A quantum computer made from extremely cold atoms can correct its own errors during long computations, an important prerequisite for becoming truly useful

WinUtils started in 1996-1997 as a way to build my programming chops. I was poking around the Windows 95 shell APIs, found the file operation functions, and thought it would be cool to have CLI tools that called them instead of doing raw file I/O.

Google is adding a switch to allow website owners to opt out of being featured in their “AI” overviews and related slopsearch results. With this new toggle in Search Console, website owners can decide if they want their site to appear in and help ground responses in our generative AI Search features (like AI Overviews, AI Mode or AI Overviews in Discover).

Restricting carbohydrates may sound like an unlikely approach to treating anorexia, but following a ketogenic diet was linked to recovery in 3 in 4 people with the eating disorder in a small trial

Researchers studying a 5300-year-old mummified man have identified bacteria that lived in his gut when he was alive, as well as cold-tolerant fungi that colonised his body after death

With KDE Plasma 6.7 almost ready for release, developers have moved on to working on 6.8, and with that release comes probably one of the biggest deprecations in KDE’s history: as of today, the X11 session is gone from KDE.

Ages 40 to 65 see a period of turmoil in the brain that has previously been overlooked. But identifying problems during this time can protect your cognitive health for decades to come

Our understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum goes back to Isaac Newton, but astronomers are still finding new ways to employ it. Astrophysicist Emma Chapman explores how much these invisible waves can reveal to us about the cosmos – and whether they might show us that we’re not alone

The most exciting popular science reads this month explore everything from symbiosis to hormones, while Alice Roberts takes on an editor-in-chief role in her latest book

From dementia to heart attacks, hearing loss has been linked to a wide range of effects across the body, and the condition is on the rise. Fortunately, we're learning how best to safeguard this crucial sense and how we might be able to reverse the damage

Computer simulations have uncovered a new manganese compound that could exist deep in Earth’s mantle and may be connected to the process that gave our atmosphere oxygen

Yesterday, a slew of Instagram accounts, including some high profile ones like the Obama White House account, seemingly got hacked. Look, I’m no spring chicken. I’ve spent almost a decade and a half identifying vulnerabilities and exploits at unicorn scale, but this is hands down the most unserious, “almost too stupid to be true” of them all.

An exploration of how biological cooperation underpins all life - and why we’ve overlooked its power until now - makes thrilling reading, finds Penny Sarchet

People with advanced pancreatic cancer taking an experimental daily pill lived nearly twice as long as those receiving chemotherapy infusions

You’re a smart cookie, so you opted to buy a copy of Microsoft Office for macOS back in 2019 or 2021, eschewing the Office 365 subscription, so you could keep on using Office 2019/2021 forever if you wanted to.

Turmeric is heralded for its anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties, but columnist Alice Klein finds that the evidence for this is shaky. Taking high doses of its curcumin extract in supplement form can be risky

Mathematicians are stunned at the progress AI is making in solving advanced problems, leaving some questioning whether there will still be room for humans

Alan Turing proposed a test for machine intelligence: could a computer convince a human it was human? We have begun conducting the same test on ourselves, writes Max Moser

It was an open secret that NVIDIA was working on an ARM-based system-on-a-chip for laptops and desktops, and today at Computex 2026 the company unveiled what it’s been working on. It’s surely a beast, and unsurprisingly, it’s lathered in “AI” buzzwords.

My favorite metonymic technology term is “cron job”: even though cron may not literally be the daemon that executes actions on a schedule, we apply the term to anything that walks like a cron and quacks like a cron.

Almost 50 more genes have been flagged as being linked to Alzheimer’s, along with changes in activity in crucial cells that disappear as dementia progresses

Two companies are aiming to preserve Arctic ice by pumping water onto the sheet and letting it freeze, but only one of the trials found that this delayed melting in the summer

Almost exactly 18 months after 3.19, the MorphOS team has released MorphOS 3.20. This is a major release, as it adds support for the upcoming Mirari PowerPC motherboards, which we talked about when that project was first announced.

A sad, painful, and infuriating read for this calm Sunday. In recent years, a lot of attention has gone into improving the output side of the accessibility story on Wayland – screen readers and the like – but apparently, the input side has languished.

The Alliance for Open Media has published the first version of the AV2 specification. AV2 is the next-generation video coding specification from the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). Building on the foundation of AV1, AV2 is engineered to provide superior compression efficiency, enabling high-quality video delivery at significantly lower bitrates.

When Cameron Kaiser speaks, we listen. In 1982, as we mentioned at length with our history of the DEC Professional, Digital Equipment Corporation attempted to keep their PDP-11 minicomputer market-relevant by turning the venerable architecture into a largely incompatible desktop microcomputer.

A beautiful TUI might not be particularly accessible, and there’s effectively zero consistency between how different TUI applications look, feel, and behave, but damn if an amazing TUI isn’t a work of art.

There is plenty of intriguing sci-fi on offer this month, whether it’s solar-powered cities from Adrian Tchaikovsky or a strange future from M. John Harrison

Particles of light cannot be divided into smaller particles, but if you try to snip off the end of one, instead of shortening it multiplies

Flathub, by the most popular (effectively only) repository for Flatpak applications, has changed its policies to include a strict ban on “AI” use for both application submissions as well as the application code itself.

According to a mathematical model of how people weigh up different outcomes, the optimal strategy is to be ambitious, but not overly so

The work on the May release has been dominated by topics on account of the just published Sculpt OS version 26.04. Besides featuring profound driver improvements across Wifi, ACPI, I2C HID, SOF audio, and graphics, it turns the most innovative aspects of Sculpt OS into building blocks for the easy reuse in other incarnations of Genode-based systems.

In the release notes for the latest NVIDIA driver version for Windows, the “AI” company who happens to spare a few GPUs for regular users every now and then has announced that the curtain has fallen for the classic NVIDIA Control Panel.

Quantum Backrooms is a horror game in which the player explores eerie rooms. The twist is that the rooms have been generated by a quantum computer

We're increasingly prioritising our own needs over those of the wider community, which may be causing us to love our partners less intensely

Bacteria created using mirror images of natural biomolecules would pose a grave threat to life on Earth, some researchers warn, but a new study suggests they would struggle to survive in the wild

A cancer-killing virus has stopped pancreatic tumours from growing and spreading in three people in an initial safety trial, raising hopes that it may help to beat the deadly condition

Even if you’ve never bought any cryptocurrency, like columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, your money may be affected by bitcoin’s fate – which is uncertain, as quantum computing advances are threatening to make the encryption protecting it useless

Dive into the opening of The Selfish Gene's first chapter 'Why are people?', the New Scientist Book Club’s read for June to mark 50 years since the popular science classic was first published

Until recently, the Pamir mountains in central Asia have bucked the global melting trend, but in 2025, the region’s glaciers experienced a massive loss of ice due to extreme heat

When you think of Gentoo, you tend to think of it being a difficult distribution, where you compile everything yourself. There’s much more to Gentoo than that. Yes, some of it comes from building from source: the flexibility.

After an AI from OpenAI found a trick to solve an 80-year-old conjecture from Paul Erdős, mathematicians have borrowed the same technique to solve another important problem

It’s no secret there’s a war going on inside the open source community, with people adopting “AI” on one side, and those that want nothing to do with it on the other. While the former are, by nature, using destructive tactics like mass website scraping, license washing, taking people’s creative works without permission, taking all the RAM and GPUs, and oh, destroying the planet, the latter have mostly stuck to fairly benign things like policies banning “AI” use, “AI” bot blockers, and the occasional honey pot mazes to trap “AI” crawlers.

AI start-ups with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding are hiring mathematicians and building AI systems that they hope will not only solve mathematics, but also build more intelligent AI

The cost of CAR T-cell therapy means that the highly effective cancer treatment is unavailable in many parts of the world. But a new way of making these cells could dramatically drive down the cost

Helen Phillips, winner of the Climate Fiction prize for her novel Hum, on if stories can make a difference, her anxieties and writing about the climate

Massive amounts of dust swirl around active nuclei at the centres of galaxies, and these discs could give rise to vast numbers of rocky planets, some even the size of stars

We’ve talked about the various age verification laws in the United States, and there’s been a development recently that a lot of people seem to think is a good thing: both the age verification laws in California and Colorado have received exemptions for open source operating systems.

But what I want to write about today are three protocols that have their own ecosystems, their own communities, and their own aesthetics. finger://, gopher://, and gemini://. Two predate the World Wide Web entirely, but one was created in 2019, the same year the first black hole photograph circled the planet.

Now that my one-month sentence of using Windows 11 has begun (you can follow along!), I’m also a bit more perceptive of news and developments regardingMicrosoft’s latest and greatest operating system version.

From Kenya's Tree of Life to a Svalbard glacier, these stunning photos are taken from a new book by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, whose The Earth From Above was a smash hit 25 years ago

The New Scientist Book Club read Silvia Park's near-future sci-fi novel Luminous in May, and had lots of good things to say (along with a few complaints)

Inspired by Shannon Vallor's book The AI Mirror, this compelling piece looks at how we are being affected by our deepening interactions with tech

Watson's death last month prompted sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson to read his acclaimed 1973 debut and find out what she'd been missing. She found it fascinating – but reflective of its time

The ideas of survival of the fittest and winning at all costs are closely entwinned with Darwinism, but they shouldn’t be. A rethink from a more communal perspective is in order

Feedback has been flooded with answers (both correct and inspired) after wondering if there is a word for something that is an exemplar of the thing it describes.

From clearing people convicted of murder to identifying a monarch's remains, Michael Le Page is fascinated by The Secrets of Our DNA, an insider's must-read book

Embryo organoids made from stem cells are enabling scientists to recreate early pregnancy in the lab, unlocking treatments for infertility, miscarriage and pre-eclampsia

Among people of high socioeconomic status, love for nature corresponds with a bigger environmental footprint – and there's an obvious reason why

Three missions slated to launch this year will begin to search the lunar surface for a suitable base location

Researchers have designed a quantum version of a pendulum clock. It could shed light on timekeeping in the quantum realm

Gold is chemically inert and so doesn't tarnish, but exactly why had been a mystery

João Carrasqueira at XDA Developers has taken a look at the current state of Sailfish OS, and concludes: As an idea, I love Sailfish OS. Not only does it bring a wholly unique interface to mobile devices at a time when things seem more unified than ever, but it also has the potential to bring the full power of Linux to a smartphone you actually want to use.

We've been looking at nature the wrong way, argues Rowan Hooper. If we stop focusing on the individual, we get a whole new picture of how life on Earth – and elsewhere – may have begun

Critical safety equipment in many train systems is vulnerable to disruption by space weather, which could lead to fatal accidents

Residues on medical equipment reveal that physicians in China over 600 years ago used aconitine, a highly toxic plant chemical, to alleviate pain during surgical procedures

Men who do not produce sperm can’t be helped by existing fertility treatments, but a start-up is now claiming it can grow their sperm in the lab. Columnist Michael Le Page suspects this technique will have to be combined with gene editing if it is to help many men

Airstrikes on Tehran earlier this year emitted a plume containing almost 30,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide that reached Asian countries

I have a Nokia N8, and it’s one of my favourite retro (?) devices I own. It was one of Nokia’s last efforts to make Symbian happen in the post-iPhone era, and while the hardware was quite nice, Symbian just wasn’t made for multitouch devices.

We’re a mere €124 away from the first incentive during our fundraiser: making me use stock Windows 11 for a month. Since the writing appears to be on the wall, and the donation pulling us across the line can come in any moment, I figured I’d better take a peek at how things stand with Windows.

Anyone who’s written C knows that full ISO C standard-adhering code is an impractical rarity. Most real world C code out there relies on non-standard behaviors and language extensions to varying extents, and a lot of this isn’t for extra features, but just to work around bugs and gaps in different compilers and libraries.

A rewrite of quantum mechanics that includes the force of gravity could finally achieve one of physicists’ biggest goals and reveal the ultimate fuzziness of time

There is currently no good way for astronauts in space to do laundry, but researchers may have finally come up with one: a bright purple jet of microbe-killing plasma

In the age of AI, instant answers to our questions are readily available. But columnist Helen Thomson finds that continuing to encourage those delicious flashes of insight that come from your own thoughts may be beneficial both for your everyday life and your long-term brain health

If you visit the Flatpak website today, it lists, as the very first advantage of the project: “Build for every distro: create one app and distribute it to the entire Linux desktop market.” If you then move on to the list of supported distributions, you’ll see the usual suspects, but also distributions like Void Linux, Guix, and Alpine.

You may think you know what “long-term support” means when picking a Linux distribution and version, but judging by the multitude of utterly wrong takes and deeply confused users I come across online, I’m starting to get the feeling that in fact, no, you don’t know what it means.

Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Gnutella is a file sharing protocol that many have forgotten and it has the story of a decentralized technology adopted by millions of casual users who did not care to learn what a peer-to-peer system was.

Bruno Croci’s blog had been running on Ubuntu 16.04 for a long time, well past the Linux distribution’s expiration date. As such, it was time to upgrade, but instead of opting for something standard like another Ubuntu release, he opted for FreeBSD instead.

Despite being the closest planet to the sun, Mercury has thick deposits of ice at its poles, and now we may understand the events that formed them over just one Mercurian day

We’ve already talked about the secure boot certificates from Microsoft that are about to become invalid, but Debian EFI team member and longtime Debian contributor Steve McIntyre published a blog post with more information for users and distribution developers alike.

Tests with rodents suggest an mRNA vaccine in development offers protection against three strains of Ebola virus, including the one behind the current crisis

We all feel emotions like anger and disgust from time to time, but they seem to cause stronger bodily sensations when they're politically induced

Vaccine misinformation, nurse and doctor shortages and crowded living arrangements may be behind soaring rates of diphtheria in remote Indigenous communities in Australia

Life on the International Space Station may feel distant, but columnist Graham Lawton finds that studying how astronauts experience accelerated ageing could help us fight similar effects on Earth related to sedentary lifestyles, disrupted circadian rhythms and social isolation

After Google killed its search engine a few days ago, one question remained: how exactly does advertising fit into all of this? Google is obviously not going to move to chatbot search without somehow adding ads to your conversation with the pachinko machine, so everybody was wondering how that was going to work, exactly.

Suppose your manager asks you next week to demonstrate that the AI coding tools your company signed up for are worth the subscription cost. Would you measure lines of code generated, or tickets closed? Or would you send out a survey asking whether developers feel more productive? Each of those approaches is flawed in a different way; the sections below explain why.

The stories of “AI” bots and crawlers absolutely ravaging websites and services keep on coming, and the amount of work people have to do just to survive these “AI” bot and crawler assaults is insane.

Since X11 has moved to legacy status, it’s only a matter of time before the BSDs are going to have to make the move to being Wayland-first as well. This applies particularly to FreeBSD, which has been focusing on improving its suitability for desktop and laptops lately.

Two popular web browser are overhauling their user interface, and the first to actually ship its new version is Vivaldi. Version 8.0 of this Chromium-based browser completely overhauls its UI, but retains its extensive customisation options, including the option to go back to the old look and feel if the new one doesn’t float your boat.

Artificial intelligence built by OpenAI has cracked a decades-old conjecture by Paul Erdős, which mathematicians have hailed as a monumental moment for AI in mathematics

Some people experience vivid, incessant dreams that leave them feeling exhausted the next day, with researchers calling for this "epic dreaming" to be classed as a sleep disorder

Women appear cognitively normal for almost three years longer than men after their brains start to develop Alzheimer’s disease, making it harder to diagnose and preventing early treatment

I was a long-time Bitwarden user, until a year or so ago when I started migrating my passwords first to Firefox/LibreWolf, and recently from there to a KeePass database I can transfer and use with whatever password manager application is compatible with KeePass’ file format.

Printing on Linux, macOS, and even on Windows seems to be pretty much a solved problem, but what about printing on OpenBSD? Anyway, to do so I would need to set up my HP OfficeJet printer, connected wirelessly to the network, on OpenBSD.

⁂ A little progress bar to keep track of our fundraiser! ⁂ ➡️ Donate through Ko-Fi ➡️ Donate through SEPA transfer ➡️ Why a fundraiser? Note that I have to update it manually, and that it includes both Ko-Fi donations, as well as direct bank transfers.

Women experience a steady rise in body temperature from their teens to midlife, which may be useful for monitoring ageing and overall health

Women experience a steady rise in body temperature from their teens to midlife, which may be useful for monitoring ageing and overall health

Previously classified photos and documents show the scientific work that went into the world's first atomic test in 1945 – a test that, just weeks later, would see nuclear bombs dropped in Japan

On a visit to the UK, Sydney-based reporter James Woodford visited an archaeological site that was on his bucket list – and experienced a very special moment as the sun set

Experiments hint that quantum mechanisms are vital to the machinery of life. Now researchers are exploring if these effects help to explain the success of an array of puzzling health treatments