Global warming may make it too hot for malaria-carrying mosquitoes to survive in parts of Africa, but could also shift the problem to less affected areas

Speaking of OpenBSD: Yes, you read that right. Modern development tools in the form of the LLVM compiler infrastructure is well on its way to supporting OpenBSD/sparc64 along with other more conventional architectures.

Protein is everywhere, but studies – mostly in non-human animals – suggest that limiting our intake could extend our lifespan

As I mentioned in my OpenBSD 7.8 highlights post, development of relayd(8) and httpd(8) had stalled. Many diffs appeared on the tech@ mailing list from different contributors, but few were committed into the repository.

Surgery that aims to enhance the clearance of Alzheimer's-associated proteins from the brain has been banned in China, but only after thousands of people had the procedure

The total solar eclipse on 12 August will only be visible to a lucky few, but eclipses happen all over the world – here are the next ones to look out for, wherever you may be

In this extract from Peter Heller’s novel, the August read for the New Scientist Book Club, we are introduced to pilot Hig, who lives alone after most of the world was killed in a superflu pandemic

Set in an empty world after a superflu pandemic wipes out most of humanity, Peter Heller's The Dog Stars - the August read for the New Scientist Book Club - will be released as a film later this month.

To predict when we’ll have a truly useful quantum computer, we need to know precisely what one is. Columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan finds that’s harder to pin down than you might think

When I had to use Windows 11 for a month because you people paid me to do so, the one seemingly small thing that really ground my gears were Windows 11’s terrible right-click (context) menus. They were full of stuff I didn’t put there, slow to open, and in some places, a modern Windows 11 context menu would have its own old Win32 context menu with even more stuff.

We may all have a disdain for Chrome – OSNews users probably use Chrome a lot less than the average public – but that doesn’t mean the browser doesn’t sometimes do interesting things other browsers should copy.

We all have bits of DNA from a long-lost “ghost ancestor” inside us – and by putting all the different bits together, we might be able to reconstruct their genome

The mummies of two people who lived in Chile more than 400 years ago carry DNA from smallpox, providing the first molecular evidence that the virus was brought to the Americas from Europe

Genetic tests of mammoth remains have found a stark contrast in the sex ratio between sites where the animals died naturally and those associated with humans, offering hints about how our ancestors hunted

A tiny sensor that unfolds within the body could continuously monitor our heart activity and breathing after showing promise in rats

Rebecca Skloot told the story of Henrietta Lacks and how her cells were taken without her permission in a bestselling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Reading it left Alison George with an uneasy feeling - so she spoke to Lacks's family

Networks of pipes carrying chilled water have proven to be an efficient way to cool hospitals and universities. Now, they are expanding into cities as heatwaves increase in the US and Europe

A treatment that turns off the bit of the immune system that goes haywire in Guillain-Barré syndrome may be the first targeted therapy approved for the autoimmune condition

Three problems that are out of reach for conventional computers have been cracked by quantum computers and show how important the machines could become for scientific research

Certain sleeping positions can lead to babies developing flattened heads, and an analysis of ancient skulls from Italy reveals that this condition affected people in the 9th century BC

The cosmological principle is the foundation of modern cosmology – but its usefulness doesn’t necessarily make it true, says columnist Leah Crane

A stunningly intact marine reptile named Austronaga minuta that lived around 245 million years ago may have looked like a miniature version of more famous later ocean predators, like plesiosaurs

There was unusual consensus amongst New Scientist Book Club members about our read for July, with readers falling over themselves to praise this big-concept slice of science fiction

Measures like bans on advertising junk food to children are essential for instilling healthy eating at a young age, but we shouldn't let adults off the hook when it comes to improving our diets

This week's cartoon from Twisteddoodles

Tom Gauld's weekly cartoon

Feedback is delighted by a deep dive into why people sometimes wear "artificially elongated fingernails". But does it do more than just scratch the surface?

If the sun suddenly disappeared, how long would life on Earth last, from humans and plants to subterranean bacteria? And why do humans so readily adopt fiction into our lives, and feel emotion about characters as though they were someone close to us in real life?

An Australian reader with an abundance of flies in their locality tries to answer a question that has intrigued many of our readers

It’s that time of the week again, I guess. The year is 2026, and I’m still amazed when I find a new entry in my Start menu’s All apps list for an app I don’t remember installing. This time, it’s Microsoft again, and the product is OneDrive Photos, which appears to be yet another photo viewer and editor for Windows 11 that nobody asked to have installed automatically.

Ubuntu Touch, the mobile Linux operating system originally started by, you guessed it, Ubuntu, but now managed by UBports, released versions 24.04-2.0 and 24.04-1.4. The latter is a maintenance release with some bug fixes and minor changes, while the former is a bigger release with quite a few improvements, so let’s focus on that one.

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of attaching multiple mice to one computer, and then having multiple mouse cursors inside of one desktop environment! I just spent three weeks investigating how well that’s currently supported on Linux & Wayland.

A jaguar that has been dubbed Gaspar traversed 2100 kilometres of the Amazon, crossing farms and roads. But why he set off on this mission is unclear

Rats are a scourge on island wildlife all over the world. But an island off the coast of Ireland is showing how to successfully gain the upper hand 

Climate change is affecting the yields and flavour of the traditional Japanese tea matcha, but studying its seedlings' genetic tolerance for heat could future-proof the crop

After the Chicxulub impact 66 million years ago, trillions of tonnes of rock vapour was launched into space before falling back to Earth at ballistic speeds, creating a global blast of heat strong enough to broil life on land

Flame-generated thunderstorms known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds can make wildfires even more intense, and they are expected to become more common in Europe

The first of a new generation of drugs that works in a completely different way to existing ones has been approved. Columnist Michael Le Page says this approach could transform treatments for all kinds of conditions

Dave Farquhar published an article today about Windows NT 3.1’s place in the market when it was originally released, and while the article is interesting and a fun read, it does mention this: Microsoft took its nascent code that it intended to form the base of OS/2 3.0, renamed it Windows New Technology, and eventually released it as Windows NT 3.1.

This is a walkthrough of how Fedora turns source code and packages into the artifacts you download and install. It follows the a package from a packager’s git push to a composed release: ISOs, cloud images, container images, and OSTree deployments.

Let’s do another article about weird code in video games. The original 1992 Comanche release is extremely picky about memory managers. The game refuses to work with EMM emulators and crashes when EMM386 is active.

A drug advisory committee in the US has recommended approval for several experimental peptides. But there have been no large-scale tests of these new compounds in humans, finds columnist Grace Wade

Over 1.4 million years ago, a group of eight ancient hominins walked across a shallow mudflat, but their footprints don’t match those of Paranthropus boisei or Homo erectus

Climate campaigners are angry at reports that the UK government is set to allow oil and gas drilling projects to go ahead, but the focus must be on ending fossil fuel consumption, not production, says Michael Le Page

Astronomers have caught a supermassive black hole straying far from the centre of its galaxy using light from a star being ripped apart

As you get older, your body’s response to food changes significantly. But by making the right changes to what you eat from midlife and beyond, it might be possible to add a decade to your life 

An eye implant and a pair of high-tech glasses that enable people with a severe form of vision loss to read have been approved for use by a European regulator

Haiku has a Firefox port, but due to Mozilla’s trademark policies, it’s actually called Iceweasel. After some back-and-forth with Mozilla, the browser maker has no given Haiku permission to officially use the Firefox name for the port.

Apple has transitioned its hardware products to the AArch64 processor architecture and is phasing out support for x64. Oracle engineers will thus stop maintaining the macOS/x64 port as of JDK 27. Maintaining the port is a significant burden.

That is the first line of the 80s microcomputer BASIC game The Wizard’s Castle initially written for the Exidy Sorcerer platform. It’s a REMark statement, a comment in that particular language.

An increasing number of studies have linked ultra-processed foods with depression, anxiety and even dementia. Columnist Helen Thomson explores how strong the evidence is for the brain effects of a diet full of these foods

The hottest and most promising operating system kernel in development, the GNU Hurd, has published another summary of its most recent quarter of development. Hurd has experimental support for 9pfs now, a work-in–progress port of OpenNTPD, the NTP daemon from OpenBSD, a port of Neovim, and a few more ports here and there.

Given that Android phones have been around for nearly two decades now, there comes a time when Google has to end support for one of its older software versions. For a couple of years now, Google Play services has been supported on devices running Android 6.0 Marshmallow or newer.

The Deep Space Network is our best way to communicate with spacecraft beyond Earth’s orbit, and one of its three stations around the world is in the middle of a wildfire

Researchers have created a textile made from the parasitic fungus Cordyceps militaris, which is biodegradable and can be adapted for different purposes with various microbes

To understand where climate change is heading, we have to look at the planet’s distant past and appreciate the disturbing uniqueness of our situation, says Bill McGuire

In a small study, restricting calories led to greater weight loss among people with a biological age younger than their chronological age

Humans have been observing solar eclipses for millennia – carving, painting, sketching and finally photographing as the moon blocks out the disc of the sun

We tend to think of the brain as being made up of highly specialised cells, but a study in mice suggests that most neurons are generalists

When researchers found evidence of a black hole flying out of its galaxy, nobody knew how that could happen. Now we have an explanation

When it comes to supplements to stave off the effects of ageing, columnist Graham Lawton admits he is a hardened sceptic. But he finds some evidence for a few that can improve biological age as we grow older

A rather unusual announcement was made late last night: the FreeBSD project has frozen their ports repository. For more than 48 hours now, no changes have been accepted or made to the tree, and here’s why.

The super El Niño now developing in the tropical Pacific has a 90 per cent chance of becoming the strongest in 150 years, breaking global temperature records and unleashing extreme weather

For the second time in a week, a long-standing conjecture has been disproved by artificial intelligence, highlighting the advanced mathematical capabilities of ChatGPT and its ilk

Haivya has developed acoustic signals designed to influence plant development, and its trials reportedly show large yield increases in soybean, pepper and cannabis crops

Mathematicians who helped unify laws of physics and cracked decades-old problems in geometry are among this year's recipients of the Fields medal

An analysis of supernovae argues that the universe’s expansion is not speeding up, so there is no need for dark energy to exist to explain it

We all know the original Amiga was far ahead of its time, and the Amiga really doesn’t need more retrospectives and glazing. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t want more Amiga retrospectives and glazing.

Viscera, voids and light-gobbling Vantablack conspire to disturb and amaze in Anish Kapoor’s new exhibition, which has heavy nods to the nature of reality, science and religion

This post is about the evolution of Futhark’s type checker, motivated by a large refactoring I am about to merge. It is probably mostly of interest to other language designers, and contains some lessons I wish I had known when we first got started – although I am not particularly well-read in the type checking literature, so it’s possible all of this is old hat.

Orcas have been seen smashing into sharp-tail sunfish so hard that the fish bursts into thousands of fragments, perhaps as a form of play as well as food processing

Long overlooked, the connection between our gut microbes and brain is yielding new insights into mental health

Honestly, it feels like only yesterday that System76, Linux OEM and the company behind pop!_OS, announced it was going to develop its own desktop environment, COSMIC. We’re about seven months into the more general availability of COSMIC, and the company has put up a nice overview of the various improvements that have already made their way into the code since then.

What happens when programmers get to vote on a complete ban on slopcoded software on their code platform? Members of Codeberg were asked to vote on a proposal to completely ban slopcoded projects from Codeberg, and in what should not be a surprising outcome to anyone not overcome with “AI” hysteria, the vast majority voted in favour of the complete ban: over 70% of Codeberg members voted to ban slopcoded projects entirely (358 in favour, 144 against, 14 abstentions).

Software that is free to use creates many opportunities – not all of which are good

Sublimation, in which a person can split into two when crossing an international border, is tip-top stuff. Don't miss it, says science-fiction columnist Emily H. Wilson

While Europe’s heatwave makes us run for shade, the intriguing In Defense of Sunlight reveals sunlight’s health-giving effects – in moderation, says David Robson

This week's cartoon from Twisteddoodles

Tom Gauld's weekly cartoon

Feedback is surprised to learn that geology is a particularly deadly speciality to pick if you're a fictional character, with a new study revealing an "alarming rate" of mortality for geologists in films

What is the optimal way to ice a cocktail: fewer big cubes or lots of small ones? And what is the smallest creature that needs to sleep, and what does this tell us about the nature of and need for sleep itself?

Readers take issue with a former answer to this question, arguing for the different behaviour of wasps and flies – and for a more defined plan of escape than has previously been posited

If you want to develop an application for AmigaOS 3.x but don’t want to deal with real hardware, virtualisation and emulation are your friends. Apropos of nothing, I decided to set up an Amiga development environment.

Drivers of cars from the Volkswagen Group using alternative Android versions like GrapheneOS, LineageOS, or /e/OS have been unable to use the VW app for some time. This means they can neither check their vehicle’s remaining range from their phone, schedule service appointments, nor control charging and air conditioning.

Sam Altman seems to be making OpenAI way more non-profit than before: Even as the AI bubble becomes a mainstream talking point on Wall Street, tech companies continue to peddle the fantasy that AI is poised to become an almost magical money-maker.

Preserved plant cells show that grasses were brought into Cloggs cave in Australia and burnt over many millennia, revealing the ancient origins of rituals practised by the GunaiKurnai people

On a trip along the Silk Road, columnist Annalee Newitz discovers that ancient technology can offer us a framework for our own advances. The most important drivers of technology aren’t inventions or devices, it turns out, but the people making them

Earth contains more than enough heat to power humanity many times over, but so far only a few lucky places have been able to exploit it. Now we may have a way to tap this vast clean energy source almost anywhere

For more than a decade, mathematicians have been unable to settle the question of whether the ABC conjecture has been solved. Fresh attempts to settle the debate are struggling to make headway

The Loki actor is the unlikely host for a three-episode docu-series about the Roman city. It's occasionally a little silly, but it's also entertaining and informative, says Josh Bell

Complex systems, be they living beings or fundamental particles, need to have enough structure to hang together along with unpredictability that can allow for change. Columnist Thomas Lewton explores whether this idea is simply a pattern seen across the cosmos or could be a “theory of everything”

One of the cool features of JPEG files is that there’s the option to save low frequency components first. This means that a partially downloaded image will be displayed at low resolution instead of being cut off.

The Verge reviewed the latest Surface Laptop, which only comes with 8GB of RAM at a higher price than the previous 16GB model, and they conclude that Windows isn’t really usable on 8GB of RAM. Whether that’s true or not I do not know – I would assume it depends a lot on your usage – but this quote from the review I found quite peculiar: I was on a Microsoft Teams call (using the app, not a browser) when the host streamed a brief video, which made the whole laptop hang for several seconds.

The NLnet Foundation’s NGI0 Commons Fund supported an effort to add WPA3 support to OpenBSD, and the work’s payed off. All drivers which support PMF can use WPA3, which are: iwm, iwx, and qwx.

Intermittingly inhaling a high dose of carbon dioxide seems to remove the proteins amyloid and tau, which are implicated in Alzheimer's disease, from the brain by boosting its glymphatic system

Mathematicians have been trying to prove the Jacobian conjecture for nearly a century, but now the Claude Fable 5 AI has apparently found a counterexample that disproves it

Don’t just hit the beach. Research is revealing how to have a holiday that leaves you mentally restored and refreshed – with long-lasting effect

Neither matter nor force, paraparticles would be something else entirely. Fresh hints that they exist are raising hopes that they could explain reality at its deepest level

Low cloud cover has been expanding since 1979, reflecting more sunlight into space, but scientists expect that trend to reverse and accelerate global warming

Many centuries before the advent of agriculture in Norway, ancient people transported fish into mountain lakes to create a source of food, then built wooden traps to catch them