Have you bought and set up a new phone for someone else lately, especially someone less technologically savvy? It’s a bit of a nightmare, with an endless list of confusing steps and dark patterns trying to trick you into signing up for all kinds of services.

Microsoft is pushing “AI” hard in Windows, Office, and in their other products, and it’s earned them a cute new nickname: Microslop. It turns out the company really doesn’t like it when you use this nickname, however, and its official Copilot Discord server – yes, there is an official one – has gone into a complete meltdown over people using the nickname.

Physicists are scrambling to understand why dark energy is weakening. In a surprising twist, we must now reconsider the possibility that our reality contains extra dimensions

Last year, our most detailed map of the universe yet suggested our understanding of dark energy has been wrong for decades. The shock result is reigniting the search for a better cosmic story   

Black holes that turn matter into energy could explain dark energy and answer two other cosmic questions. Now, the challenge is to find them

This is a New Scientist special package about shock results that have upended cosmology. What do they mean for our models of the universe, and what are the alternative explanations?

Putting silicate rocks from mine waste on fields could improve crops and limit global warming, but some researchers question where all that rock is going to come from

If you’re following KDE Plasma development, you’ve most likely run into something called Union, a project KDE is working on to unify their various ways of theming their applications. The problem KDE is facing right now is that after so many decades of development and changes in how people want to develop applications, they ended up with various different ways of writing applications, each with their own theming method.

Fungus-farming ants have evolved a remarkable solution to the danger of excess carbon dioxide inside their nests – which could inspire ways for humans to capture CO2

The most comprehensive study to date has revealed what we need to eat throughout the day to sleep well that night

The latest in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series is out this month, along with a speculative retelling of Moby-Dick and a forgotten classic from 1936

Cables underneath New York City are teeming with entangled quantum particles of light thanks to Qunnect, a company that has spent a decade working on building an unhackable quantum internet

Magnesium has been called the “super mineral of the moment”, hailed for its supposed benefits for the brain and body. But columnist Alice Klein finds that the evidence is lacking for many of these claims

I had no idea, but apparently, you can just use newline characters and tabs in URLs without any issues. Notice how it reports an error if there is a tab or newline character, but continues anyway? The specification says that A validation error does not mean that the parser terminates and it encourages systems to report errors somewhere.

Are you not at all interested in upgrading to macOS Tahoe, and getting annoyed at the relentless notification spam from Apple trying to trick you into upgrading? The secret? Using device management profiles, which let you enforce policies on Macs in your organization, even if that “organization” is one Mac on your desk.

If this isn’t catnip to the average OSNews reader, I don’t know what is. Windows 95 is a comprehensive upgrade to the Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 products. Many changes have been made in almost every area of Windows, with the user interface being no exception.

Bootc and OSTree represent a new way of thinking about Linux system deployment and management. Building on container and versioning concepts, they offer robust and modern solutions to meet the current needs of administrators and developers.

The file system of the Windows operating system is NTFS, whether you’re running it on a desktop/laptop or server. It’s the only file system Windows can run on and boot from, at least officially, so you’re not even given a choice of file systems for the boot volume like you are on, say, desktop Linux.

Encryption backdoors, social media bans for children, creepy age verification for applications – what will they think of next? The latest brilliant idea by US lawmakers sure is a hell of a doozy: legally mandated age verification in every single operating system.

FreeBSD has its jails technology, and it seems NetBSD might be getting something similar soon. Jails for NetBSD aims to bring lightweight, kernel-enforced isolation to NetBSD. The system is intended to remain fully NetBSD-native.

As it faces yet another set of delays, NASA’s Artemis programme is being shaken up, delaying an actual moon landing in favour of smaller, faster steps forward

Frailty can typically only be lessened through lifestyle changes, but a stem cell therapy seems to target the underlying causes of the condition, boosting the mobility of frail older people

Neuron-powered computer chips can now be easily programmed to play a first-person shooter game, bringing biological computers a step closer to useful applications

Pouring 65,000 litres of sodium hydroxide into the Gulf of Maine removed up to 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere without harming wildlife, according to the researchers behind an ocean alkalinity enhancement test

The dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid, but does that mean we risk suffering the same fate - and should you be worried about the possibility? Leah Crane sets the matter straight

The New Scientist Book Club enjoyed our February read, Tim Winton's far-future-set Juice. Head of books Alison Flood rounds up member thoughts

As the New Scientist Book Club embarks on its read for March, Art Cure, author Daisy Fancourt gives a sneak preview into the myriad ways in which the arts can improve our health

In this extract from Daisy Fancourt's Art Cure, the March read for the New Scientist Book Club, we learn about how art classes transformed life for Russell after he had a stroke

Secret-keeping evolved to maintain social harmony, but it can weigh heavily on us when we can’t stop thinking about them. So, what is the best way to deal with things that we don't want anyone else to know?

Superconducting computing circuits were briefly heralded as the future of computing in the 1980s. Columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan visits a quantum chip foundry where one company is betting this technology’s second act will revolutionise quantum computers

The congenital condition spina bifida is often treated surgically in the womb, but many children still go on to have mobility issues. The addition of a patch made up of stem cells from donated placentas could improve their long-term outcomes

The Genode OS Framework 26.02 has been released, and its tentpole improvement is the completion of moving configuration from XML to the new human-inclined data syntax, as we talked about a few months ago.

You may not be aware that FreeBSD has a pretty robust set of tools to run Linux binaries, unmodified. The result? A fast, smooth, fully-featured remote development experience on FreeBSD running Linux binaries transparently via the Linuxulator.

It seems the widespread efforts in Europe to drastically reduce its dependency on US technology companies is starting to worry some people. President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered U.S.

Genetic evidence hints that there was a strong bias for male Neanderthals and female humans to mate, rather than any other combination

Legislation working its way through the UK parliament would ban children from using social media and virtual private networks – but the proposals would endanger online privacy and may not make children safer, say legal experts

Nearly all of the solar system’s planets are about to file across the night sky in a planetary alignment, and it will be visible from anywhere on Earth

The UK's first geothermal plant in Cornwall is part of a wave of projects aiming to meet growing electricity demand, some of them enabled by technology from oil and gas fracturing

Both boosters and sceptics have strongly held opinions on AI tools like ChatGPT, but after an experiment in vibe coding, I have realised that both camps are wrong, says Jacob Aron

I’ve been a .com purist for over two decades of building. Once, I broke that rule and bought a .online TLD for a small project. This is the story of how it went up in flames. ↫ Tony S. An absolute horror story about Google’s dominance over the web, in places nobody really talks about.

Only a few days ago we talked about the concept of client-side decorations, and how more and more desktop environments and operating systems – specifically GNOME and macOS – are putting more and more buttons, menus, and other widgets inside title bars.

Microsoft released an optional cumulative update for Windows 11, and for once, it actually includes something many of you might actually like: it adds Sysmon from Sysinternals to Windows natively, so you no longer have to install it manually.

The environmental impact of SpaceX's planned gargantuan mega-constellation is still being grappled with, but the FCC isn’t required to study it

From ice ages to asteroid strikes, an epic book shows how important it has been for humans to look outwards. Alex Wilkins surveys a climate historian's cosmic sweep

Feedback is excited to learn that University of Maryland researchers are measuring farts in a bid to build a Human Flatus Atlas, a project that seems destined for an Ig Nobel

Post-apocalyptic bunker sci-fi is huge this year as TV front-runners Fallout, Paradise and Silo return. Bethan Ackerley asks whether this is a signal we’ve given up on our real world, or if there is hidden hope

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

NASA crew members practise emergency rescue drills in a 40-foot-deep pool simulating the lunar surface, as part of tests on a new generation of spacesuit, the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit

Many of us obsess over how much sleep we get each night, and the dangers to our health of not getting enough, but really, there is another way

The alvarezsaurs were thought to have evolved a smaller stature because of their diet of ants and termites, but a new fossil found in Argentina casts doubt on that theory

The discovery of bright yet stable pigments is vanishingly rare, making them hugely valuable. Now chemist Mas Subramanian is unpicking the atomic code of colour and homing in on our most-wanted hue

The commonly used RSA encryption algorithm can now be cracked by a quantum computer with only 100,000 qubits, but the technical challenges to building such a machine remain numerous

Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

The drug rapamycin has been held up for its life-extending properties, but whether this treatment – or fasting – actually adds years to your life isn't guaranteed

This must be a universal experience at this point for people who aren’t swayed by the latest and greatest marketing hype around new phone models: there’s just nothing out there that fits one’s needs.

Social media is going the way of alcohol, gambling, and other social sins: Societies are deciding it’s no longer kid stuff. Lawmakers point to compulsive use, exposure to harmful content, and mounting concerns about adolescent mental health.

Fins washing up in the North Pacific suggest that orcas from one subspecies are snacking on other orcas, and researchers think that may explain their different social dynamics

Ukraine has responded to a war it didn’t start by creating an industry it doesn’t want, but could the nation's drone expertise help it rebuild? To learn more, New Scientist gained exclusive access to the research labs, factories and military training schools behind Ukraine’s drones

A cream that directly disrupts the underlying causes of the skin patches seen in the condition vitiligo will be made available on the NHS

Duplicating the information held in quantum computers was thought to be impossible thanks to the no-cloning theorem, but researchers have now found a workaround

People often focus on the bad side effects of vaccines, but they can have some great side effects too, says columnist Michael Le Page. They don’t just protect us from contagious diseases but can also lower the risk of dementia and heart attacks

Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, may have been even more instrumental to the system’s evolution than we thought, forming its rings, shaping its moons and even affecting the planet itself

While Libadwaita applications running in a GNOME desktop environment look great and nicely consistent, they look utterly out of place and jarring when run in Xfce, Pantheon, KDE, and others. The biggest reason for this is GNOME’s insistence on using client-side decorations, which feel at home inside a GNOME environment, but out of place in environments that otherwise do not use them.

Every OpenBSD admin has booted bsd.rd at least once — to install, upgrade, or rescue a broken system. But few people stop to look at what’s actually inside that file. It turns out bsd.rd is a set of nested layers, and you can take it apart on a running system without rebooting anything.

Mysterious signs engraved on objects reveal that a form of proto-writing may have been used in Europe 40,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before the emergence of a full writing system

Expert birdwatchers have changes in their brain structure compared with novices, which probably help them better identify birds and may even protect against age-related cognitive decline

An examination of bones has revealed one of the largest prehistoric mass killings known in Europe, with women, adolescents and children making up most of the 77 victims

How we feel about a night’s sleep can have a bigger impact on mood and grogginess than actual hours of rest. Here’s how to change your mindset to feel more energised

Temnothorax kinomurai, a parasitic ant species found in Japan, reproduces asexually and all of its young develop into queens that try to take over other ants’ colonies

Horses use their larynx to make two sounds simultaneously, so they are effectively singing and whistling at the same time

We often stop noticing things we’ve become too accustomed to, as a side effect of our brains protecting us from sensory overload. Columnist Helen Thomson shares the evidence-backed ways to learn how to notice again

The regular, consumer version of Windows 10 isn’t the only Windows release reaching or having reached end-of-life, now middling on under the Extended Security Updates program for the many people sticking with the venerable release.

Despite continuous rumors to the contrary, Oracle is still actively developing Solaris, and it’s been more active than ever lately. Yesterday, the company pushed out another release for customers with the proper support contracts: Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU90.

I was trading New Year’s resolutions with a circle of friends a few weeks ago, and someone mentioned a big one: sleeping better. I’m a visual neuroscientist by training, so whenever the topic pops up it inevitably leads to talking about the dreaded blue light from monitors, blue light filters, and whether they do anything.

A survey of 100 commercial foods for dogs and cats revealed that PFAS chemicals appear in numerous brands and types, with fish-based products among those with the highest levels

Colliding galaxies can create a beam of focused microwave radiation known as a maser, and astronomers have discovered the brightest one ever seen

New insights into the causes of migraine are prompting a fresh look at a drug target that was sidelined 25 years ago

Planet K2-18b, an apparent water world 124 light years away, has been seen as a promising location in the search for aliens, but telescopes on Earth failed to pick up any radio transmissions

We’ve been missing an important contributor to ageing, says columnist Graham Lawton. Ultra-processed foods are known to be associated with many chronic health problems, but studies have now shown they may also speed up ageing

As if keeping track of whatever counts as a release schedule for Windows wasn’t complicated enough – don’t lie, you don’t know when that feature they announced is actually being released either – Microsoft is making everything even more complicated.

Spinosaurs have sometimes been portrayed as swimmers or divers, but a new species of these dinosaurs bolsters the idea that they were more like gigantic herons

After a Falcon 9 rocket stage burned up in the atmosphere, vaporised lithium and other metals drifted over Europe. This growing type of pollution could destroy ozone and form climate-warming clouds

An exotic type of dark matter could explain some of the characteristics of our galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, but many cosmologists are leery of the idea

Symbiotic bacteria living inside insect cells have lost much of their DNA over hundreds of millions of years, much like the ancient microbes that evolved into mitochondria

So vi only has one level of undo, which is simply no longer fit for the times we live in now, and also wholly unnecessary given even the least powerful devices that might need to run vi probably have more than enough resources to give at least a few more levels of undo.

F9 is an L4-inspired microkernel designed for ARM Cortex-M, targeting real-time embedded systems with hard determinism requirements. It implements the fundamental microkernel principles—address spaces, threads, and IPC, while adding advanced features from industrial RTOSes.

It’s been well over a year since Microsoft unveiled it was working on bringing MIDI 2.0 to Windows, and now it’s actually here available for everyone. We’ve been working on MIDI over the past several years, completely rewriting decades of MIDI 1.0 code on Windows to both support MIDI 2.0 and make MIDI 1.0 amazing.

An assessment of nearly 900 dogs has identified 12 breeds prone to brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome, which can affect dogs' ability to sleep and exercise

Antibodies harvested from the blood of paediatricians are up to 25 times better at protecting against the common respiratory infection RSV than existing antibody therapies, and are now being developed as preventative treatments

We have long drawn parallels between ants and humans. Now we are comparing the insects to computers. It is time to stop using ants as analogues for ourselves and our machines, says Annalee Newitz

Fungi have become Hollywood’s go-to bad guys. But as yet another story focuses on Cordyceps, Nick Crumpton says we are missing a chance to broaden our fictional horizons

Feedback enjoys the debunking of a study that suggested a 2022 solar eclipse had been "anticipated" by a bunch of trees

Mathematician Hannah Fry travels to the front lines of AI in her new BBC documentary AI Confidential with Hannah Fry. She talks to Bethan Ackerley about what the technology is doing to us – for better and for worse

In the ChatGPT era, a war over the nature of intelligence is playing out. Chris Stokel-Walker explores a Princeton professor's engaging take

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

A new show at the Royal West of England Academy brings together a series of works that interweave art and science

If you feel like the least popular person among your friends, then a handy piece of maths might improve your mood, says Peter Rowlett

Around 40 per cent of people are unaware that men can experience postpartum depression too — that has to change

Prolonged grief disorder affects around 1 in 20 people, and we're starting to understand the neuroscience behind it

Microsoft researchers have developed a technology that writes data into glass with lasers, raising the prospect of robotic libraries full of glass tablets packed with data