanding of how other animals also share skills and knowledge will help us chip away at the folly of human exceptionalism, say Philippa Brakes and Marc Bekoff

How do we deal with anxiety generated by ever-accelerating change? Sam Conniff and Katherine Templar-Lewis's The Uncertainty Toolkit sets out to empower us, but it's a flawed read

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

AI chatbots can take on many roles in our lives. James Muldoon's Love Machines looks into the relationships we're forging with them

January is a good time to take stock of our lives – but where to start? David Robson finds some answers in the latest psychological research

As rates of mental health conditions like depression spike, we desperately need new ways of identifying and treating people in distress. When it comes to giving artificial intelligence a role, though, guarding against its many flaws will be vital

A piece of woolly rhinoceros flesh hidden inside a wolf that died 14,400 years ago has yielded genetic information that improves our understanding of why one of the most iconic megafauna species of the last glacial period went extinct

Some of the world’s biggest megacities are located in river deltas threatened by subsidence due to excessive groundwater extraction and urban expansion, compounding the threat they face from sea-level rise

A decades-long push to identify clear biomarkers for anxiety and depression is at last achieving results

In fall 2025, we g0t the second novel in the Paradise Investigations series from Teel James Glenn. This series, set in 1939 New York City, stars Adam Paradise, a private investigator who is Frankenstein’s monster.

A Chinese application to the International Telecommunications Union suggests plans for the largest satellite mega constellation ever built – but something else might be going on here

An analysis of growth rings in the leg bones of 17 Tyrannosaurus rex individuals reveals that the dinosaurs matured much more slowly than previously thought, and adds to the evidence that they weren't all one species

Easing stress is one of the healthiest pursuits you can embark on this January. Here are some evidence-backed ways to ground yourself in 2026

Construction generates between 10 and 20 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, but cities can slash their climate impact by designing buildings in a more efficient way

My conversation with Charlie Gammell

A report warns that we may have seriously underestimated the rate of warming, which could damage economic growth