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
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
Summer 2025 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the November/December issues of Analog Science Fiction & Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Cover art by John Jennings, Eldar Zakirov, and Shutterstock It’s a bittersweet month for fans of print SF magazines.
Are you a normal person and thus sick of all the nonsensical, non-browser stuff browser makers keep adding to your browser, but for whatever reason you don’t want to or cannot switch to one of the forks of your browser of choice? Just the Browser helps you remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from desktop web browsers.
Despite December being the holiday month, Haiku’s developers got a lot of things done. A welcome addition for those of us who regularly install Haiku on EFI systems is a tool in the installer that will copy the EFI loader to the EFI system partition, so fewer manual steps are needed on EFI systems.
A few extra minutes of sleep per day or an extra half-serving of vegetables with dinner can add a year to our lives, according to an analysis of data from 60,000 people
It’s no secret that the Windows 95 installer uses a heavily stripped-down Windows 3.10 runtime, but what can you actually do with it? How far can you take this runtime? Can it run Photoshop? It is a long-standing tradition for Microsoft to use a runtime copy of Windows as a part of Windows Setup.
Clues from studies of ancient plants and animals have helped archaeologists pin down where the last Neanderthals found refuge, says columnist Michael Marshall
Some of climate change's sharpest realities are being felt on small island nations, where extreme weather is claiming homes and triggering displacement. Those able to stay are spearheading inventive adaptation techniques in a bid to secure their future
They’re easily overlooked between all the Chrome and Safari violence, but there are still text-based web browsers, and people still use them. How do they handle the latest HTML features? While CSS is the star of the show when it comes to new features, HTML ain’t stale either.
A study of the hearts of Greenland sharks has found that the long-lived deep-sea predator has massive accumulations of ageing markers, such as severe scarring, but this doesn't appear to affect their health or longevity
Before the Romans captured Pompeii, the famous town was run by the Samnite people – and a dip in their public baths might have been an unpleasant experience
Combining two kinds of quantum computing devices could be just the trick for taking better images of faint, faraway exoplanets
For centuries, the principle of symmetry has guided physicists towards more fundamental truths, but now a slew of shocking findings suggest a far stranger idea from quantum theory could be a deeper driving force
Sexual behaviour among same-sex pairs is common in apes and monkeys, and a wide-ranging analysis suggests it does boost survival
The PDP-10 family of computers (under different names) was manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation between 1964 and 1983. Designed for time-sharing, batch and real-time systems, these computers were popular with universities, scientific companies and time-sharing bureaux.
Are you an author writing HTML? Just so we’re clear: Not XHTML. HTML. Without the X. If you are, repeat after me, because apparently this bears repeating (after the title): You are not required to close your <p>, <li>, <img>, or <br> tags in HTML.
I have posted several times on the various collections taken from the men’s adventure magazines (or MAMs), which succeeded the pulps. The folks who put out the excellent Men’s Adventure Quarterly, Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, have been putting out volumes in the Men’s Adventure Library, reprinting art and fiction (and nonfiction, some of which […]
The world’s most powerful supercomputers can now run simulations of billions of neurons, and researchers hope such models will offer unprecedented insights into how our brains work
Mathematicians rely on numbers, but finding words to explain different levels of certainty has stymied everyone from the ancient Greeks to the most famous modern philosophers. Maths columnist Jacob Aron tells the story of how a CIA analyst finally cracked it
(As long as Black Gate lets me post here, this will run every year the week of Howard’s passing (January 16), to help keep his flame alive) A LIFE IS NOT IMPORTANT EXCEPT IN THE IMPACT IT HAS ON OTHER LIVES – Jackie Robinson’s epitaph I did an interview last week with Jason Waltz for his ’24 in 42′ podcast (Yeah, I know: You just can’t wait to hear that one…).
Came across Mole: 🐹 Deep clean and optimize your Mac. today. It is an open source, command line based utility for cleaning your Mac.
I generally don't install much, and try to be pretty diligent about keeping my Mac clean. Nevertheless, I was able to clear up a few gigabytes worth of junk that was lying around.
As you may recall, circa 2022-2023 I was working on a
microkernel written in Hare named Helios. Helios was largely inspired by and
modelled after the design of seL4 and was my first
major foray into modern OS development that was serious enough to get to a
somewhat useful state of functionality, with drives for some real hardware,
filesystems, and an environment for running user programs of a reasonable level
of sophistication.
Helios development went strong for a while but eventually it slowed and
eventually halted in a state of design hell.
We all knew this was going to happen, so let’s just get it over with. Microsoft is testing a new feature that integrates Copilot into the File Explorer, but it’s not going to be another ‘Ask Copilot’ button in the right-click menu.
Posh, GNOME’s mobile shell, published a look back on the project’s 2025. The Phosh developers focus from day one was to make devices running Phosh daily drivable without having to resort to any proprietary OSes as a fallback.
From Sun King to Spray-Tan King
I discovered Adrian Cole (1949 – ) in the late 1970s through his Dream Lords trilogy. 1. Plague of Nightmares (1975) 2. Lord of Nightmares (1975) 3. Bane of Nightmares (1976) All were from Zebra books, with covers by Tom Barber, Jack Gaughan (maybe), and Tom Barber respectively.
Budgie has fallen a bit by the wayside in recent years, but it’s still in development and making steady progress. The project’s just released Budgie 10.10, the final release in the 10.x series which also marks the end of the transition to Wayland.
OpenBSD on a Sharp Zaurus Linux-based PDA from 2005? Of course, why not? Installing OpenBSD was easy. The instructions in INSTALL.zaurus are pretty straightforward. My 5.6 install was smooth. Installing sets took ~10-15 minutes.
Except me. I'll never leave. Not ever. I'm here until it's lights out.
Katabasis by R. F. Kuang (Harper Voyager, August 26, 2025) and We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad (S&S/Marysue Rucci Books, September 23, 2025). Covers: Patrick Arrasmith, uncredited The New York Times traces the inception of the “dark academia” genre to Donna Tart’s The Secret History, a Gothic murder mystery involving Classics students at a liberal arts college.
It’s time to end this discussion now.
Cutting down boreal forest and sinking the felled trees in the depths of the Arctic Ocean could remove up to 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year – but it could come at a cost to the Arctic ecosystem
One of the astronauts aboard the International Space Station is undergoing a “medical situation”, forcing NASA to bring the crew home early for the first time ever
Evidence is mounting that specific gut bacteria are linked to sleep conditions, which may open the doors to dietary recommendations aiming to boost the quality of our slumbers
A recording from a live video filmed on 5 January.
The ice-covered island may be strategically important, but it's unclear that it could be a commercially viable source of minerals and oil in the near future
Calculations show that injecting randomness into a quantum neural network could help it determine properties of quantum objects that are otherwise fundamentally hard to access
A man with auto-brewery syndrome, a rare condition in which gut microbes produce intoxicating levels of alcohol, has been successfully treated with faeces from a super donor
A standard industrial knitting machine has been modified to produce fabrics from tungsten wire coated in gold, which are used to form the dish on the CarbSAR satellite
A new survey hints at an alarming psychological distinction in political life
A new survey hints at a deep psychological distinction in political life
George Allan England was born in Fort McPherson, Nebraska on February 9, 1877. He attended Harvard University, where he earned Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees. In 1903, he published Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses.
Whose Body? by Dorothy Sayers (Avon Books, 1948) Mysteries aren’t my first choice in genre fiction; science fiction and fantasy appeal to me more consistently. Even so, I’ve read a fair number of mysteries, by authors from Dashiell Hammett to P.D.
Rob Beschizza in Everyone hates OneDrive, Microsoft's cloud app that steals then deletes all your files for Boing Boing:
If you want control over your files (or simply like knowing where they are and be certain they still exist) use another operating system.
Sums up in a single sentence why I'll never again use Windows on a personal computer. The enshittification is unbelievably bad. Rob continues:
And it's such a mess: an operating system packed with ads, upsells and bloat. Something about Microsoft reminds me of oil companies in the southwest: risky environment, externalized costs, nauseating conditions, cunning alignments of liability and safety, no-one cares if it works so long as money is made.
Since we entered a new year, we also entered a new quarter, and that means a new quarterly report from the Hurd, the project that aims to, to this day, developer a kernel for the GNU operating system. Over the course of the fourth quarter of 2025, an important undertaking has been to port dhcpcd to Hurd, which will ultimately bring IPv6 support to Hurd.
MenuetOS, the operating system written in x86-64 assembly, released version 1.58.00. Since the last time we talked about MenuetOS, the included X server has been improved, networking performance has been increased, there’s now native versions of classic X utilities like XEyes, XCalc, and others, and more.
