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Despite December being the holiday month, Haiku’s developers got a lot of things done. A welcome addition for those of us who regularly install Haiku on EFI systems is a tool in the installer that will copy the EFI loader to the EFI system partition, so fewer manual steps are needed on EFI systems.

A few extra minutes of sleep per day or an extra half-serving of vegetables with dinner can add a year to our lives, according to an analysis of data from 60,000 people

It’s no secret that the Windows 95 installer uses a heavily stripped-down Windows 3.10 runtime, but what can you actually do with it? How far can you take this runtime? Can it run Photoshop? It is a long-standing tradition for Microsoft to use a runtime copy of Windows as a part of Windows Setup.

Clues from studies of ancient plants and animals have helped archaeologists pin down where the last Neanderthals found refuge, says columnist Michael Marshall

Some of climate change's sharpest realities are being felt on small island nations, where extreme weather is claiming homes and triggering displacement. Those able to stay are spearheading inventive adaptation techniques in a bid to secure their future

They’re easily overlooked between all the Chrome and Safari violence, but there are still text-based web browsers, and people still use them. How do they handle the latest HTML features? While CSS is the star of the show when it comes to new features, HTML ain’t stale either.

A study of the hearts of Greenland sharks has found that the long-lived deep-sea predator has massive accumulations of ageing markers, such as severe scarring, but this doesn't appear to affect their health or longevity

Before the Romans captured Pompeii, the famous town was run by the Samnite people – and a dip in their public baths might have been an unpleasant experience

Combining two kinds of quantum computing devices could be just the trick for taking better images of faint, faraway exoplanets

For centuries, the principle of symmetry has guided physicists towards more fundamental truths, but now a slew of shocking findings suggest a far stranger idea from quantum theory could be a deeper driving force

Sexual behaviour among same-sex pairs is common in apes and monkeys, and a wide-ranging analysis suggests it does boost survival

The PDP-10 family of computers (under different names) was manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation between 1964 and 1983. Designed for time-sharing, batch and real-time systems, these computers were popular with universities, scientific companies and time-sharing bureaux.

Are you an author writing HTML? Just so we’re clear: Not XHTML. HTML. Without the X. If you are, repeat after me, because apparently this bears repeating (after the title): You are not required to close your <p>, <li>, <img>, or <br> tags in HTML.

The world’s most powerful supercomputers can now run simulations of billions of neurons, and researchers hope such models will offer unprecedented insights into how our brains work

Mathematicians rely on numbers, but finding words to explain different levels of certainty has stymied everyone from the ancient Greeks to the most famous modern philosophers. Maths columnist Jacob Aron tells the story of how a CIA analyst finally cracked it

We all knew this was going to happen, so let’s just get it over with. Microsoft is testing a new feature that integrates Copilot into the File Explorer, but it’s not going to be another ‘Ask Copilot’ button in the right-click menu.

Posh, GNOME’s mobile shell, published a look back on the project’s 2025. The Phosh developers focus from day one was to make devices running Phosh daily drivable without having to resort to any proprietary OSes as a fallback.

Budgie has fallen a bit by the wayside in recent years, but it’s still in development and making steady progress. The project’s just released Budgie 10.10, the final release in the 10.x series which also marks the end of the transition to Wayland.

OpenBSD on a Sharp Zaurus Linux-based PDA from 2005? Of course, why not? Installing OpenBSD was easy. The instructions in INSTALL.zaurus are pretty straightforward. My 5.6 install was smooth. Installing sets took ~10-15 minutes.

Cutting down boreal forest and sinking the felled trees in the depths of the Arctic Ocean could remove up to 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year – but it could come at a cost to the Arctic ecosystem

One of the astronauts aboard the International Space Station is undergoing a “medical situation”, forcing NASA to bring the crew home early for the first time ever

Evidence is mounting that specific gut bacteria are linked to sleep conditions, which may open the doors to dietary recommendations aiming to boost the quality of our slumbers

The ice-covered island may be strategically important, but it's unclear that it could be a commercially viable source of minerals and oil in the near future

Calculations show that injecting randomness into a quantum neural network could help it determine properties of quantum objects that are otherwise fundamentally hard to access

A man with auto-brewery syndrome, a rare condition in which gut microbes produce intoxicating levels of alcohol, has been successfully treated with faeces from a super donor

A standard industrial knitting machine has been modified to produce fabrics from tungsten wire coated in gold, which are used to form the dish on the CarbSAR satellite

Since we entered a new year, we also entered a new quarter, and that means a new quarterly report from the Hurd, the project that aims to, to this day, developer a kernel for the GNU operating system. Over the course of the fourth quarter of 2025, an important undertaking has been to port dhcpcd to Hurd, which will ultimately bring IPv6 support to Hurd.

MenuetOS, the operating system written in x86-64 assembly, released version 1.58.00. Since the last time we talked about MenuetOS, the included X server has been improved, networking performance has been increased, there’s now native versions of classic X utilities like XEyes, XCalc, and others, and more.

Tree bark has a total surface area similar to all of the land area on Earth. It is home to a wide range of microbial species unknown to science, and they can either take up or emit gases that have a warming effect on the climate

A preliminary analysis suggests that industrially useful quantum computers designs come with a broad spectrum of energy footprints, including some larger than the most powerful existing supercomputers

There’s so much shit going on in the world right now, and we can all use a breather. So, let’s join Carl Svensson and look at some pretty Amiga Workbench screenshots. Combining my love for screenshots with the love for the Amiga line of computers, I’ve decided to present a small, curated selection of noteworthy Amiga Workbenches – Workbench being the name of the Amiga’s desktop environment.

The solution the Flatpak team is looking into is to use virtualisation for the graphics driver, as the absolute last-resort option to keep things working when nothing else will. It’s a complex and interesting solution to a complex and interesting problem.

Satellite photos show meltwater on the surface of iceberg A23a collecting in an unusual way, which may be a sign that the huge berg is about to break apart

A man’s severe reaction to a tattoo, which made all his hair fall out and destroyed his sweat glands, has reignited concerns about the immune effects of some tattoo inks

A comprehensive review confirms the benefits of exercise for treating depression, even if the exact reasons remain unclear

Drugs like Ozempic have transformed how we treat obesity, but a review of almost 40 studies shows it doesn't take long for people to regain weight if they come off them

A collection of arrow points excavated in South Africa has provided the oldest direct evidence of hunters deploying plant-based poisons on their weapons, a practice that has continued into modern times in some traditional cultures

We are going to be getting a lot of exciting new information about galaxies in 2026, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who can't wait to see what it can tell us

There is a growing trend to see our relationship with nature as a spiritual thing. This is a mistake, argues Richard Smyth

From Fallout and Gen Z Star Trek to the classic Neuromancer, you will be glued to the TV this year, says TV columnist Bethan Ackerley

The Nesin Mathematics Village in western Turkey was dreamed up by award-winning mathematician Ali Nesin to engage his students

With a new 28 Days Later movie and a new Dune, not to mention films from Stephen Spielberg and Ridley Scott, this is shaping up to be a vintage year for sci-fi, says Simon Ings

After finding success with last year's New Year's resolution, health reporter Grace Wade has grand plans for 2026 – and the science to back them up

While US President Donald Trump and his administration are making false and debunked claims about the causes of autism, real research is improving our understanding of the condition

Four years ago, I reviewed a truly fully open source desktop computer, from operating system down to firmware: the Raptor Blackbird, built entirely around IBM’s POWER9 processor. The overall conclusion was that using was mostly an entirely boring experience, which was a very good thing – usually ideologically-fueled computers come with a ton of downsides and limitations for average users, but Raptor’s POWER9 machines bucked this trend by presenting a bog-standard, run-of-the-mill desktop Linux experience, almost indistinguishable from using an x86 machine.

The jawbones and vertebrae of a hominin that lived 773,000 years ago have been found in North Africa and could represent a common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans

Most planetary systems contain worlds larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, and the low-density planets around one young star should help us understand how such systems form

You might feel like the days and weeks are slipping by. Here is how one psychologist says you can shift your experience of time

AI models such as ChatGPT and Gemini fail to give adequate advice for 60 per cent of queries relating to women’s health in a test created by medical professionals

Immune cells are most commonly engineered to kill cancers, but now, scientists have shown the technique makes the gut lining of older mice resemble that of younger mice, raising hopes that the same approach could work in people

About half a year ago, I wrote an article about persistent rumours I’d heard from Android ROM projects that Google was intending to discontinue the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). AOSP has been gutted by Google over the years, with the company moving more and more parts of the operating system into closed-source, non-AOSP components, like Google Play Services.

Since we moved to a new year, we also moved to a new month, and that means a new monthly report from Redox, the general purpose operating system written in Rust. The report obviously touches on the news we covered a few weeks ago that Redox now has the first tidbits of a modesetting driver for Intel hardware, but in addition to that, the project has also taken the first steps towards basic read-only APIs from Linux DRM, in order to use Linux graphics drivers.

Happy New Year 2026! Once again, a lot has happened in Gentoo over the past months. New developers, more binary packages, GnuPG alternatives support, Gentoo for WSL, improved Rust bootstrap, better NGINX packaging, … As always here we’re going to revisit all the exciting news from our favourite Linux distribution.

The new version brings a ton of new enhancements and fixes to all 3 supported platforms, with Steam running not only on Arm64, but also on RiSC-V and on Loongarch! And this is the Linux version of Steam, not the Windows one (but the Windows one works too if you really prefer that one).

A 1.78-million-year-old partial elephant skeleton found in Tanzania associated with stone tools may represent the oldest known evidence of butchery of the giant herbivores

The earliest acoustic vibrations in the cosmos weren’t exactly sound – they travelled at half the speed of light and there was nobody around to hear them anyway. But Jim Baggott says from the first moments, the universe was singing

The curse of having to remember easily hackable passwords may soon be over, as a new alternative is set to take over in 2026

The benefits of sleep may be more universal than we thought. We know it helps clear waste from the brain in humans, and now it seems that even creatures without brains like ours get similar benefits

An ambitious form of climate modelling aims to pin the blame for disasters – from floods to heatwaves – on specific companies. Is this the tool we need to effectively prosecute the world’s biggest carbon emitters?

Ever noticed your computer acting sluggish or warning you about low storage? Temporary files could be the sneaky culprit. Windows creates these files while installing apps, loading web pages, or running updates.

For nearly three decades, the International Space Station has been the only destination in low Earth orbit, but that will change this year. Could it be the start of a thriving economy in space?

Modelling suggests both carbon taxes and green subsidies will be necessary to decarbonise the US economy, but the inconsistent policies of successive presidents are the "worst case" scenario

The way the histories of CP/M, DOS, Microsoft, and the 8086 intertwine would be worthy of an amazing film if it wasn’t for the fact it would be very hard to make it interesting screen material. Few OEMs were asking for an 8086 version of CP/M.

We’ve talked about just how bad Apple’s regular icons have become, but what about the various icons Apple now plasters all over its menus, buttons, and dialogs? They’ve gotten so, so much worse.

CheriBSD is a Capability Enabled, Unix-like Operating System that extends FreeBSD to take advantage of Capability Hardware on Arm’s Morello and CHERI-RISC-V platforms. CheriBSD implements memory protection and software compartmentalization features, and is developed by SRI International and the University of Cambridge.

The Prudhoe ice dome disappeared during a warm period 7000 years ago. Global warming could cause similar temperatures by 2100, showing the Greenland ice sheet’s vulnerability

For years, we've thought of autism as lying on a spectrum, but emerging evidence suggests that it comes in several distinct types. The implications for how we support autistic people could be profound

A galaxy cluster in the early universe is 10 times hotter than it ought to be, which may reshape how we think these enormous structures formed

A study of 160 European famines between 1500 and 1800 shows that El Niño weather events led to the onset of some famines and extended the duration of others

A host of new science books are due to hit shelves in January, by authors including Claudia Hammond, Deborah Cohen and Daisy Fancourt

The US government is approving the drug leucovorin to address rising rates of autism, despite limited evidence that it works. This year, results from the largest trial yet should give more insight into its potential

Up until now, it’s always remained possible to activate Windows offline, by calling a phone number, going through a lengthy phase of entering digits on your phone dialpad, and carefully listening to and entering a string of numbers on the device you’re trying to activate.

Researchers at Google have used their Willow quantum computer to demonstrate that "quantum contextuality" may be a crucial ingredient for its computational prowess

Big hitter Peter F. Hamilton has a new sci-fi novel out this month – and Booker winner George Saunders ventures into speculative fiction with his latest book, Vigil

An analysis of several experiments aimed at detecting the mysterious neutrino has identified a hint of a crack in the standard model of particle physics

Desktop Classic System is an operating system based on Debian and a customized version of the MATE Desktop Environment that hearkens back to, but is not a direct copy of, the classic Mac OS. DCS seeks to provide and sometimes even improve upon the conceptual simplicity offered by the old Macintosh.

KDE developer Herz published a detailed look at the immense amount of work they’ve done cleaning up the developer onboarding documentation for KDE. All that just to say that I’m finally content with the state of beginner onboarding docs in our KDE Developer Platform.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the HP-UX FAQ eventually grew an entry for “how can I make a 712 run headless”. It was possible, and to do it you had to change the firmware “console” path.

IceWM, the venerable X11 window manager, has released a new version, bumping the version number to 4.0.0. This release brings a big update to the alt+tab feature. The Alt+Tab window switcher can now handle large numbers of application windows in both horizontal and in vertical mode.

Did Sahelanthropus, which lived 7 million years ago, walk on two legs like a modern human? It's complicated

Astronomers were puzzled by a black hole around 50 million times the mass of the sun with no stars, spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope – now simulations suggest it could be a primordial black hole, something we have never seen before

The New Scientist Book Club has just finished our December read, Iain M. Banks's sci-fi novel The Player of Games - and most of us were fans of this big-thinking Culture tale

The author of the award-winning science fiction novel Annie Bot, the January read for the New Scientist Book Club, on how she created her startling protagonist

In this extract from the award-winning science fiction novel Annie Bot, the January read for the New Scientist Book Club, we are introduced to Sierra Greer's protagonist, a sex robot called Annie

A woman's body has been found to consist of varying proportions of male and female cells because of an extremely rare form of chimerism

Researchers have confirmed the mass of a free-floating planet thanks to a lucky convergence of ground- and space-based telescopes

Chess960 involves shuffling the pieces at the back of the board, and an analysis suggests doing so can increase the complexity of the game to favour white, black or neither player

The new year isn’t even a day old, and Haiku developer X512 dropped something major in Haiku users’ laps: the first alpha version of an accelerated NVIDIA graphics drivers for Haiku. Supporting at least NVIDIA Turing and Ampere GPUs, it’s very much in alpha state, but does allow for proper GPU acceleration, with the code surely making its way to Haiku builds in the near future.

Olivia Remes, a mental health researcher at the University of Cambridge, says these are the three things everyone should do this New Year to cultivate a more positive mindset

It’s 31 December 2025 today, the last day of the year, but it also happens to mark the end of support for the last and final version of one of my favourite operating systems: HP-UX. Today is the day HPE puts the final nail in the coffin of their long-running UNIX operating system, marking the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux.

Understanding the chemical properties of a molecule is an inherently quantum problem, making quantum computers a good tool for the job – and we may start seeing this take off in 2026

Astronomers have found a system of three supermassive black holes, all actively feeding, that appear to be combining into a single system – a rare event that will help elucidate the physics of complex mergers

An explorer and a glaciologist are kite-skiing across Antarctica with a ground-penetrating radar to gather data that will help understand the past and future of the ice sheet

In 1892, astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard thought he saw a bright star near Venus, but then it vanished. We may now know why

Reflect Orbital plans to launch thousands of reflective mirrors to produce "sunlight on demand", but researchers are sceptical about whether the reflected light will be enough to generate electricity

Drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound have transformed how we treat obesity, but more effective treatments could be down the road

After the New START treaty expires in February, there will be no cap on the number of US and Russian nuclear weapons - but some are sceptical about whether the deal actually made the world safer

After the New START treaty expires in February, there will be no cap on the number of US and Russian nuclear weapons - but some are sceptical about whether the deal actually made the world safer

The BepiColombo mission has been on its way to Mercury since 2018 and will finally start orbiting the planet and taking X-ray images in the second half of 2026