Sebastian Wick has a great explanation of why opening files – programmatically – is a lot more complex and fraught with dangers than you might think it is. This issue was relevant for Wick as he is one of the lead developers of Flatpak, for which a number of security issues have recently been discovered, and it just so happens that many of these issues dealt with this very topic.

In that reading „AI“ is a machine for the creation of epistemic injustice and the replacement of truth with what a tech elite wants it to be in order to control the population. This is a Fascist project that not so subtly aligns with Fascism’s totalitarian will to power and control as well as its reliance in replacing reasoning and debate with belief in power and the leader.

Measuring the strength of gravity is extraordinarily difficult, and different experiments have always disagreed – but a new test is paving the way to finally understanding nature’s most enigmatic force

People with cognitive decline or early-stage dementia saw their symptoms improve when given bespoke treatment plans that targeted their personal nutritional deficiencies, ongoing infections and environmental exposures

Physicists have long suspected that there is a layer of physical reality beneath quantum theory and a new mathematical model unveils just how strange it might be

A clinical trial to reverse age-related vision conditions using stem cell treatment could finally deliver on the promise of a major discovery in ageing and regeneration made 20 years ago, says columnist Graham Lawton

I’m not sure many OSNews readers still use Ubuntu as their operating system of choice, and from the release announcement of today’s Ubuntu 26.04 it’s clear why that’s the case. Resolute Raccoon builds on the resilience-focused improvements introduced in interim releases, with TPM-backed full-disk encryption, improved support for application permission prompting, Livepatch updates for Arm-based servers, and Rust-based utilities for enhanced memory safety.

During the Cretaceous, 19-metre-long predatory octopuses swam the seas, and evidence from their fossilised remains suggest they may have been highly intelligent hunters

A powerful AI kept from public access because of its ability to hack computers with impunity is making headlines around the world. But what is Mythos, does it really represent a risk and might it even be used to improve cybersecurity?

Infecting mice with RSV, a common virus that causes cold-like symptoms, prevented breast cancer cells from reaching their lungs. This was due to the release of proteins that stop viruses from replicating in the lungs also making it harder for cancer cells to seed new tumours

The Epstein-Barr virus seems to affect gene expression and cell signalling in a way that causes the autoimmune condition multiple sclerosis

You can find beauty in the oddest of places. WSL9x runs a modern Linux kernel (6.19 at time of writing) cooperatively inside the Windows 9x kernel, enabling users to take advantage of the full suite of capabilities of both operating systems at the same time, including paging, memory protection, and pre-emptive scheduling.

Despite years of apparent stagnation and reported mass layoffs, it seems the Solaris team at Oracle has found somewhat of a renewed stride recently. Both branches of Solaris – the one for paying customers (SRU) and the free one for enthusiasts (CBE) – are receiving regular updates again, and there seems to be a more concerted effort to let the outside world know, too.

Photographer Yuri Segalerba explores how dengue has spread to Nepal's Himalayan districts, and how locals are fighting back

The food industry has made big promises to reduce emissions and become more sustainable, but a review concludes that many of the pledges are not backed up by evidence

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

Feedback, always on the hunt for absurd units of measurement, is delighted by recent attempts to convey the 406,771 kilometres that the Artemis II crew travelled from Earth

Discovering he is getting old before his time, David Cox tries to lower his biological age by changing his diet in a helpful new book, The Age Code, says Graham Lawton

A seaside town is devastated when a small fishing boat, the Rose of Nevada, disappears at sea. Thirty years later, the boat reappears in the harbour and sets off a moving story, says Bethan Ackerley

The idea that EV batteries age poorly is a misconception – and a new report has found they often outlive the cars themselves

The rise of a new generation of radiotherapies means we will soon need much greater quantities of radioactive atoms. That's why companies are scrambling to refine them from all manner of radioactive waste

A robot built by Sony AI is rapidly learning how to beat the world's very best table tennis players

Exercise has been touted as a tool for managing and treating long covid, but much of the evidence has neglected one of its most debilitating symptoms: post-exertional malaise

Simon Singh's exploration of mathematical proof – in particular Pierre de Fermat's last theorem – remains an absolute treasure, almost three decades after it was first published

A final-stage trial has started of an mRNA vaccine against the bird flu strain infecting many animals – and occasionally people – worldwide

Most of Titan’s surface is oddly flat and smooth, and it may be because it is coated by as much as a metre of fluffy organic material that snowed down from the icy moon’s thick atmosphere

Some seemingly simple sequences of multiplication and addition grow so quickly that they question the very foundations of mathematics. In doing so, they demand a whole new level of logic

Some seemingly simple sequences of multiplication and addition grow so quickly that they question the very foundations of mathematics. In doing so, they demand a whole new level of logic

The ongoing conflict around the Strait of Hormuz has become a situation in game theory known as a war of attrition. The maths behind it can help explain what's going on, says Petros Sekeris

I need to post about this because if I don’t, people will get mad. Cook will continue on as Apple CEO through the summer, with Ternus set to join Apple’s Board of Directors and take over as CEO on September 1, 2026.

Have you ever tried clicking the back button in your browser, only to realise the website you’re on somehow doesn’t allow that? Out of all the millions of annoyances on the web, Google has decided to finally address this one: they’re going to punish the search rankings of websites that use this back button hijacking.

Experiment with nanodiamonds reveals that they are less rigid than other diamonds, adding to our understanding of how they could be used in new technologies

LXQt, the desktop environment which is effectively to KDE what Xfce is to GNOME, has released version 2.4.0. Quite a few changes in this release are further refinements and fixes related to LXQt’s adoption of Wayland, but there are also a ton of small fixes, improvements, and small new features that have nothing to do with Wayland at all.

Filtering a protein that may cause sepsis out from the blood has shown promising signs for improving survival

An injured kea with just half a beak has used what's left as a weapon that gives him dominance over a captive colony of the birds

A traditional vaccine primes the immune system to build better defences. Researchers think we can do something similar to increase our resilience to the pressures and worries of life

Stress is linked to many of our biggest killers, but a growing body of research suggests that certain types can sharpen the mind and strengthen the body. Here’s how to find your perfect dose

“I’m stressed” is a phrase that many of us use, but now there are ways to shed light on how stressed you actually are

Pushing against years of scepticism, an analysis suggests quantum computers may offer real advantages for running machine learning and similar algorithms in the near future

Most hospital patients don't brush their teeth regularly, but doing so could cut their risk of developing pneumonia during their stay

Most hospital patients don't brush their teeth regularly, but doing so could cut their risk of developing pneumonia during their stay

Electric vehicles could store renewable energy when there is excess supply and give it back to the grid when demand peaks, but car companies disagree on the best way to do that

Changing your opinion can be difficult, and it’s sometimes even seen as a flaw. But research shows being open-minded has a host of benefits. Columnist David Robson finds there are a few simple ways to encourage yourself to withstand the discomfort that gets in the way of mental flexibility

Cyclic cosmology, or the big bounce, is the idea that the universe will eventually crunch back together and then go through another big bang. Columnist Leah Crane finds that, appropriately, it’s coming back

The title of my article on age verification in Linux and other operating systems had a “for now” added for a reason, and here we are, with two members of the US Congress introducing a bill to add age verification to operating systems.

Terminally ill people are commonly reunited with lost loved ones in their dreams and have visions of doors, stairways and light, which are said to help them accept the dying process

The Lyrid meteor shower will soon hit its peak. Here's how to spot it, including by using the New Scientist stargazing companion

Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, doesn’t only support x86. It also has a branch for SPARC, which tends to run behind its x86 counterpart a little bit and has a few other limitations related to the fact SPARC is effectively no longer being developed.

Patients are requesting that blood transfusions come from people who they know have not been vaccinated against covid-19, which can cause dangerous delays

Patients are requesting that blood transfusions come from people who they know have not been vaccinated against covid-19, which can cause dangerous delays

Monkeys with around 300 electrodes implanted in their brain were able to steer avatars around different virtual environments

An imaginative and compelling book reveals how radio waves help us tune in to our universe – and even search for alien civilisations, says Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

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

Feedback discovers that a conspiracy theory has formed that various celebrities have been replaced by clones, and sees just a few small problems with the idea

A film about the quest for “ghost elephants” is as much about not knowing and asking the right questions as about exploration, finds Davide Abbatescianni

From huge geese to flying cars, these photographs from a new exhibition at the Rijksmuseum reveal how we have been manipulating images for over a century

Forty years after the world’s biggest nuclear disaster, the safety of Chernobyl hangs in the balance – though not because of the radiation risk

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has finished the most detailed survey of the universe to date, and the resulting map will help researchers understand an apparent weakening of dark energy

A detailed analysis of the best-preserved Neanderthal infant skeleton ever found suggests that our ancient relatives grew much faster as young children

Another Haiku monthly activity report, but this time around, there’s actually a big ticket item. Haiku has been in a pretty solid and stable state for a while now, so the activity reports have been dominated by fairly small, obscure changes, but during March a major milestone was reached for the ARM64 port.

The editor in chief of this blog was born in 2004. She uses the 1997 window manager, Enlightenment E16, daily. In this article, I describe the process of fixing a show-stopping, rare bug that dates back to 2006 in the codebase.

Modern laptops promise a kind of magic. Shut the lid or press the sleep button, toss it in a backpack, and hours, days, or weeks later, it should wake up as if nothing happened with little to no battery drain.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft made some concrete promises about fixing and improving Windows, and among them was removing useless “AI” integrations. Applications like Notepad, Snipping Tool, and others would see their “AI” features removed.

A planet-warming El Niño climate phase is now developing, and some models predict it could turn out to be the strongest on record

The protein craze is in full swing and beef consumption is on the rise, particularly in the US, where health agencies are promoting red meat as part of an optimum diet. So, how much beef should we really be eating, and how does it impact our well-being?

The gap between genetics and archaeology leaves us with an unclear picture of where the Neanderthals originated. Columnist Michael Marshall details a surprising new hypothesis that suggests they may have come from us

How do you portray momentum in space accurately? Columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein takes a look at the origins of our understanding of motion, which runs from Isaac Newton back to the Zhou dynasty a millennia ago

L-ergothioneine, an antioxidant found in certain mushrooms, is thought to neutralise damaging molecules in uterine cells that may contribute to period pain

Antibodies mistakenly attacking the brain are linked with conditions including schizophrenia, dementia and OCD, prompting a revolution in how we think about mental health conditions

The day when a quantum computer manages to break common encryption, or Q-Day, is fast approaching, and the world is not close to being ready

A study of more than 10 million siblings suggests that firstborns are more likely to be autistic and have allergies, while conditions like migraine and shingles tend to affect their younger sibling

Removing CO2 from the atmosphere by capturing the carbon from burning biomass is supposed to save the planet, but it looks like the flagship project will never happen

Removing CO2 from the atmosphere by capturing the carbon from burning biomass is supposed to save the planet, but it looks like the flagship project will never happen

Some gut bacteria recycle discarded sex hormones, like oestrogens, back into the body. The level of these bacteria seems to be higher in industrialised societies, which could have big implications for our health

Some gut bacteria recycle discarded sex hormones, like oestrogens, back into the body. The level of these bacteria seems to be higher in industrialised societies, which could have big implications for our health

A small comet has been spotted slowing down and then speeding up again – but in the opposite direction, which we have never seen before

If the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation shut down, the knock-on effects could release hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2, raising global temperatures even further

Ever since the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in 1986, scientists have needed to monitor radioactive conditions inside. That job currently falls to Anatoly Doroshenko, who explains the dangers and importance of his work to New Scientist

Ever since the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in 1986, scientists have needed to monitor radioactive conditions inside. That job currently falls to Anatoly Doroshenko, who explains the dangers and importance of his work to New Scientist

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Chernobyl lay on the path to the capital Kyiv. When the plant was occupied by Russian troops, meteorologist Lyudmila Dyblenko fearlessly continued taking vital measurements to monitor the nuclear exclusion zone

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Chernobyl lay on the path to the capital Kyiv. When the plant was occupied by Russian troops, meteorologist Lyudmila Dyblenko fearlessly continued taking vital measurements to monitor the nuclear exclusion zone

Forty years ago, the catastrophic explosion at Chernobyl sent plumes of radioactive waste into the atmosphere. Now, New Scientist has gained exclusive access to learn how vital work to decontaminate the site has been derailed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine

New Scientist reporter Matthew Sparkes secured unrivalled access to Chernobyl's most crucial scientific sites, where researchers are fighting to protect the area and ensure it remains safe amid the constant threat of attack from Russia

Ever heard of a condition called bixonimania? Did you search the internet or ask your “AI” girlfriend about some symptoms you were experiencing, and this was its answer? Well… The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist.

Version 7.0 of the Linux kernel has been released, marking the arbitrary end of the 6.x series. Significant changes in this release include the removal of the “experimental” status for Rust code, a new filtering mechanism for io_uring operations, a switch to lazy preemption by default in the CPU scheduler, support for time-slice extension, the nullfs filesystem, self-healing support for the XFS filesystem, a number of improvements to the swap subsystem (described in this article and this one), general support for AccECN congestion notification, and more.

The astronauts of the Artemis II mission around the moon have made it home safely to Earth, marking the end of a triumphant mission and the beginning of a longer road to stay on the moon

It shouldn’t be a surprise that companies – and for our field, technology companies specifically – working with the defense industry tends to raise eyebrows. With things like the genocide in Gaza, the threats of genocide and war crimes against Iran, the mass murder in Lebanon, it’s no surprise that western companies working with the militaries and defense companies involved in these atrocities are receiving some serious backlash.

Some cats will suddenly refuse to touch brands of cat food that they have eaten for years. Changing the way the food smells might solve the problem

A handful of plankton fossils buried in a small chunk of rock show that the oceans were teeming with life before the Late Ordovician mass extinction, the second most severe on record

Working in secret for more than two years, a group of mathematicians has set out to resolve of the longest and most bitter battles in modern mathematics

If you want to run FreeBSD on a laptop, you’re often yanked back to the Linux world of 20 years ago, with many components and parts not working and other issues such as sleep and wake problems. FreeBSD has been hard at work improving the experience of using FreeBSD on laptops, and now this has resulted in a list of laptops which work effortlessly with the venerable operating system.

It may sound unbelievable to some, but not everyone has a datacenter beast with 128GB of VRAM shoved in their desktop PCs. Around the world people tell the tale of a particularly fierce group of Linux gamers: Those who dare attempt to play games with only 8 gigabytes of VRAM, or even less.

Physicists have shown how time can effectively be reversed for some quantum systems, which would allow for new ways to harvest energy

The incompleteness theorem is accepted as part of the mathematical canon today, but columnist Jacob Aron says it was a bombshell when Kurt Gödel first introduced it. Gödel’s seminal work directly contradicted one of the great minds of mathematics and limited the field forever

Two extremely precise experiments agree with a previously shocking measurement of just how big the proton is, which may help future searches for new particles

You might have seen this, one of the strangest and most primitive experiences in macOS, where you’re asked to press keys next to left Shift and right Shift, whatever they might be. Perhaps I can explain.

This post aims to be a high level introduction to using USB for people who may not have worked with Hardware too much yet and just want to use the technology. There are amazing resources out there such as USB in a NutShell that go into a lot of detail about how USB precisely works (check them out if you want more information), they are however not really approachable for somebody who has never worked with USB before and doesn’t have a certain background in Hardware.

The months keep coming, and thus, the monthly progress reports keep coming, too, for Redox, the new general purpose operating system written in Rust. This past month, there’s been considerable graphics improvements, better deadlock detection in the kernel, improved Unicode support thanks to switching over to ncurses library variant with Unicode support, and much more.

Researchers who observed a murderous conflict unfolding in a once-unified group of wild chimpanzees say there are parallels with civil wars in human societies

A woman with three different autoimmune conditions had all of them treated simultaneously by genetically modifying her immune cells to kill off the rogue ones causing problems