We’re a little deep into June already, but it’s only now that Haiku published its monthly progress report for May. There’s a bunch of fixes for drag-and-drop behaviour in Tracker, AVX512 support can now be enabled thanks to changes to the kernel’s FPU handling, some low-level changes were made for the Rust and Zig compilers, and further improvements were made to the boot process on the Raspberry Pi 5 (although a lot more work is needed on that front).

Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, has been updated with the release of Milestone 40. This version has some major component updates. Perl in now 5.42 instead of 5.34, and the default Python is now 3.13.

The surprising discovery of mysterious blobs inside our cells is revolutionising our understanding of how life works, and how it got started

IVF could be done inside the body using sperm that have been magnetised, allowing them to be directed to an egg while getting around the need for invasive egg retrievals and embryo transfers

Scientists have long grappled with how to measure the effect of social media on children. Now, the UK government has announced a total ban for everyone under 16, and researchers are rushing to design rigorous studies before it comes into effect

Physical Intelligence is drawing on the broad knowledge of large language models to help robots understand instructions and learn to carry out any task independently

An infuriating story about something most of us don’t really stop to think about: e-books and the rendering engines companies and software use to display them. It’s the year 2026. Thanks to the horrendous RMSDK which Kobo decided to use as their backbone for all book rendering (probably for DRM reasons), a single line of perfectly valid CSS turns a perfectly valid EPUB file into a “corrupted file” on Kobo and just drops the whole book.

Quantum computing firm QuEra says it plans to make a fault-tolerant quantum computer and offer it to users through the cloud in 2028, which will require a real leap in engineering

How far can you get, application development-wise, by using only the original APIs from Windows 1.0, and only whatever came included by default with Windows 1.0? I finally decided to write an application for the very first version of Windows and see how different the modern WinAPI really is from its earliest versions.

Galaxies and their supermassive black holes evolve together, but which came first is an ongoing question. Now we may finally have an answer, says columnist Leah Crane

In 1994 I got my first computer: an Intel i486 DX2-66 with 4 MB RAM and a 512MB harddisk. The software was IBMs OS/2 and Microsofts Windows 3.11. In the next four years I was upgrading this machine every few months with more RAM (up to 16MB), a CD-ROM-drive and a soundblaster card.

TrueType is a widely used vector font standard for rendering text in web pages, PDFs, operating systems, and applications. Familiar fonts like Helvetica, Garamond, and Monaco are all built on TrueType outlines.

We know that members of Gen Z are less likely to be in a steady relationship than millennials were at their age, but previous research missed out an important factor that actually widens the relationship recession

We can no longer ignore the growing threat of fully autonomous weapons. The world must either act to ban them or accept that they are the future of war

If you want to try out a modern Amiga operating system, your choices are severely constrained. Both MorphOS and AmigaOS 4 need PowerPC hardware, and at the moment, there’s little to no modern hardware available for purchase to run these operating systems on.

A superconducting quantum computer is part of a network that is mining an experimental cryptocurrency called Quip, and it is able to do it faster and with better energy efficiency than conventional machines

In the face of loneliness, many people are turning to AI chatbots for companionship – but research shows it can’t replace human connection. Columnist David Robson explores how beneficial it can be to talk to strangers, with evidence-based tips on how to get the conversation flowing

A clock based on radioactive thorium atoms realises a long-held ambition, demonstrating a technology that could eventually beat the accuracy of today’s best atomic clocks

Our soils are teeming with networks of fungi, and we're starting to understand how important they are

It was widely thought that the movement of water through Venus flytrap cells caused the trap to close, but detailed experiments have led scientists to propose an alternative mechanism

So-called indirect greenhouse gases, including carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds, aren’t covered by climate policies even though they heat the planet

Global weather agencies have declared that El Niño has begun, and models show it is more likely than not to be a "super" El Niño. The climate pattern boosts extreme weather around the world, and could lead to record temperatures

Video game consoles have a long history with web browsers. From the advent of the World Wide Web, consoles have been trying to get online. Browsers on video game consoles were initially very much an attempt to provide a cheap gateway to the web for a casual audience lacking technical expertise, though as time progressed they’ve become a greater and more integrated part of systems.

An experiment with a toy universe made up of extremely cold atoms shows how time can emerge from quantum interactions, instead of existing by default

With the announcement of an upcoming new macOS release also come the usual changes in which Macs will still be supported. MacOS 27 Golden Gate is an important release in this regard, as it will be the first release of Apple’s desktop operating system that will be entirely ARM-only, dropping support for all Intel Macs.

Student Gunnar Hartmann wins Nature’s 2026 Scientist at Work photography competition for this shot of migrating northern bald ibis in Spain

With Steven Spielberg’s new extraterrestrial film Disclosure Day just out, it’s the ideal time to watch Close Encounter of the Third Kind – perhaps the perfect UFO film, says film columnist Bethan Ackerley

A study of 4.5 million people suggests that ex-smokers who take up vaping are more at risk of dying from lung cancer than people who quit without the use of e-cigarettes

A study of 4.5 million people suggests that ex-smokers who take up vaping are more at risk of dying from lung cancer than people who quit without the use of e-cigarettes

Apple recently announced its next crack at integrating “AI” into its operating systems, this time opting to simply whitelabel Google’s Gemini “AI” tools instead of developing its own LLM technology.

For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions.

On a related note, what about a raycasting first-person shooter written in… COBOL? Can you think of a better programming language than COBOL to implement an FPS from scratch? I know I can’t, so buckle up and enjoy what can only be described as an out-of-body experience for COBOL enthusiasts as I set out to make a Wolfenstein3D-like raycasting based FPS game (and potentially go a bit further than that, hopefully it’s not a DOOMed attempt).

My goal was to build a complete, shippable first-person shooter using techniques that were common in the early 90s, while allowing myself the luxury of using a modern compiler and a platform abstraction layer.

Microsoft has detailed that Windows 11 is going to switch away from dedicated printer drivers to its Windows Ready Print system. This should make it a lot easier and less cumbersome to get printers running on Windows 11.

A visit to Kew Gardens’ exhibit of the sculptor’s work is a fascinating insight into how he was inspired by nature

Palaeontologist Steve Brusatte's The Story of Birds offers an excellent and sometimes startling account of bird evolution, finds Michael Marshall

Feedback is alarmed by a study that explored how funny people think they are, and discovered certain traits in those who rate themselves the most humorous

A photo essay from Tommy Trenchard explores efforts to protect the fragile ecosystems of oases in Chad

With its origins in a creepy image posted on 4chan, Backrooms is an unusually potent big-screen experiment in fear and perception, says Davide Abbatescianni

Researchers suggesting that the keto diet could treat mental health conditions find themselves uncomfortably aligned with people like vaccine-sceptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr, but that is not a reason to reject the idea

Europe’s largest land animal, the bison, is thought to be relatively unthreatened by predators, but footage from Białowieża Primaeval Forest in Poland shows it does face attacks from wolves

Researchers diving 7 kilometres deep in a crewed submersible have discovered a vast collection of whale bones, including fossils up to 5 million years old and species new to science

The outer solar system once seemed like a quiet backwater. But a glut of tiny, strange moons with unruly orbits are coming into view, revealing hints of a surprising past – and the origin of Saturn's rings

It’s just a ruling from a lower court, but it sets the stage for how European courts are going to deal with the question of who is liable for whatever slop “AI” generates. The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no.

Climate models suggest a small nuclear war in the tropics would do even more damage to the ozone layer than a larger nuclear war in more northerly latitudes, increasing exposure to dangerous ultraviolet radiation all over the world

When it comes to 80s computer brands, few flew as high as Eagle Computer flew in 1983. The aptly named company was selling 12,000 computers a month and had been doubling sales every quarter under the leadership of a talented CEO.

A senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry told New Scientist that a test took place two years ago involving fully autonomous drones set to destroy anything in a given area, with confirmed casualties

A near miss with a Waymo while cycling through London hasn't changed my optimistic stance on driverless cars, but we can't ever let our guard down, says Matthew Sparkes

Uncrewed ground vehicles have already been tested for defending the front line by the Ukrainian military. Despite their limitations, these remotely controlled robots could be the deciding factor in many conflicts

Scrape marks inside a skull and sharpened limb bones in a set of remains found in Scotland may be evidence of unusual Iron Age funerary rituals

A new logo means new merch! I’m launching brand new merch today, all featuring the brand new OSNews logo. We’ve got the classic T-shirt with the new OSNews logo, in sandy white and terrain grey.

A complex ecosystem of woolly mammoths, bison, horses and big cats has been elucidated by studying the faeces of small rodents that probably ate the bigger animals

Bleaching has devastated reefs around the world, raising fears of an irreversible shift. Yet new interventions have revealed that corals can be remarkably resilient if we can give them enough help to recover

Drill cores at the impact site of the Chicxulub asteroid show evidence that, alongside widespread destruction, the collision created a vast underground ecosystem filled with hot water that sheltered microbial life

Brown dwarfs are somewhere between the size of a planet and a star, so how could we have potentially mistaken two of them for distant galaxies? Columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein argues that solving this cosmic mix-up is particularly possible now, as galaxy research has never been stronger

Physics is considered a cold, hard science – but it will transform your life if you view it with a bit more subjectivity, says Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

In today’s climate, I needed this: GentleOS, an operating system targeting both 386 (GentleOS/32) and even processors as old as the 80186 (GentleOS/16), with a lovely retro graphical user interface, usable on bare metal, and, of course, open source.

Apple’s developer conference started today, and as is tradition, this means it also announced coming updates to its operating systems lineup. macOS is probably one of the two major ones OSNews readers are interested in, so let’s start there: Much like Mac OS X Snow Leopard in 2009, Apple said it focused on improving macOS’s performance and dozens of underlying technologies this year.

Anthropic has warned that recursive-self-improving AI could be on the horizon, but the truth is the company is more immediately concerned with marketing itself for a blockbuster initial public offering on the stock market, says Matthew Sparkes

The out-of-Africa migration, in which ancient humans went on to inhabit every other continent except Antarctica, may not have been one moment in time, but a long and slow process. Columnist Michael Marshall examines how archaeologists are rethinking this critical part of our history

Lapses in memory are a normal part of ageing but can also be signs of dementia. Here’s how to distinguish between typical brain ageing and cognitive decline

A diverse range of bird species has been recorded at a solar park on rewetted peatland in Germany, suggesting that combining energy generation with habitat restoration could benefit biodiversity, the climate and the economy

Redox progressed another month, and that means a ton of improvements and new features to talk about. The biggest news this past month is that Xfce has been ported to Redox, which offers a better X11 experience than MATE currently does.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has warned tech firms, including Apple and Google, that they must voluntarily implement tools to stop children sharing explicit images, but experts warn this is easier said than done

Each decade the world is losing over 7 per cent of its freshwater storage capacity to sediment build-up, according to an analysis of over half a million reservoirs

Norman Feske, one of the main developers behind Genode and Sculpt OS, has published a blog post detailing how he developed a two-factor authentication application for Sculpt OS. With this little tool, which I have turned into an deploy option on Sculpt OS to swiftly bring it up whenever I need it, TOTP-based two-factor authentication has become part of my daily routine.

One-third of people with anorexia nervosa don’t recover and treatment has remained stagnant for years. Now we’re beginning to understand how the condition takes over the mind

Endometriosis is usually thought of as a gynaecological condition, but a huge study shows it has links with cholesterol levels, inflammation and an altered microbiome

Mice seemed to reap some of the benefits of sleep by having their brain activity stimulated while they were awake, and the researchers plan to test the approach on people

I’ve been using Fedora Silverblue on my desktop and laptop for the past, what, five years? Silverblue is Fedora’s main atomic variant, a spiritual counterpart to Fedora Workstation. I also make niri, a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.

x86CSS is a working CSS-only x86 CPU/emulator/computer. Yes, the Cascading Style Sheets CSS. No JavaScript required. What you’re seeing above is a C program that was compiled using GCC into native 8086 machine code being executed fully within CSS.

A team in the US has reported promising results after using an improved form of CRISPR to gene-edit human embryos, but a major issue remains unsolved

Scientists warn that the Trump administration's push to dismantle a vital network of ocean-sensing instruments will stymie crucial weather and climate monitoring in the Pacific and Atlantic

RISC-V has been in the “promising” phase for a long time now, especially for general purpose computing, never really breaking through into the mainstream in any measurable way. While I think that breakthrough is still relatively far away, we now do have newer RISC-V SoCs on the market supporting the RVA23 baseline RISC-V profile.

The modern world depends on open-source software maintained by volunteers, but the added demands of checking and fixing AI-written submissions are causing some to burn out and quit

Mice that contain cells with an added rat chromosome have been created by scientists. The next step is to try this with frozen elephant tissue – and if that works, the team will try it with frozen mammoths

I’ve mentioned it before, but Chris Siebenmann is basically the Raymond Chen of the UNIX world, and today he’s filling that role perfectly once again. I recently read Simon Tatham’s Nitpicking the shell history scene in Tron: Legacy, where one thing that surprised Tatham was the film using ‘login -n root‘ to become root instead of ‘su‘.

A seemingly simple set of rules kicks off a kind of mathematical magic trick, which has kept great minds busy since the 1930s. Columnist Jacob Aron explores the origins of the Collatz conjecture, why it is so addictive to mathematicians and whether AI could help us solve it once and for all

Roku, the company that makes TV boxes and sells ad space based on your usage patterns, has released its remote control operating system as open source – and by remote control I don’t mean robot stuff or whatever, but actual remote controls, the thing you use to control your TV or whatever from the couch.

Raymond Chen shares some history regarding Windows 8’s development: During the development of Windows 8, we needed a name for “that thing we’re creating.” Not being a particularly clever bunch when it comes to code names, we just called it “the modern experience,” to distinguish it from what we had in Windows 7, which was called “the classic experience.” And then, as Microspeak demands, we started abbreviating like mad.

Parents report loving their partners less within the first year of having a child, but that doesn't mean the feeling is permanent or inevitable

A patch of ocean south-east of Greenland is the only place on Earth that is cooling, and it could be a sign that the warm water "conveyor belt" in the Atlantic is slowing down

For the past few years, Microsoft has been phasing out NTLM in Windows in favor of Kerberos-based alternatives. Starting with the next versions of client and server editions of Windows, Microsoft will also be disabling the legacy authentication protocol by default.

Rachel Carson’s look at the dire effects of industrial and agricultural pollution birthed the modern environmental movement when it was first published – and remains as crucial a read today, finds Rowan Hooper

A glacier could have carried the giant sandstone at the centre of Stonehenge southwards from north-east Scotland, but this scenario appears unlikely

At its Build conference, Microsoft announced coreutils for Windows. Coreutils for Windows is a Microsoft-maintained set of UNIX-style command-line utilities that run natively on Windows — the same commands and pipelines you use on Linux, macOS, and WSL.

On the Vogon forums, user MarkDastedt posted an interesting bit of source code he discovered on an old company DVD: a very basic, very rudimentary implementation of multicore support for DOS. Another user, dartfrog, took a closer look and had this to say: Interesting stuff nonetheless.

A hobby operating system, not written in Rust, not targeting Qemu, not targeting a Raspberry Pi. Yes, it still happens. Serena OS is what you get when modern operating system design and implementation meets vintage hardware like the Amiga computers.

Andrew Tridgell, developer of rsync, has published a blog post addressing the massive surge in “AI” code submissions and the string of regressions supposedly caused by them. He explains rsync was flooded with “AI”-generated security reports, and he couldn’t handle the volumes anymore.

Global warming will amplify the impacts of El Niño events, and could also make them much stronger and more far-reaching

Actor Ben McKenzie explores the world of crypto in an entertaining documentary that doesn't shy away from calling out those who have promoted the currency

A new retrospective of M.C. Escher’s work opens this week. Explore some of his most mind-bending, mathematically inspired works here

A new retrospective of the artist beloved by mathematicians opens this week. Get up close to the art with our interactive story

Giulia Enders made her name with Gut, an exploration of our intestines. Now, in the compelling follow-up Organ Speak, she’s listening to what our other organs are telling us

Feedback discovers Halupedia, an online encyclopedia that is 100 per cent generated by AI, offering such delights as the 19nd century and The Society for the Prevention of Unnecessary Tuesdays

Why do we have big brains? Or walk on two legs? Biological anthropologist and broadcaster Alice Roberts talks human exceptionalism, evolution and her new book Humans with Michael Marshall

Despite AI's dizzying improvements in mathematical ability, its successes show just how integral human mathematicians are to the scientific process

Mark Thomson has taken the reins at CERN just as particle physics confronts some of its deepest unknowns – and faces hard choices about what comes next

A circle running along the 27° east and 153° west meridians divides the globe into two halves with equal reflectivity – and this may have implications for solar geoengineering schemes

A UN report warns of the rapid growth in AI energy consumption, but suggests users can improve efficiency by making prompts more concise