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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Minuscule silicon wafers propelled by lasers could be used to steer light sails, helping them travel beyond the solar system

If a key ocean current collapses it could plunge northern Europe into a big freeze. Now researchers are weighing up a drastic intervention – building a 130-kilometre-wide dam between the US and Russia

The ways in which Google can lock you into their ecosystem are often obvious, but sometimes, they’re incredibly sneaky and easily missed. CAPTCHA tests are annoying, but at the same time, they can help protect websites from bots.

With that context, I always found it strange that the designers of ASCII included 6 characters after uppercase Z before starting the lowercase letters. Then it hit me: we have 26 letters in the English alphabet, plus 6 additional characters before lowercase starts: 26 + 6 = 32.

Many Bourne shells go slightly beyond the POSIX sh specification to also support a ‘-l’ option that makes the shell act as a ‘login shell’. POSIX’s omission of -l isn’t only because it doesn’t really talk about login shells at all, it’s also because Unix has a special way of marking login shells that goes back very far in its history.

The US Department of Defense has released hundreds of documents and photographs related to UFOs, some of which have been declassified, in the first of many drops to come

Many flowering plants have duplicated genomes, which could have helped them evolve to deal with extreme stress in times of environmental upheaval

A drone has crashed in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, causing a fire that has spread to 12 square kilometres of land. Dry weather, strong winds and the presence of land mines are complicating efforts to bring the blaze under control

Satellite measurements show that in the early 2010s sea level rise suddenly accelerated to a rate of 4.1 millimetres per year, possibly in response to an increase in the rate of global warming

How important is thinking about your breath for calming yourself down? We now know that slow breathing is effective even without conscious involvement

An impression made in clay around 175,000 years ago could be a kneeprint left by one of the builders of a strange stalagmite circle found deep inside Bruniquel cave in south-west France

A secret society of French mathematicians has been revolutionising the field of mathematics under a pseudonym for nearly a century. Columnist Jacob Aron finds that this mythic collective provided maths a rigorous and useful foundation, and did some real harm along the way

On the Fedora forums, there’s a long-running thread about a proposal for Fedora to build a variant of the distribution aimed specifically at “AI”. The “problem” identified in the proposal is that setting up the various parts that a developer in the “AI” space needs is currently quite difficult on Fedora, and as such, a bunch of technical steps need to be taken to make this easier.

Another month, another progress report, Redox, etc. etc., you know the drill by now. This past month Redox saw improved booting on real hardware by making sure the boot process continues even if certain drivers fail or become blocked.

Time for another Sun Ray blog post! I’ve had a few people email me asking for help setting up a Sun Ray server over the last few months, and despite my attempts to help them get it going there’s been mixed results with running SRSS on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10.

If you’re sick of Chrome OS on your Chromebook, or can find a Chromebook for cheap somewhere but don’t actually want to use Chrome OS, have you considered postmarketOS? Since I was kind frustrated with ChromeOS, I decided to take a look at something that I knew supported my Lenovo Duet 3 for some time: postmarketOS.

The World Health Organization sought to quell worldwide fears over the hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius and reassure the public that the risk of widespread transmission is low

Only 3 per cent of those with polycystic ovary syndrome reach perimenopause by the age of 46, which may allow them to conceive when older

A comprehensive study exploring coffee’s physiological effects finds that some of its benefits are down to polyphenols and their influence on gut bacteria

A guide to walking, a look at the world’s Google searches and a deep dive into the secrets of our DNA are some of the topics tackled by the popular science books out this month

A device made using a tiny bead floating in a beam of light can measure extremely small pressures and could help find a mysterious kind of neutrino

Research into dating has until now almost exclusively focused on younger people, but we’re finally beginning to investigate how romance changes in later life

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

Eric Lusito crossed the former Soviet Union to explore vast scientific sites, some of which have been deserted for years, for his new book

An analysis of 150 artefacts from a site in Wales shows that the ancient practice of making tools out of bone persisted even after the advent of metal-working

Solving society's problems with evidence is a work in progress, argues a must-read new book. The process is surprisingly new – and riddled with complexities, finds Michael Marshall

Feedback discovers that the prevailing themes of Eurovision songs may come and go, but the urge to win stays the same.

People often ask who might replace the nature broadcaster, who turns 100 this week. The truth is that he’s irreplaceable, but a wide range of voices are attempting to fill his shoes.

Red-light therapy promises to treat everything from acne and hair loss to depression and chronic pain. Many of these claims are overhyped, but evidence suggests it can have healing powers

At least 15 per cent of the Amazon has already been lost, and further destruction could unleash widespread rainforest dieback with as little as 1.5°C of global warming

When the slope of a mountain above Tracy Arm fjord, in Alaska, gave way on 10 August 2025, 64 million cubic metres of rock fell into the fjord, causing a 5.4 magnitude seismic event  

This 2013 book by an Indigenous botanist is a quietly urgent act of healing that forces Western science to look at the world in a different way

Prize-winning young writer Hasset Kifle, 17, explores how the world of super-competitive running is being transformed by so-called “super shoes” – and what cost this will have on the sport

Fossils reveal that there were at least two kinds of koala when humans first arrived in Australia, but one died out about 30,000 years ago when the west of the continent dried out

There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a terminal, it is inherently accessible. The logic assumes that because there are no graphics, no complex DOM, and no WebGL canvases, the content is just raw ASCII text that a screen reader can easily parse.

Backing up in modern times, we’ve had ZFS snapshots and replication to make this task extremely easy. However, you may not have access to another ZFS endpoint for replication, need to diversify risk by using a non-ZFS tool for backup, or are simply using UFS2, living the old skool life.

Creating quantum entanglement inside a solid material is tricky in the lab – but crystals buried in the earth could be growing it naturally. Now one scientist says he has proof he’s found them

NHS England is pulling its open-source software from the internet because of fears around computer-hacking AI models like Mythos. Opposition is growing among those who say the move is bad for transparency and efficiency, and will also do nothing to improve security

Three people have died on board the cruise ship MV Hondius due to an outbreak of hantavirus, a rare illness transmitted by rodents

Three passengers on the cruise ship MV Hondius have died due to an outbreak of hantavirus, a rare illness transmitted by rodents

A biopsy of a woman's cancer seems to have triggered an immune response against the tumour, putting her into remission

One of the best-performing models in cosmology is also one with the least physical rationale behind it. Columnist Leah Crane says this leaves us with a puzzle that could make or break physics as we know it

Doug Whitney has a genetic mutation that means he should have developed Alzheimer’s disease decades ago, but his long-term work in hot engine rooms may have protected him in a similar way to sauna therapy

Doug Whitney has a genetic mutation that means he should have developed Alzheimer’s disease decades ago, but his long-term work in hot engine rooms may have protected him in a similar way to sauna therapy

Two quantum computers and two supercomputers teamed up to break the record on the biggest molecule yet to be simulated using quantum hardware

Earlier this year, Mac OS and Windows NT-capable ROMs were discovered for Apple’s unique AIX Network Server. Cameron Kaiser has since spent more time digging into just how capable these ROMs are, and has published another one of his detailed stories about his efforts.

With Windows being as old and long-running as it is, there’s a ton of old and outdated bits and pieces lurking in every nook and cranny. I have always found these old relics fascinating, especially now that over the past few years, Microsoft has attempted to replace some of those bits and pieces with modern replacements (not always to great success, but that’s another story).

It is appealing to think something as simple as honey could cure a cold or prevent hay fever, but is there evidence to back up honey’s health benefits? Columnist Alice Klein finds that it has legitimate medicinal uses, depending on the type of honey you’ve got

A long-overlooked writing system from 5000 years ago is still largely undeciphered, but could mark the moment humans first represented their speech with written words

A 500-kilometre-wide object in a similar orbit to Pluto challenges our assumptions about small bodies in the outer solar system

An update to an experiment run by Henry Cavendish in 1773 could be a cheaper and faster way to spot a potential dark matter particle – and may be 10,000 times more sensitive

To mark David Attenborough turning 100, New Scientist staff have been set a tricky task: pick your favourite of his many amazing documentaries...

A small trial found that chewing gum containing nitrate can ease the symptoms of gum disease by favouring the growth of beneficial mouth bacteria

A device you attach to your underwear reveals how often you really break wind – and it’s probably more frequently than you think

While I’m normally a KDE user, I do keep close tabs on various other desktop environments, and install and set them up every now and then to see how they’re fairing, what improvements they’ve made, and ultimately, if my preference for KDE is still warranted.

To assess how small a macOS VM could be, I ran the same VM of macOS 26.4.1 on progressively smaller CPU core and memory allocations, using my virtualiser Viable. The VM’s display window was set to a standard 1600 x 1000, and I ran Safari through its paces and performed some lightweight everyday tasks, including Storage analysis in Settings.

The second half of this year will almost certainly see the start of an El Niño phase that could lead to extreme heat across much of the globe, and James Hansen expects that to make this year surpass 2024 as the hottest on record

National Health Service rules state that all software created with public money should be publicly available, but fears of computer-hacking AI models like Mythos have prompted a change in policy

Should you really be drinking eight glasses of water a day? What about reaching for a sports drink after exercise? Physiologist Tamara Hew-Butler is here to bust these hydration myths and more.

An infestation of caterpillars can make an oak tree postpone when it opens its leaves next year by three days, wrong-footing the insects when they attack again

With progress at COP climate meetings stalling, 57 countries took part in the first of a new series of conferences aiming to develop roadmaps away from fossil fuels, but big emitters like China and the US were absent

Silvia Park, author of the May read for the New Scientist Book Club, reveals how a book that was originally intended to be for children took a darker route following a death in the family

In this extract from Luminous, the May read for the New Scientist Book Club, we meet a mysterious robot discovered in a salvage yard in Seoul, in a future reunified Korea

Uranus’s outermost two rings are surprisingly dissimilar, which opens up a mystery about the tiny moons and moonlets that form them

The implications of quantum mechanics suggest reality isn't as solid as we think it is, but physicist David Bohm had a spin on the theory that restores reality. Columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan explores how we could test Bohmian mechanics – and if it will ever become more widely accepted

Email is like those creaking old Terminators from the ’70s which continue to function without complaining. Designed for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, it has optional encryption, no built-in auth, three⁺ retrofitted security layers bolted on top, an unstandardized filtering layer and many more quirks.

A cryptocurrency that aims to avoid the disastrous energy consumption of bitcoin is actually using 18 times more energy than its makers claim – but it promises improvements are on the way

An ambitious study has explored how the oral microbiome may affect our metabolic health, raising hopes that conditions like pre-diabetes could one day be screened for via a simple mouth swab

Since the early 20th century, people’s skulls have got rounder and their jaws have got wider, probably because of changes in health, diet and environment

Researchers in South Korea say they have made a major advance by turning on genes with an electromagnetic signal, but critics say the claims are implausible and the paper is flawed

New science fiction from big names including Ann Leckie, Alan Moore and Martha Wells are just some of the exciting crop of titles out this month

Craig Venter has died aged 79. He was at the forefront of sequencing the human genome and of synthetic biology, but divided opinion in how he went about it

What if you run a few online services for you and your friends, like a small git instance and a grocery list service, but you get absolutely hammered by “AI” scrapers? I cannot impress upon you, reader, that this is not only an attack that is coordinated, it is an attack that is distributed.

A technique inspired by the film Interstellar suggests a new way of communicating backwards in time, but it could help improve conventional communication systems as well

Microsoft is continuing its efforts to release early versions of DOS as open source, and today we’ve got a special one. We’re stoked today to showcase some newly available source code materials that provide an even earlier look into the development of PC-DOS 1.00, the first release of DOS for the IBM PC.

When Apple unveiled the Vision Pro, almost three (!) years ago, I concluded: If there’s one company that can convince people to spend $3500 to strap an isolating dystopian glowing robot mask onto their faces it’s Apple, but I still have a hard time believing this is what people want.

The New Scientist Book Club read Kim Stanley Robinson's acclaimed science fiction story about the first settlers on Mars in April – and had a lot to say about it

These unusual images were created by visual artist Daniel Regan by submerging Polaroid photographs in his ADHD medication, to represent his experiences with the condition through art

Feedback has learned that, according to reports, Meta is building an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with staff. Feedback hopes this doesn't become a trend

Set on a planet whose population lives underground, Radiant Star is Ann Leckie's latest Radch-universe novel. Its rich characterisation and meticulous world-building shine through, says our science-fiction columnist Emily H.

Our brains need to adapt quickly to meet the challenges of our digital world, but a rigorous new book by a neuroscientist brings hope that we can do it, says Graham Lawton