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

Feedback goes down a "moon warfare" rabbit hole and discovers that some forward-thinkers are making plans to counteract as-yet-hypothetical pirates in space

Jennie Durant's Bitter Honey is a great exposé of the true cost of industrially farming US honeybees, finds Thomas Lewton. But the book's grim figures of bee death alone may not prompt deep change – how about seeing them as fellow creatures?

There’s unexpected news of a fifth movie for one of the most underrated sci-fi reboots. Hurray, says New Scientist film columnist Bethan Ackerley

Like covid-19 and mpox before it, the decision to relabel PCOS as polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome is a welcome one – and reveals why a name is never just a name

Storing carbon dioxide in rocks while producing hydrogen from them - and perhaps even geothermal power too - could be a double win on the climate front, and several groups are trying to make it happen

Storing carbon dioxide in rocks while producing hydrogen from them - and perhaps even geothermal power too - could be a double win on the climate front, and several groups are trying to make it happen

When Richard Dawkins’s first blockbuster book was published half a century ago, few genes had ever been sequenced or studied in detail. Yet the book’s gene-centred view of evolution still has much to teach us in today’s genetic age

Fifty years ago, a draft of Richard Dawkins’s first book landed on book editor Michael Rodgers’s desk – and life was never the same

Last year, The New Yorker revealed the late Sacks's "guilt" about his “falsification” in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, but is this story about more than just the facts?

Five different groups of predatory dinosaurs independently evolved disproportionately small arms, and it seems they did so because their heads became so large and powerful

This is a virtual museum of operating systems (and standalone applications) running under emulation, implemented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM. A custom emulator-independent launcher is provided, and all OSes and emulators are pre-installed and pre-configured.

We can inter Google Search to the Google Graveyard. At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.

The following is a hands-on introduction to Futhark through a collection of commented programs, listed in roughly increasing order of complexity. You can load the programs into the interpreter to experiment with them.

The world’s best BSD (I’m kidding, I love them all equally) has released version 7.9, now available through your update tools and on mirrors the world over. OpenBSD 7.9 brings a ton of changes, fixes, and improvements, such as delayed hibernation support on amd64.

A decade ago, we discovered an exceptionally exciting exoplanet that could be the best candidate for hosting alien life. Now we’re about to find out if it really is

A solar farm in a tidal bay has generated more electricity and profits than a nearby coastal solar farm, but challenges could arise as floating solar moves further offshore

If wind-assisted cargo ships chose routes based entirely on where the winds are better, their fuel use could be cut in half or even completely eliminated

Colossal Biosciences, the company that says it resurrected the dire wolf, now says it has developed artificial eggshells so it can replicate the huge eggs of the moa. Independent experts say this isn't nearly enough to bring back these giant birds

An exotic new molecule is shaped like a butterfly, complete with "wings" made from electrons. The discovery could provide a gateway to completely new parts of the quantum realm

Robots are becoming more a part of our lives every year, and worries about a robot army rising up have long plagued the technology. But columnist Annalee Newitz talks to nanobot researchers and finds out the real robot army could be a welcome solution to medical or environmental problems

In central Laos, the landscape is littered with enormous stone jars, some 3 metres high, and we may be closer to understanding how and when they were used

To celebrate my 21 years and 20000 posts as OSNews’ managing editor, it’s time for a massive fundraiser: €1 for every story I’ve posted over the past 21 years, for a long-term total goal of €20000.

Big news from the Haiku forums: the Haiku ARM port is running on M1 Macs now. This is bare metal, no VM. m1n1+u-boot deal with the Apple-specific parts of booting, so we can boot UEFI images from USB like any PC.

Maui in Hawaii experienced some of the worst wildfires in US history in 2023. Amid concerns of a PTSD epidemic, floatation tanks are being deployed to the island to help restore people's mental health

Maui in Hawaii experienced some of the worst wildfires in US history in 2023. Amid concerns of a PTSD epidemic, flotation tanks are being deployed to the island to help restore people's mental health

Scientists recently gathered for a conference called Love, Actually and in Theory, but didn't settle on a definition of the topic at hand

Work, illness, divorce: life is riddled with stressors out of your control. But research is revealing new ways to cope with these challenges and find hope instead of despair

I’ve seen some wild projects in my day, but this one is definitely up there as one of the more ambitious. Stock Microsoft Windows CE 2.11 running on a real Nintendo 64. A custom HAL drops the unmodified nk.lib kernel onto VR4300, brings up the CE 2.11 GWES desktop and shell, mounts the EverDrive-64 X7’s SD card under \SDCard, treats the N64 controller as a mouse, plays sound through the N64 AI hardware via the standard CE wave stack, and runs third-party CE 2.11 EXEs straight off the SD card.

There is one specific way in which the non-corporate open source projects typically document how their infrastructure work: not at all, and Flathub is no different. The full picture likely lives only in my brain, and while it could be sorted out by anyone (especially in this LLM age, yay or nay), why should it only be me thinking at night about all the single points of failure? Like any system that evolved naturally, it’s all over the place.

Microsoft is finally rolling out one of the most requested set of features to Windows 11: a movable and resizable taskbar. Windows 11 did away with the ability to move the taskbar to any side of the screen, as well as a various other taskbar customization options, that had been there since the very first iteration of the taskbar in Windows 95.

Why have so many people become fixated on protein? Donald Layman is one of the people behind the research showing the benefits of getting more protein in your diet, but he thinks things have gone too far and wants to set the record straight

A little-known strain of Ebola virus is behind an ongoing health emergency, prompting researchers to call for the acceleration of vaccine candidates against such infections

We think of our body clock ticking over on a 24-hour cycle, but evidence is growing that it has seasonal rhythms, which could affect our response to vaccines

The floating ice shelf of world’s widest glacier – Thwaites glacier in Antarctica – is detaching, with worrying implications for global sea-level rise

Inside some very special black holes, there may be a boundary called a Cauchy horizon. Columnist Leah Crane explores the place beyond which physics breaks and anything is possible

Almost exactly 21 years ago, in June 2005, at a mere 20 years old, I took over the managing editor role at OSNews from Eugenia. I had already published a few articles in the years prior, and had given Eugenia enough confidence to suggest me as her replacement.

In Ladakh, Himalayan wolves are increasingly breeding with feral dogs, giving rise to a new animal known as khipshang that could injure humans and outcompete other carnivores

Google recently launched something called Health Coach, an “AI” thing that’s part of the company’s new Fitbit products. Let’s check in with how that’s going. Put simply, Google’s paid replacement for Fitbit Premium immediately began hallucinating, even admitting to having made up the data before asking if, you know, maybe I’m the one who actually forgot to input a run.

One of the top pieces of customer feedback in the graphics driver area is clear: “Windows Update downgrades my drivers.” Today, we are announcing a policy change to how display drivers are published through Windows Update — allowing 2-Part HWID + Computer Hardware ID (CHID) targeting for new devices.

Adding olivine to the ocean could remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and a pilot project in New York state found no signs of adverse effects on seafloor organisms

A record-breaking new version of Starship, due to launch within days, could form the basis of NASA's ambitious Artemis programme that aims to put humans back on the moon as soon as 2028

Global warming already threatens to destabilise the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, and new research shows that regional clean-air policies could reduce its strength further

CAR T-cell therapy has been hugely successful in treating certain types of tumours, and stiffening up cancer cells beforehand could make it even more effective

People who imagine their self to reside in their head or their heart have different approaches to life. Columnist David Robson explores the benefits of learning to shift where you sense your self, and how this practice could improve your relationships and decision-making

The EU’s Digital Markets Act has been in effect for a mere two years, but despite all the obstructionism, malicious compliance, and steady stream of lies from US tech companies and Apple in particular, it seems this rather basic consumer protection legislation is already bearing fruit.

Interest in classic user interface design is spiking, and today we’ve got another great example, highlighted yesterday by Micheal MJD. Classic 7 combined Windows 10 LTSC with a whole slew of themes and deep modifications to deliver Windows 10, but made to look, feel, and even act like Windows 7.

The creaky noise known as vocal fry that people generally associate with young women – and some find irritating – is actually more common in men

Partially burnt trees still standing after a wildfire are typically felled and burned, but a US start-up claims burying them instead will trap the carbon underground for centuries

What use is a quantum computer? Perhaps both more and less than you think, according to quantum computing expert Shayan Majidy

Seismic surveys and sediment cores suggest that dozens of deep pockmarks on the sea floor were created when Arctic methane stores were disrupted by climate change after the last glacial maximum – and scientists warn it could happen again

Muscle stem cells, which are crucial for building new muscle, don’t work as well as we get older, but giving them an artificial boost could rejuvenate them

The months, they don’t stop coming, so here’s another progress report for Haiku, our beloved successor to BeOS, the best operating system ever made. This past month the team’s added basic support for SMP on ARM64 (enough to use it in QEMU), the MIME sniffer’s internals have been overhauled for some serious performance gains, and a long list of smaller, but no less important or impactful, changes.

The European Union is considering rules that would restrict its member governments’ use of U.S. cloud providers to handle sensitive data, sources familiar with the talks told CNBC. ↫ Kai Nicol-Schwarz at CNBC The fact that this has only just become a possible reality now, and not decades ago, is beyond me, but better late than never, I suppose.

A Neanderthal tooth shows clear signs of human intervention to treat bacterial decay, showing that the earliest dentistry began at least 59,000 years ago

Winner of an environmental photography award, this shot of a sea turtle seen under ultraviolet light shows how forensic evidence is being used to help catch poachers and animal traffickers

A study of soils around the Arctic and boreal forests has found that some wildfires are releasing carbon stored over millennia, meaning higher CO2 emissions than assumed

Rowan Hooper met ecologist Suzanne Simard under an oak tree in Kew Gardens, London, to talk about her new book, criticism of her work, and getting a call from James Cameron's people

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

Why did humans decide they weren't like other animals, or animals at all? Has this exceptionalism twisted us out of shape? Michael Bond's book Animate offers a page-turning account of where we are now

Scientific disciplines often shy away from asking fundamental "what if" questions. But philosophy – if unencumbered by dogma or ideology – has much to offer evidence-based enquiry

Asteroid 2026JH2 will zoom past Earth at a distance of only 90,000 kilometres next week. It has enough mass to wipe out a city, but simulations suggest there is no chance of an impact for at least the next century

Asteroid 2026JH2 has enough mass to wipe out a city and will zoom past Earth next week

After a career spent grappling with the neural underpinnings of autism, Uta Frith is unwavering in her controversial call to scrap our current view of the condition and start again

Six teeth roughly 400,000 years old have yielded some of the first ancient proteins thought to belong to Homo erectus, providing molecular clues to their relationships with other hominins

Genetically altered bacteria can synthesise gadusol, a naturally occurring compound found in zebrafish eggs that could be developed as an alternative to existing sunscreen products that can harm marine life

Government departments and other public bodies in the UK must consider requests to release information about AI-produced content, regulators have confirmed. The move follows a successful request by New Scientist for the release of a minister's ChatGPT logs

A few weeks ago, we talked about a project within KDE to revive two of their classic themes, Oxygen and Air, and polish them up to make them usable on the current versions of KDE. The developers and designers working on this project say they’ve been utterly surprised by just how popular this news has proven to be, and Filip Fila published a blog post with some thoughts on this unexpected popularity.

The news that Google is working to move Chrome OS to the Android technology stack, and that it wants to start putting Android on laptops, is not exactly news, as the company has been talking about it for years.

We’ve long tried to control the weather by engineering rainfall. Now such cloud-seeding efforts are escalating, creating conflict between countries and stoking conspiracy theories. But do they work?

Carbon credits bought by companies to offset their emissions really have reduced deforestation, but not by as much as credit developers claim, according to a rigorous analysis

PCOS will now be known as PMOS (polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome), and for Alice Klein, who has the condition, it's been a long time coming

The concept of a field plays a key role in particle physics, but what exactly is it? From its origins in the study of magnetism to the quantum fields of today, columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein goes exploring

Gases collected from boiling mineral springs in Zambia contain the chemical signature of having come directly from the Earth’s mantle, a sign of a rupture in the tectonic plates and the possible beginning of a new continental boundary

Every single software product is dealing with the question about what to do with “AI”-generated code, but the question is particularly difficult to answer for open source operating systems like Linux distributions and the various BSDs, which often consist of a wide variety of software packages from hundreds to thousands of different developers.

Microsoft is currently testing a brand new performance-enhancing feature in Windows 11. Microsoft, too, is introducing something to Windows 11 called “low latency profile” and it this will work irrespective of the processor, be it AMD64 CPUs like Intel or AMD or ARM64 ones like from Qualcomm.

Microsoft acquired GitHub and applied their unique brand of enshittification. Amongst their achievements was the spawning of the Copilot circle of hell. Now they’re effectively DDoSing themselves with slop.

An analysis of ancient human artefacts finds that the container, a simple but critical tool, may have originated 500,000 years ago. Columnist Michael Marshall explores how slings, ostrich eggs and wooden trays helped our ancestors survive

A US start-up is putting autonomous data centres in the ocean, powered by wave energy, but experts warn that the harsh environment could make maintenance challenging

The rules governing gravity and other laws of nature seem like eternal truths, but cosmologist João Magueijo has always questioned their origins. Now, he has a bold new proposal

Genetic analysis of 1039 people buried in Britain between the Bronze Age and the Norman conquest highlights the impact of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings on the island’s ancestry

Big news from the Debian release team: Debian is going for reproducible package builds. Aided by the efforts of the Reproducible Builds project, we’ve decided it’s time to say that Debian must ship reproducible packages.

ymawky is a small, static http web server written entirely in aarch64 assembly for macos. it uses raw darwin syscalls with no libc wrappers, serves static files, supports GET, HEAD, PUT, OPTIONS, DELETE, byte ranges, directory listing, custom error pages, and tries to be as hardened as possible.

Ada is incredibly well designed. One way this shows is that it takes the big, monolithic features of other languages and breaks them down into their constituent parts, so we can choose which portions of those features we want.

Sculpt OS, the operating system based on the various components that make up Genode, has seen a new release, 26.04. A lot of the new features and changes to Genode that we’ve been talking about for a while now are part of this release, most notably the new human-inclined data syntax that replaces XML as the configuration language for Genode.

Sprite scaling. It is the coolest effect of the 2D arcade era, a must-have for games from Space Harrier to Real Bout Fatal Fury Special. Home consoles pretty much lacked it– sorry, Nintendo, but Mode 7 only scales a background, not sprites.

Minuscule silicon wafers propelled by lasers could be used to steer light sails, helping them travel beyond the solar system

If a key ocean current collapses it could plunge northern Europe into a big freeze. Now researchers are weighing up a drastic intervention – building a 130-kilometre-wide dam between the US and Russia

The ways in which Google can lock you into their ecosystem are often obvious, but sometimes, they’re incredibly sneaky and easily missed. CAPTCHA tests are annoying, but at the same time, they can help protect websites from bots.

With that context, I always found it strange that the designers of ASCII included 6 characters after uppercase Z before starting the lowercase letters. Then it hit me: we have 26 letters in the English alphabet, plus 6 additional characters before lowercase starts: 26 + 6 = 32.

Many Bourne shells go slightly beyond the POSIX sh specification to also support a ‘-l’ option that makes the shell act as a ‘login shell’. POSIX’s omission of -l isn’t only because it doesn’t really talk about login shells at all, it’s also because Unix has a special way of marking login shells that goes back very far in its history.