Speaking of OpenVMS and Alpha – and we like speaking about OpenVMS and Alpha, don’t we? – there’s now a port of DOSBox that runs on the Alpha version venerable operating system.

Well, this is new – but not at all unexpected considering the state of Windows and the wider technology industry. When you connect certain LG monitors to a Windows machine, Windows Update will pull in a bunch of adware promoting antivirus trash.

It was only a few weeks ago that we got a massively improved Alpha emulator, capable of running VMS, Windows 2000, and Tru64, including X11 support and a variety of other exciting features. Today, we’ve got another major emulation milestone (update: sadly, with “AI” support, so odds are this will fizzle out.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel and git, is employed by the Linux Foundation. This Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to, as the name obviously implies, the promotion of Linux.

As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the Korean war than to 9/11 which is itself an event that happened a quarter of a century ago.

An experiment showed AI users had the most creative ideas when they used it in moderation – not too much and not too little. Columnist David Robson puts the finding to the test, and explores what we lose when we over-rely on AI

A supplement comprised of dead bacteria seems to remove microplastics, and prevent their absorption into cells, by attracting them to the bacteria's rough surfaces

An open-source flight-control system found in consumer drones has been installed in Ukraine’s latest cruise missile, showing how cheap technology is making military hardware accessible to all

The mummified daughters of pharaohs who lived thousands of years ago have bone changes that suggest they fought with bows and daggers

Rumours had been circulating for a while, but now it’s official: OnePlus is effectively retreating from the European and US markets. Today, our hearts are undoubtedly heavy and mixed with emotion.

There’s a ton of interest in immutable, image-based versions of various Linux distributions, since they offer a number of benefits that make them a good fit for some users. Updates can’t really go wrong, rollback is easy, application management through Flatpak is more in line with systems like Android and iOS – they may not be advantages sought by everyone, but they clearly are by some.

Out of all the bloody things Microsoft could release as open source, they chose the world’s weirdest IRC client they shipped in the late ’90s that nobody used or even remembered? What on earth is happening? Microsoft Comic Chat is a Microsoft-developed Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chat client released in 1996 that rendered conversations as automatically generated comic strips.

OpenBSD parts ways with an architecture: OpenBSD will no longer be developed for loongson. The reasons are exactly what you’d expect. The last compiler update unfortunately does not work on mips64el, with clang 22 built with clang 19 being apparently functional, but clang 22 rebuilt with the previous clang 22 hitting deterministic SIGSEGV on various files.

Linus Torvalds, on the Linux Kernel Mailing List: Asbestos is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one. The solution is to make sure asbestos tools help maintainers instead of just causing them pain.

Zombie, or senescent, cells accumulate in our body with age, when we become less able to clear them. But a study in mice suggests that a drug could restore this ability and improve ageing outcomes

Keith Thomas, 48, has paralysis, but brain stimulation gave him some feeling and movement in his hands – and this was maintained even when the stimulation was turned off

Astronomers have only previously found atmospheres around exoplanets that are very large or incredibly hot – but now they have found one adorning a world that may well be right for life

A new kind of antibody drug that more efficiently enters the brain could slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease with a much lower risk of dangerous side effects than existing therapies

A drone that spins 25 times a second can avoid being spotted by becoming nothing more than a vague blur – though the creators admit that it can still be easily heard

The 2026 Tour de France has been the hottest ever. Norwegian-method pioneer and Uno-X Mobility coach Olav Aleksander Bu reveals how Nordic athletes have been learning to beat the heat

In this New Scientist CoLab podcast, experts from global life sciences leader Cytiva explain the hidden, high-stakes science of purification that is required to close the gap between drug discovery and the pharmacy shelf.

After I mentioned a Jurassic Park anecdote the other day, I watched the movie again. I must have seen it at least ten times now. This time, I researched every computer/software I spotted. ↫ Fabien Sanglard We are all aware of the infamous “This is a UNIX system, I know this!” meme, but many more computers make their appearance in Jurassic Park, and Fabien Sanglard documents all of them.

As a former translator with two rock-solid university degrees in the subject, there was never a universe in which I would not talk about Twitter’s new autotranslation feature turning the tamest things into hardcore pornography.

The Svelte web framework recently added a section to its documentation site addressed, cheerfully, to artificial intelligences: “If you’re an artificial intelligence, or trying to teach one how to use Svelte, we offer the documentation in plaintext format.

Low levels of replicating Epstein-Barr viruses might be the main driver of the autoimmune condition multiple sclerosis. This may mean that targeting them would be as effective as suppressing the immune system, with fewer side effects

A black colobus monkey from a remote part of the Congo Basin rainforest, known locally as likweli, is thought to be severely threatened by poaching

The impact of high humidity on top of high temperatures is often underappreciated, but most of us aren't prepared for such extreme conditions, which will become more common with global warming

This week's cartoon from Twisteddoodles

Tom Gauld's weekly cartoon

Feedback has been spending far too much time reading the latest output of entirely made-up research studies from the Journal of Imaginary Research

Why don’t dogs look up when a low-flying plane or helicopter passes overhead? I’ve never seen one do this. And what changes will occur on Earth as the moon moves further away from us?

Haiku has another buy month of development activity to detail, and there’s a big ticket item this time, even if the developers themselves don’t consider it so. The thing that should be the biggest news item this month is that the GSoC 2024 work to port “NVMM”, the NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor (which runs on more than just NetBSD, despite the name), providing hardware-accelerated virtualization support for QEMU, was finally merged.

I have yet to see any of these creepy camera glasses Facebook (and a few other companies) are selling. One of the many benefits of living in Arctic Sweden, where people are reserved, keep their their distance, and try not to draw attention to themselves, is that new technology fads don’t really permeate society here.

In what should be a surprise to absolutely nobody, Microsoft assigns a persistent identifier to every Windows installation, tying it to its user, and the company has no issues handing it over to law enforcement.

Cutting back on our use of energy and materials so that we live within Earth’s means can seem like an insurmountable challenge. But after a decade grappling with these problems, a historic Portuguese city is beginning to walk this tightrope

Marine bristle worms have jaws made from a mix of proteins and metal ions that may constitute a whole new kind of material, with possible applications in engineering

In some parts of the world, the probability of rain rises with every day it doesn’t rain, and communities in these places are more likely to carry out rain-making rituals

Powerful artificial intelligence models built by Chinese companies have gone from inducing widespread panic to being met with a shrug of the shoulders – what changed?

When considering what makes up a human body, a physicist drills down beyond the atomic level. Columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein explores the not-exactly-real particles that allow the stuff we’re made of to hang together

Hieroglyphs on the wall of a Maya building record calculations concerning the orbits of Earth, Mars and Venus, as well as the name of a mathematician who wrote the text around 1200 years ago

I have a love-hate relationship with Sun’s NFS. Since it was so prevalent, it’s a go-to for getting stuff on and off the classic UNIX workstations I love to explore, but at the same time, it also never seems to work right away.

OSNews covered the downfall of Nokia extensively back when it was happening, but I must admit that seeing this whole story in “retrospectives” now makes me feel so incredibly old. This story played out roughly between 2007 and 2016 – in the grand scheme of things, the end of Nokia’s phone business wasn’t that long ago! Zeit, bitte bleib stehen.

Artistic representations of ancient humans often show large men with bulging muscles – but our ancestors were actually smaller than us, in both height and body mass. Columnist Michael Marshall reveals surprising details about the short kings of prehistory

Researchers have long suspected early life may have been helped by sugars brought to Earth by asteroids – now a sugar found in raspberries has been spotted in a cosmic cloud nearly 27 light years away

Sustained heat stress is bad for our health and can be deadly. But we’re discovering that heat therapies like sauna, when used in the right way, have surprisingly wide-reaching benefits for health

Two types of jet stream patterns seem to be causing persistent heat domes over Europe, with big questions for the future

Apple sued OpenAI on Friday, alleging the AI company has stolen the iPhone maker’s trade secrets to develop its own yet-to-be-unveiled AI gadgets. In the suit, filed in the District Court of Northern California, Apple accuses OpenAI of trade secret misappropriation and breach of contract.

Redox did the develop cools stuff thing again for a month, so we’ve got progress to talk about. This past month, GTK3 has been ported to Redox, as well as the Tcl programming language. Support for per-window fractional scaling has been added to Orbital, Redox’ desktop environment, but it’s still relatively limited for now.

Windows has a fairly complex update ecosystem, so every now and then, the company feels like it needs to publish clarifications and explainers so people can keep up with what’s going on. Most individuals and organizations regularly deploy monthly security updates, released on the second Tuesday of each month.

A list of global space launches designed to calm cold war tensions and promote transparency has been missing from the UN's website for months

Climate change is already having a big impact on crop yields, and the subsequent financial losses will continue to rise as the world keeps warming

A list of global space launches designed to calm cold war tensions and promote transparency has been missing from the UN's website for months

Climate change is already having a big impact on crop yields, and the subsequent financial losses will continue to rise as the world keeps warming

At an event in London, mathematicians have made unexpectedly fast progress on formalising Fermat's last theorem using AI

At an event in London, mathematicians have made unexpectedly fast progress on formalising Fermat's last theorem using AI

How can you have a proof without proving anything? Mathematicians found a way and, in the process, came to blows over it – but 100 years on, this trick is a common part of modern maths, says columnist Jacob Aron

How can you have a proof without proving anything? Mathematicians found a way and, in the process, came to blows over it – but 100 years on, this trick is a common part of modern maths, says columnist Jacob Aron

During the August 2026 solar eclipse, scientists will be rushing to gather data on the sun, but even if you aren't a professional scientist, you can still help the research

During the August 2026 solar eclipse, scientists will be rushing to gather data on the sun, but even if you aren't a professional scientist, you can still help the research

An experiment with a charged molecule of bismuth and carbon reveals how effects from Albert Einstein’s special relativity reshape the standard understanding of chemical bonds

An experiment with a charged molecule of bismuth and carbon reveals how effects from Albert Einstein’s special relativity reshape the standard understanding of chemical bonds

Perfusing donor human retinas with blood and oxygen meant they continued to respond to light for up to 10 hours after death, marking a significant step towards eye transplants that restore vision

Perfusing donor human retinas with blood and oxygen meant they continued to respond to light for up to 10 hours after death, marking a significant step towards eye transplants that restore vision

The laws of physics that concern heat and work could gain a firmer mathematical footing thanks to “gauge theory”, which already helps us understand quantum fields

The laws of physics that concern heat and work could gain a firmer mathematical footing thanks to “gauge theory”, which already helps us understand quantum fields

Egg cells missing a key protein may be more likely to end up with the wrong number of chromosomes, but an mRNA injection that helps the cells make the protein reduces the problem

Egg cells missing a key protein may be more likely to end up with the wrong number of chromosomes, but an mRNA injection that helps the cells make the protein reduces the problem

Fossils of Spriggina floundersi provide the earliest evidence of animals favouring one side of the body over the other – a feature of nervous systems that we see in our own right- and left-handedness

Fossils of Spriggina floundersi provide the earliest evidence of animals favouring one side of the body over the other – a feature of nervous systems that we see in our own right- and left-handedness

You all donated en masse to have me use Windows 11 for a month, and so I did. What was it like for a long-time Linux user to go back and experience Windows as it exists now? Is it really as bad as we’ve collectively made it out to be? Did my month with Windows 11 consist of nothing but pain and misery, or are there good things to say, too? Or, was it an unexpected pleasant surprise? And ultimately, did I stay with Windows 11, or move back to the Linux world? ➡️ Donate through Ko-Fi ➡️ Donate through SEPA transfer* ➡️ Buy merch from our store ➡️ Why a fundraiser? *Name: Thom Holwerda – IBAN: SE08 8000 0820 1684 4657 8414 – BIC: SWEDSESS This year, I’m celebrating the milestone of having posted 20000 stories on OSNews during my 21 years as managing editor of OSNews.

With July being Disability Pride Month, GNOME’s Sophie Herold published a blog post taking stock of where GNOME stands on this front, progress that’s been made, as well as areas where the project comes short.

Linux Mint’s Cinnamon is one of the last desktops to still not support Wayland, and is relegated to only being compatible with legacy X11 environments. With the next release of Cinnamon, however, this is finally going to change.

A modelling study suggests marine cloud brightening could shade the eastern Pacific and reduce a global temperature spike from El Niño, but there could be unexpected consequences

Homer still matters, argues Adam Nicolson in The Mighty Dead, a great primer to Christopher Nolan's new adaptation of the Odyssey, says Kelsey Hayes

Feedback is delighted by a study of how many animals produce poop that echoes the look of the poop emoji – even the lugworm, which does it upside down

The first six months of 2026 have seen bright threads in sci- fi series including Fallout and Paradise. But for pure gold, advises TV columnist Bethan Ackerley, try Star City

From AI with Hannah Fry to David Attenborough's early days, these are the five must-watch science documentaries of the year to date, says Bethan Ackerley

Dads are often overlooked when it comes to parenting science. Darby Saxbe's fascinating new book Dad Brain is out to change that, says Olivia Goldhill

A drug that softens the ovaries helped mice and rats conceive more easily at an older age, and produce more pups

Seeking out the simplest, most elegant explanations has served scientists well for centuries, but cognitive scientist Marina Dubova’s experiments are revealing better ways to uncover reality

Pioneer of quantum mechanics Erwin Schrödinger's look at living organisms is one of the most influential popular-science books of the 20th century. So how does it hold up today, asks Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Lambs have been born using an experimental form of IVF that coaxes immature eggs to become mature ones. This could boost the number of eggs available for fertilisation and improve IVF success rates

A drug that raises levels of histamine – the chemical that causes allergy symptoms – in the brain boosts our memory by around 10 per cent

A short spell in a heat chamber at the University of Brighton showed Alec Luhn that his body is not adapted to high temperatures – but regular exposure can train the body to respond more effectively

About a month ago, Flathub announced a ban on slopcoded applications. Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis, developer of a number of popular Linux applications and ton of other things, did some research into just how many applications tagged with “AI slop”, a tag Flathub reviewers used to keep track of slopcoded applications submitted to Flathub, actually survived the test of time.

Only a few days ago we had Linux on the Mega Drive, and someone took that as a challenge, so now we have Linux on the Atari Jaguar. The Jaguar has a very different architecture than the Mega Drive, but does happen to use a processor from the same 68000-family.

Few people have invented an algorithm with the potential to spark a worldwide crisis, so why is quantum computing pioneer Peter Shor so unconcerned? Karmela Padavic-Callaghan spoke to him to find out

Explaining the passage of time has been a gnarly problem in physics basically forever, but physicist and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram has a radical proposal for where it comes from. He discussed his ideas on time – and what they mean for free will – with reporter Leah Crane

Some 40 years ago, physicists noticed certain metals were conducting electricity in a bizarre way no one could explain. New answers to how and why this happens are forcing us to question how electricity flows

Today, most rechargeable batteries are made from lithium ions, but sodium-ion alternatives could make battery tech much cheaper and offer other advantages

As Chris Packham gears up for his new TV show, Evolution, he tells Penny Sarchet why understanding the latest evolutionary science is so important if we are to truly appreciate the natural world - and how he would happily die at the hands of a Tyrannosaurus rex

Longer-lasting hot spells and high temperatures at night are making it harder to cope, leading to thousands more deaths from extreme heat

We used to think post-menopausal ovaries sat inert in the body, but evidence from mice suggests they may instead turn into an organ with a role in inflammation

A series of experiments shows that bees respond differently to tastes depending on their internal states, hinting that they have something akin to our emotions

A cave on the Turkish Mediterranean coast was inhabited first by Neanderthals and then Homo sapiens, but the continuity of tools and personal objects suggests there was some sharing of culture between the two species

In our efforts to keep our brains healthy, how do we know what is working? Helen Thomson explores a new generation of tests that can reveal whether our efforts are paying off

How much sunscreen should you be using, when should you apply it, and are there any downsides to doing so? Skin cancer expert Rachel Neale is here to answer all of these questions and more

A TED talk and then a film, William Kamkwamba’s story of how he worked to provide his rural Malawian village with electricity has now been turned into a musical – and it mostly works, says Bethan Ackerley

The fate of the Atlantic Ocean current that keeps Europe’s climate warm depends on our carbon emissions and the rate of ice melt from Greenland, but there is a chance that a shutdown is already inevitable