The Antenna

The beloved "Peanuts" character’s many costumes and brand collaborations are featured in a new showcase

Zenith is a variant of Windows for “developer-class devices”. Project Zenith comes with a set of pre-installed tools spanning languages and runtimes, source control, and productivity tools. Windows Terminal and Visual Studio Code are pinned to the Taskbar by default, putting your favorite tools within immediate reach. We’ve also pre-configured Windows Settings for coding across File Explorer, Search, Start, and the Taskbar. File Explorer shows file extensions, hidden files, the full path in the title bar, and the details pane, with long-path support enabled. Recently used files and folders and sync provider tips are turned off for a cleaner workspace. In Search and Start, Command Palette is enabled, while Start menu tips and account notifications are turned off to reduce distractions. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has become foundational for running Linux workloads on Windows. Last year we open-sourced WSL. Building on that momentum at Build 2026, we integrated WSL more deeply into Windows with WSL containers to provide a built-in way to create, run, and interact with Linux containers directly on Windows. ↫ Logan Iyer at the Windows Blogs It’s highly unlikely you’ll be using this Zenith Windows flavour any time soon, as it requires 64GB of unified RAM with 250 GB/s memory bandwidth. In 2026, that’s a serious ask. On top of that, it’s not entirely clear to me if Zenith will be available as a separate Windows variant, without having to buy a complete device. Of course, it would be trivial to set all of this up on any fresh Windows installation.

The fire department at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley will perform training on the Moffett Federal Airfield beginning Tuesday, Sept. 8 through Friday, Sept. 11. The training will involve the use of a propane-fueled aircraft fire simulator and be conducted from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. PDT. Because the aircraft simulator is […]

The BepiColombo mission, by the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, is only the third to study our smallest planetary neighbor

NASA will host a virtual webinar at 2 p.m. EDT on Friday, Oct. 2, titled “The RS-25 Engine and the Future of Artemis Missions: An Accessible Webinar for the Blind and Low-Vision Community.” This webinar is open to the public, however it is tailored specifically for a blind and low-vision audience. The webinar will last about two hours and […]

Older female mice—equivalent in age to 60-year-old women—given daily injections of the active ingredient in Ozempic lived about 12 percent longer than animals that didn't receive the drug

On Wednesday, June 17, skywatchers across the United States—and parts of Canada—enjoyed a rare event: a daytime lunar occultation of Venus. A lunar occultation occurs when the Moon moves directly in front of another celestial object from our viewpoint on Earth, briefly hiding it from sight. This time, the Moon slipped in front of Venus […]

Scientists long attributed rain damage to physical abrasion and chemical degradation from acidic substances. A new study offers a third idea, which could help researchers develop longer-lasting coatings and preserve important objects

The magnetic North Pole has shifted over the millennia, leaving clues in the minerals that make up clay antiquities

A new meta-analysis pooled data from more than one million people to look at the crossover between DNA and the "Big Five" personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism

Hot weather isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s killing thousands more Americans than show up in official records. That’s the finding from a new NPR investigation, in partnership with Boston University. And the way they came up with that new, better estimate of the true toll of heat is, of course, with science. This episode, we’ll bring you all the details – and chat about why getting good estimates could save lives.

Interested in more science-based investigations? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 September 4 – Na… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Nā ʻUhane […]

The Pacific was buzzing with storms while the Atlantic was notably quiet.

With artificial intelligence and careful modeling of fossilized wings, researchers reproduced how some extinct, katydid-like insects might have made noise

The floating forest appeared in a well-mapped reservoir in British Columbia. Its presence and vanishing act have puzzled locals and officials at the power utility that operates the lake, but other similar islands exist elsewhere

Decades ago, scientists found a hexagon around Saturn’s north pole. Now, recent images reveal a decagon in the planet’s southern hemisphere—and it seems to have recently formed

We are pleased to announce the release of ReactOS 0.4.16! After a year and a half of development, we’re excited to showcase the improvements we’ve made between a new graphical installer; a unified bootcd and livecd image; video, audio, networking, and storage stack improvements; a new installation type; and third-party code syncs. ↫ The ReactOS Team on the ReactOS website The amount of changes and improvements is quite staggering, honestly. They’ll always be chasing a moving target, sure, but if they manage to keep this rate up ReactOS might actually grow into something usable in its own right, full compatibility with Windows or not. Excellent progress.

More than 60 paintings from the private estate of Paul Durand-Ruel, who shepherded Impressionism out from obscurity, will be up for sale

NASA will provide live coverage of the launch and docking of a Roscosmos cargo spacecraft carrying about three tons of food, fuel, and supplies for the crew aboard the International Space Station. The unpiloted Progress 96 resupply spacecraft is scheduled to launch at 12:15 p.m. EDT (9:15 p.m. Baikonur time), Wednesday, Sept. 9, on a […]

Frontier intelligence is going local. At IFA 2026, NVIDIA, Microsoft and its partners are teaming up to provide faster inference and new tools that make agents easier to set up and run locally on NVIDIA hardware. New compact NVIDIA RTX Spark Windows PCs are also coming in October to give AI enthusiasts, developers and creators […]

Written by Michelle Minitti, MAHLI Deputy Principal Investigator Earth planning date: Friday, Aug. 21, 2026 After Curiosity’s 14 years on the surface, Mars continues to surprise. Both of our workspaces this week contained features unlike quite anything we have seen in the past — broad, shallow pits (like the one in the image above) dotted […]

Now on a three-month, million-mile journey to its final orbit, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will soon reveal the universe’s darkest secrets. The mission launched at 7:26 a.m. EDT on Aug. 30 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman pairs a large […]

From the magnificent mountains of New England to the desert landscape of northern New Mexico, the tools can help you make the most of nature's upcoming wardrobe change

In this special live recording from the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, July 2026, the central question discussed was what do mathematicians really value about doing mathematics in the first place?

The post Live from ICM 2026: What Is Math For in the Age of AI? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Sarah Demers, chair of the physics department at Yale University, sees the potential for large language models to both help and harm her field.

The post In an Age of AI, a Physicist Seeks What Endures first appeared on Quanta Magazine

This Hubble Space Telescope image features a sprawling cosmic vista called N44.

September is here with 28 more games streaming on GeForce NOW this month, led by a slam dunk: NBA 2K27 with the NVIDIA DLSS 5 3D-Guided Neural Rendering feature. Through NVIDIA’s close collaboration with Visual Concepts and 2K, DLSS 5 brings a new level of lifelike lighting and material detail to the court — tuned […]

I’m excited to announce that NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000. Together, we will scale Hugging Face’s platform, strengthen its infrastructure and expand access to AI for developers and institutions worldwide. Over the past decade, Clem, Julien, Thomas and the team at Hugging Face have built something remarkable: a vibrant home for […]

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 September 3 – The… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. The Eclipse […]

With Indonesia gripped by drought, fires are smoldering on the surface and underground.

Forgejo Runner v13.1.0 is available. An experimental plugin capability allows Forgejo Runner to support user-developed pluggable execution environments.

As many of you know, Microsoft will be disabling Exchange Web Services (EWS) support on its Microsoft 365 platform later this year. The Thunderbird Desktop team has been hard at work to ensure continuity of functionality through this transition, and today we are pleased to announce the release of native Thunderbird support for the Microsoft […]

The post Thunderbird Desktop New Protocol Support: Microsoft Graph API appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

The winners of the 17th annual contest reveal the beauty of birds, the splendor of their migratory journeys and the risks they face

Community college students across the U.S. now have another opportunity to discover how their education can lead to fulfilling roles at the forefront of aerospace, science, engineering, and technology. The updated NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars (NCAS) student challenge invites students to learn about the agency and its missions, engage with NASA experts, and explore […]

Although prized in the United States, the crustaceans have been decimating ecosystems and the fishing industry in Italy. Experts hope that an army of natural predators—common octopuses—can help contain the invasive species' spread

In addition to the tomb, which once belonged to a high-ranking official, excavations revealed a network of burial shafts that still held human remains and funerary objects

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope observes a giant, evolving, 10-sided atmospheric wave encircling Saturn’s south pole.

For roughly a decade leading up to September 1953, the United Kingdom limited sugar purchases. Scientists studied health outcomes in people born during the ration and right after

On Aug. 28, 2026 (the evening of Aug. 27 in some time zones), the Moon passed into Earth’s shadow, creating a deep partial lunar eclipse. At the moment of greatest eclipse, 12:13 a.m. EDT, 96.3% of the Moon’s disk was immersed in Earth’s umbra—the central, darkest part of the shadow where sunlight is completely blocked. […]

High above Earth, thin veils of metallic haze drift through the edge of space. Known as sporadic E layers, these high-altitude “clouds” form from the vaporized dust of burnt-up meteors, earning their name from the unpredictable way they emerge and then dissipate. Now, new results from a NASA sounding rocket — a suborbital research rocket […]

By doubling their entire genome, organisms can evolve extremely rapidly — or they can lose it all. New studies reveal how to survive the high-risk, high-reward evolutionary event.

The post Genome Duplication Is a Radical Evolutionary Gamble first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Researchers used elements trapped within Galápagos corals to understand natural swings in the climate over the past millennium. They hint that variability has gone up over the past 40 years compared to preindustrial times

Do you ever feel like your emotions control you instead of you controlling them? Maybe you lash out at someone after a long day at work or indulge to avoid a stressful situation. It’s called emotional dysregulation and don’t worry – we all experience it at some point. Luckily, there’s a better way of dealing with our feelings: building emotional intelligence. That may seem daunting, but Short Wave is here to guide you through everything from understanding the importance of emotions to how we can repair our relationship to them.

Interested in learning more about your brain and your feelings? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org . We might cover it in a future episode!

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 September 2 –… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Solar Eclipses and […]

“We’re at an inflection point in cybersecurity,” Jensen Huang told a sold-out crowd at CrowdStrike’s Fal.Con 2026 in Las Vegas Tuesday. Attacks are now automated. Defense has to be, too.  The NVIDIA founder and CEO joined CrowdStrike CEO and founder George Kurtz to announce CrowdStrike SafeMind, its agentic cybersecurity system developed by the CrowdStrike Cyber […]

NASA awarded Blue Origin a contract Tuesday to develop the agency’s Mars Telecommunications Network, a next-generation communications system that will enable reliable, high-bandwidth communications and navigation services for current and future Mars missions. The firm-fixed-price contract has a maximum potential value of approximately $700 million to deliver a high-performance Mars telecommunications orbiter to NASA no […]

Brilliant Venus and a Harvest Moon Use the Moon to find Antares and the Teapot, spot brilliant Venus, welcome the equinox, and see the Harvest Moon near Saturn and Neptune. Skywatching Highlights Transcript The Moon joins a tea party… Venus cranks up the brightness… the seasons officially change… and the Harvest Moon meets up with […]

Geneticists altered Alfie and Bailey’s DNA so that they don't produce a major allergen. However, canines like them are not currently commercially available, and some experts express ethical concerns about altering the animals' genes

Dale Sanders finished the hike in just under a year. Nicknamed "Grey Beard," he's no stranger to age-defying feats of endurance

On Aug. 24, technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida began installing the four RS‑25 engines in the core stage of the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that will carry the Artemis III crew into low Earth orbit in 2027. Each RS‑25 engine has a unique serial number that records its detailed flight […]

The visionary designed this two-bedroom, one-bathroom in his affordable Usonian style. It’s the only house of its kind in L.A.

Researchers used a novel technique to figure out what's going on inside the Red Planet. The work suggests that the interior of the southern hemisphere is hundreds of degrees hotter than that of the northern hemisphere and partially molten

A previously undescribed critter that lived 324 million years ago appears to have been a transitional species that lived between land and sea. It could help researchers fill an 80-million-year gap in the fossil record of how crustaceans evolved into insects

Faced with a chorus of potential mates, female Cope’s gray treefrogs may be overwhelmed by the number of options and struggle to make a careful decision, a study suggests

Recently discovered archival records indicate that workers constructing an extension of the Constable's Gate at Dover Castle in the late 19th century reused fragments of the Tudor-era Sandown Castle

Seashells: They're beautiful remnants to carry home from the beach—and so much more! According to environmental journalist Cynthia Barnett, seashells record history more accurately than the humans who first wrote it down. In this episode, we talk about the science of seashells, their impact on humankind and the scientist behind a very famous tongue twister.

Check out Cynthia’s book The Sound of the Sea and check out Emily’s reporting on sandcastles .

Interested in more marine biology stories? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s hperks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org .

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 September 1 – A… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. A Plane […]

In summer 2026, a substantial iceberg calved from Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland and swiftly drifted into Nares Strait, colliding with an island along the way.

During a ceremony hosted by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman at the agency’s headquarters in Washington on Monday, the Republic of Türkiye signed the Artemis Accords, joining the growing international coalition of like-minded nations dedicated to peaceful, transparent space exploration. “It is my privilege to welcome the Republic of Türkiye as the 71st signatory of the […]

Natural hazards researchers suspect that a landslide involving a glacier triggered the event, and they say more could happen because of human-caused climate change

The so-called “Conquest Man” was buried in England in 1079, just over a decade into the reign of William the Conqueror. Researchers recently analyzed the skeleton’s DNA and teeth to learn more about him

Here’s the August 2026 puzzler. Quick, where is this? And what makes this place interesting or unique?

Welcome back! In our June update, we discussed PureOS's downstream relationship with Debian. Just as PureOS Crimson is based on Debian Bookworm, PureOS Dawn is based on Debian Trixie.

We modify many Debian packages for PureOS to provide the best experience on all Librem devices. Often, when we reach a new Debian release, there will be packages with changes on both sides, creating a conflict.

The post PureOS Development Report: July 2026 appeared first on Purism.

Opening in 2027, The Whale will explore the science, behavior, evolution and cultural history of whales through art, storytelling, sound and architecture

Officials were shaken after dozens of ancient artifacts vanished from the local archaeological museum in Villena, Spain. The thieves left only a few pieces from the Bronze Age treasure behind

Nearly a decade after her acclaimed first translation was released, Wilson is taking a fresh approach to Homer's ancient Greek epic

A team of researchers programmed yeast to turn broken-down plastic and agricultural waste into sweet treats called µBites. They might come in handy during deep-space missions or in disaster zones, although some critics say the food is impractical

Researchers found the textile traces on a pair of metal brooches. When the accessories corroded, they released metallic salts that inadvertently preserved the fabric for centuries

Mathematicians found that a broad class of networks will abruptly shift behavior past a critical point.

The post ‘Stunning’ Percolation Proof Solves Decades-Old Puzzle About Phase Transitions first appeared on Quanta Magazine

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, transits the Sun during launch from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Aug. 30, 2026. Roman is named after the agency’s first chief astronomer. Roman will survey billions of stars and galaxies with a field of view far larger than Hubble’s, […]

The ghost pipefish's scruffy appearance probably helps it look like floating algae, allowing it to blend in with its environment. Researchers had been on the hunt for this strange creature for years after first spotting one more than two decades ago

Where is Roman? Roman is making its three-month journey from Earth to Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, or L2. Along the way, Roman is undergoing a process called commissioning, where systems are turned on, adjusted, calibrated, and prepared for science operations. Commissioning is the time for scientists and engineers to make sure that Roman is performing […]

The NFL season begins this week, but America’s favorite sport has been on our minds for other reasons recently. New research released in the journal BMJ reveals that 1 in 4 former NFL players in this sample had CTE, a neurodegenerative brain disease caused by repetitive head injuries. Past studies already showed that football players are at high risk for CTE, but this study – which assessed ex-NFL players who died from 2016 to 2021 – revealed that at least a quarter of those former players died with CTE, and the study’s lead author says the actual numbers are likely higher. What does that mean for players (and fans) of American football? Short Wave host Nate Rott and NPR sports correspondent Becky Sullivan find out.

If you liked this episode, check out our episode on the brain injuries caused by operating blast weapons.

Interested in more sports science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org .

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 31 –… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. To view this […]

Description Leadership from NASA Headquarters, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Deep Space Network (DSN) stand in front of the recently completed Deep Space Station 23 antenna at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex near Barstow, California, on Aug. 25, 2026.  From left: Germaine Aziz (project manager, DSN Aperture Enhancement Project, JPL); Bradford Arnold (manager, […]

Description Long shadows are cast by the recently completed Deep Space Station 23 at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex near Barstow, California, in August 2026. A 34-meter (114-foot) multifrequency beam-waveguide antenna, DSS-23 will boost the DSN’s capacity and enhance NASA’s deep space communications capabilities for decades to come. NASA leadership and personnel as well […]

Description Five antennas soak in the summer sun at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex near Barstow, California, in August 2026. The recently completed Deep Space Station 23, a 34-meter (114-foot) beam-waveguide antenna, can be seen to the right of the frame in the foreground. The other three 34-meter antennas are, from left, DSS-26, DSS-25, and […]

Now on a three-month, million-mile journey to its final orbit, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will soon reveal the universe’s darkest secrets. The mission launched at 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman pairs a large field of […]

The new observatory will complete three surveys of the universe in five years, although it's designed to function at least twice as long. Its data could change scientists' basic understanding of the cosmos

From left to right: NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch, CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, and NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman receive the Congressional Space Medal of Honor from President Donald J. Trump on Aug. 28, 2026, for their service during the Artemis II mission. The Congressional Space Medal of Honor was authorized […]

NASA named a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the first prize winner for Phase 2 of the agency’s LunaRecycle Challenge, which focused on developing solutions for reducing waste during missions to the Moon or deep space by recycling common materials, like fabrics, plastics, foam, and metals.  The Composites for Extraterrestrial Recycling By Engineering the Reuse and Upcycling of Zotek (CERBERUZ) team, comprised of undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students at MIT, received a total of $775,000 in awards.   The technology grinds mixed trash into a fine powder, […]

An intense global warming event 56 million years ago caused a forest in modern-day Wyoming to lose around 60 percent of its canopy cover, and it took more than 100,000 years to bounce back, a study suggests

Best known for its Paleolithic art, Valencia’s Cova de les Dones also contains a Roman sanctuary where researchers say women appear to have played an active role in the worship of a female deity

Researchers say that past exposure to sulfur dioxide is likely to blame for the increased porosity of the Murujuga rock art created by the Ngarda-Ngarli people tens of thousands of years ago

President Donald J. Trump awarded NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor Friday for their service during the Artemis II mission. He presented the awards during a ceremony at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, honoring the first […]

To strengthen the nation’s space workforce and develop the next generation of space leaders, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order on Friday to establish the nation’s first U.S. Space Academy. The order highlights how space is a critical domain for American national security, economic growth, scientific discovery, and technological innovation. The proposed academy […]

*Notice* The Payment Management System (PMS) is currently experiencing issues affecting Federal Financial Report (FFR) generation. Impacted NASA grant recipients will not be considered noncompliant. NASA is working with PMS to resolve the issue. Updates will be posted here. Grants Status Requests To submit a request, visit NASA General Information Request Form and complete the […]

The speedster travels at up to 56 million miles per hour, or about 8 percent the speed of light. It also gets very close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way

When "Torero" vanished from a Milwaukee art gallery in 2018, the owners didn't know whether they'd ever see it again. The man who found the etching turned it over to the police earlier this month

The bearded capuchins of northeastern Brazil typically eat plant-based foods, but they turn to small vertebrates when those sources are limited. Our ancestors may have done the same, eventually allowing predatory behaviors to be more frequently passed on in our lineage

The theoretical side of the field doesn’t require computing machines. But many questions would never have been posed without them.

The post Does Computer Science Need Computers? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The new Nancy Grace Roman space telescope is slated to launch this weekend. It was originally built for the National Reconnaissance Office as a spy satellite, but was never launched. Instead, NRO gave it to NASA about 15 years ago. After some major modifications, it’s set to begin its five-year mission peering at new supernovas, distant galaxies and planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. It should help scientists get a better understanding of the mysterious force known as dark energy – which will tell us about the fate of the universe.

If you liked this episode, check out Regina’s reporting demystifying the mysterious red dots spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Interested in more space news? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org .

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 28 – The… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. The Sky […]

The meandering Congaree River sustains towering forest ecosystems and fashions oxbow lakes as it shifts across its floodplain.

Virtually all laptop speakers suck. It’s the one area where even really expensive laptops tend to fall on their ass, leaving users with a tinny, harsh, and hollow sound experience. While you can’t exactly overcome physics – laptop speakers are necessarily small and thus just cannot ever sound as good as proper speakers – there’s a lot you can do with proper tuning and software magic. If you’re a desktop Linux user, you actually already possess all the plumbing needed to fix your audio; it’s just not exposed to you in any way. Luckily, an application called EasyEffects allows you to actually make use of desktop Linux’ advanced audio features to massively improve the sound quality of your laptop’s speakers. EasyEffects’ own description on its GitHub page doesn’t really explain what it does or what it’s capable of, so here’s the description from Wikipedia instead. EasyEffects uses PipeWire to process incoming and outgoing audio streams independently and can apply various sound effects in the form of plug-ins made by different developer teams such as Calf Studio Gear, MDA.LV2 and GStreamer. All plugins have their own presets and can be applicable inside the suite rather than having to use a different mixer or executing a script from the command line. Available output effects are limiter, auto volume, compressor of dynamic range, filter, 30 bands parametric equalizer, bass enhancer, exciter, reverbation, crossfeed, delay, maximizer and spectrum analyzer. Available input effects are WebRTC, limiter, compressor, filter, equalizer, de-esser, reverbation, pitch shift and spectrum analyzer. ↫ EasEffects’ Wikipedia page None of this matters, and you can forget everything from these two paragraphs. What matters is that using EasyEffects, you can tune the audio coming out of your speakers to make them sound a lot better. The few laptops on the market that do have decent audio – MacBooks, some Dell XPS laptops, and surely a few more – aren’t magically defying physics. While they probably do have objectively higher-quality speakers, the main difference between those laptops and laptops with crappy-sounding speakers is that the former come with built-in tuning from the factory to make them sound much better than they would without any software trickery. If you know your way around audio, you can very much use EasyEffects and tune your laptop speakers from scratch to massively improve how they sound. However, that requires time, experience, knowledge, and expertise that most people lack, including myself. Lucky for us, though, there are countless downloadable presets out there for EasyEffects designed specifically to make laptops sound better. In an ideal world, you’d pick a preset created specifically for your laptop make and model, but odds are you won’t find one, so for most laptops you’ll have to settle for a generic preset that tries to do its best. I’ve long settled on the Advanced Auto Gain.json preset from JackHack96, which greatly improves the audio performance on any laptops I’ve tried it on, but of course, there’s countless other presets for you to try to see if there’s anything that suits your particular laptop and ears better. Getting all of this up and running is really easy. EasyEffects is most likely packaged by your Linux distribution, and the latest version is always available as a Flatpak from Flathub. Download the preset(s) you want to try, copy them either to ~/.config/easyeffects (if you use your distribution’s package) or to ~/.var/app/com.github.wwmm.easyeffects/data/easyeffects/output/ (if you use the Flatpak version). They’ll show up right away in the Presets tab in EasyEffects, ready to be turned on and off whenever you want, making it very easy to compare and contrast to find the one you like best. EasyEffects can live in your system tray giving you easy access to your presets without having to open the main window, and it can be set to start automatically at boot. EasyEffects can also be turned on and off on the fly. There’s obvious downsides to all of this, too, of course. First, since you’re most likely going to be using a generic preset not specifically crafted for your laptop, there’s no guarantee the results will be positive for you. Second, not every preset is ideal for every type of audio. Most of my audio consists of YouTube videos with mostly speech; if you listen mostly to music, different presets may yield better results. Third, audio quality is deeply subjective, and what sounds good to my ears may sound like total garbage to yours. Fourth, EasyEffects does take up a tiny fraction of CPU power (I’m talking 0.1-0.2% according to KDE’s System Monitor), but I have never seen it have any noticeable performance impact on anything. Even the generic preset I use makes such a massive difference for me on every laptop I’ve ever tried it on, that I’ve become convinced EasyEffects and a few of the generic presets should be installed by default by any desktop-oriented Linux distribution. On top of that, Linux laptops OEMs like System76, Nova Custom, Star Labs, and so on, should really take the time to create proper presets for their laptops to improve their sound quality out of the box. I feel like if you’re already designing and selling laptops, you probably also have the skills and means to create a decent preset. In fact, I’d take it a step further and urge desktop environments like KDE and GNOME to properly integrate EasyEffects into their sound settings. They shouldn’t include the entire application and its user interface, but should make it so that you can configure and manage presets right from the sound settings panels, and switch between presets from their volume applets (as well as turn it off entirely, of course). This would leave the full EasyEffects application for people who need more control, manual tuning, and more advanced features. There’s absolutely no reason why speakers on Linux laptops should sound tinny, harsh, and hollow. The Linux desktop has all the technologies and features built right in to make speakers sound much better than they do without any tuning,

The critters can alter the proportions of calcium and collagen in the versatile substance, which changes the protein structure. The different textures can help snails glide, climb or protect themselves

The chance to help move the castle keep drew thousands of applications from Japan and abroad. Groups of lottery winners took turns tugging on thick ropes attached to the massive structure

The eclectic program spans decades and genres, offering glimpses into Brooks’ comedic influences, personal history and enduring love of film

Turkey will sign the Artemis Accords during a ceremony at 2:30 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 31, at NASA Headquarters in Washington, becoming the 71st country signatory. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman will host Turkish Minister of Industry and Technology Mehmet Fatih Kacır for the ceremony, together with U.S. Department of State officials. This event is in person only. […]

Selma's Edistone Hotel has witnessed pivotal chapters in American history, from Reconstruction to "Bloody Sunday." Now, after years of neglect and a recent wall collapse, the Conservation Fund is working to secure its future

New civil servants and guests pose for a group photo with NASA and center leadership in the National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Complex (NFAC) 80-by-120-foot test section, N221 on Aug. 24, 2026. The civil servants were sworn-in the same day in the largest swearing-in ceremony ever hosted at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley since […]

New research suggests that the people who buried the young woman took precautionary measures to stop her from coming back to life and exacting revenge on them

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch at 7:26 a.m. EDT on Sunday, Aug. 30. While you wait to watch the launch, brush up on some key facts about this wide-view mission. To learn more about the Roman mission, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/roman Media contact: Claire AndreoliNASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.claire.andreoli@nasa.gov301-286-1940

The fossilized remains, recovered in 1929, were part of La Brea's relatively understudied amphibian collection. Since toads are cold-blooded and sensitive to environmental changes, the discovery can help researchers piece together past climate conditions

After nearly a decade of service to NASA, including an eight-month science expedition aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Jonny Kim’s last day at the agency is Thursday. He will continue serving as lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. Kim launched to the space station in April 2025 aboard the Soyuz MS‑27 spacecraft to conduct […]

Eight ensembles from the Queen frontman's career will be displayed across six stops in the London museum's permanent galleries, offering a glimpse into the clothes behind his legendary stage persona

Built on a 2 nanometer technology node, the processor’s design will contain 11 high-performance cores operating at more than 5.7 GHz, AI inference accelerators for in-transaction fraud detection, a dedicated on-chip data processing unit for I/O acceleration, and a large cache architecture for demanding enterprise workloads. The chip is architected to not contain separate Arm and IBM cores: each processor core can natively execute Arm and IBM Z, or Arm and LinuxONE, instructions concurrently while prioritizing the platform’s established performance, security, encryption, and availability characteristics. IBM Z and LinuxONE platforms are capable of scaling to hundreds of cores and tens of terabytes of memory. ↫ IBM press release IBM is still doing some amazing chip architecture design. ServeTheHome has more details of how this works: A key choice here is that IBM implemented AArch64 in full hardware rather than through translation. This design uses a little-endian Arm implementation alongside big-endian z/Architecture, with AArch64 v9.3, SVE and SVE2 support, and 2,792 implemented AArch64 instructions. IBM also claims Arm SystemReady compliance, which matters for how much off-the-shelf Arm software this core can absorb. This is absolutely crazy technology. Arm software sees a native Arm processor. Arm runs unmodified, out-of-the-box, and onto a standard Arm platform. IBM said the 2792 AArch64 instructions are more than twice the Z instructions. IBM made a funny quip about “reduced” in RISC. ↫ Patrick Kennedy at ServeTheHome This is bonkers technology. We can only dream of this ever serving a home.

The true prevalence of the neurodegenerative disease—which is associated with repeated head injuries—among the deceased football players might be much higher. CTE affects other athletes too, including hockey players, soccer players and wrestlers

NVIDIA’s Gamescom announcements are revealing what’s next for GeForce NOW, with new ways to play, more supported devices and platforms, and even more big PC games headed to the cloud. New NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 technology controls give members more ways to fine-tune gameplay, while expanded support for new Steam devices, GOG single sign-on, Firefox browser […]

NVIDIA Vice President of Hyperscale and HPC Ian Buck hand-delivers Vera CPU systems across the AI ecosystem as Vera begins shipping at scale.

It’s always a special day on OSNews when Haiku has a new release. While OSNews was founded in 1997, it wasn’t until 2001, when Eugenia took over and relaunched the site, that we really got going. Eugenia came from BeNews, a popular BeOS news website, which shut down in the wake of Be, Inc’s infamous “focus shift” away from BeOS as a general purpose desktop operating system. BeOS continues to have a special place on OSNews ever since. Today marks the release of Haiku R1/beta6, the first official Haiku release in two years. As such, this new beta covers a monumental amount of progress since beta5, progress I’ve reported on diligently. The highlights of this new beta include a port of Firefox (including branding) and many of its forks, much improve support for Qemu, a new memory allocated largely based on the one from OpenBSD, and improved support for various filesystems. Of course, there’s a massive list of performance improvements, memory management changes, as well as a truly massive number of new application ports. It’s important to note, as I usually do, that while these Haiku beta releases serve as patches of calm in rough seas, Haiku is generally stable and capable enough that using the project’s nightly releases is usually a totally acceptable way of installing and running the operating system. If you’re not comfortable running nightly releases, however, and haven’t tried Haiku since the previous beta, you’re in for a massive overall improvement. Everybody loves Haiku.

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 27 –… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Colorful Aurora over […]

Back-to-back winter storms in August 2026 brought snowfall to northern Chile, from the Andes to near the Pacific coast.

The next wave of AI is placing new demands on infrastructure.  As AI agents and trillion-parameter workloads become mainstream, the performance of AI infrastructure depends not only on compute, but on how compute, memory, storage, networking and software are designed together as a unified system. To help hyperscalers and AI innovators build the next generation […]

NASA’s Earth-observing satellite missions track dozens of features of a changing planet — aerosols, sea levels, land cover, cloud cover — over years and decades. Sustaining that record for the scientific and operational communities who depend on it requires more than engineering talent. It requires planning for an uncertain future: anticipating where a mission delay […]

Twenty-six works spanning many centuries and regions will form the September exhibition titled "From the Louvre: Masterpieces of Islamic Art"

During the peak, 96 percent of the moon will be within the darkest part of our planet's shadow. The orb will take on an eerie glow because of how sunlight gets filtered through Earth's atmosphere

Traces of pine tar and beeswax preserved on the vessel reveal the painstaking techniques shipbuilders millennia ago used to protect their ships from the briny deep

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, encapsulated in its payload fairing, travels from the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility to the SpaceX hangar at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026, ahead of mating to a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Roman’s science instruments are designed to help researchers understand dark […]

Now in its 62nd year, the famed competition has released a sneak peek of the entries from this contest ahead of announcing the winners in October

Recently discovered on Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands, the pages include Bible passages, poems, plays and other texts. They were repurposed as book bindings during the 16th and 17th centuries

During the Aug. 12 total solar eclipse over Europe, scientists aimed to study a long-standing mystery: why the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, is far hotter than its visible surface. Capturing the data they needed meant being in exactly the right place at the right time.  Pilots from NASA’s Johnson Space Center flew the WB-57F high altitude research aircraft from Ellington Field in Houston to Iceland, their […]

Despite its role in one of the most famous games in soccer history, the historic piece of sports memorabilia fell short of its $10 million pre-sale estimate

A study in mice found that a protein called saxiphilin acts like a sponge against a deadly toxin produced by algal blooms. The harmful agent, which accumulates in certain seafood, can cause a life-threatening illness called paralytic shellfish poisoning

To explore quantum phenomena, we must leave the familiar world and enter the abstract realm of Hilbert space.

The post In Hilbert Space, All Things Are Quantumly Possible first appeared on Quanta Magazine

NASA will provide coverage as two astronauts step outside the International Space Station on Tuesday, Sept. 1, to replace a spacecraft navigational aid and complete several maintenance tasks in support of space station operations. Watch live coverage beginning at 7 a.m. EDT. The spacewalk is expected to start at approximately 8:30 a.m. and last about […]

Researchers captured an unprecedented image of the stellar recycling process while calibrating a Chile-based instrument called MOTHRA, which is expected to be complete by the end of 2026

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story, originally published in December, was revised Aug. 26, 2026 with an update on a new phase of testing, including video from a recent test run and new images. To help NASA and commercial partners better understand the science of lunar landings, specifically the hazards that may occur when a lander’s engine […]

At 17, Jeret Howard raised his right hand to serve his country as a United States Army combat medic in Iraq. This past summer, he raised his right hand again at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Hired as a civil servant under the agency’s workforce directive to restore core competencies by […]

As drought exposes stretches of riverbed in central Europe, markers carved by past generations to record low water levels are emerging once again

In 2009, medical student Shebani Sethi watched a patient in a weight loss program make a remarkable recovery. The dietary intervention she underwent alleviated her schizophrenia symptoms, something the woman had tried – and failed – to treat with medication for years. That experience sent Shebani down a medical path that would lead her to treating mental health in a radically different way. Today host Emily Kwong talks to Shebani about the emerging field of metabolic psychiatry and how ketogenic metabolic therapy may treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression.

Read Shebani’s article on metabolic psychiatry here .

Interested in more lifestyle science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 26 – JWST… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. JWST Images […]

NASA’s Deep Space Network facility in California is marking the addition of a brand new 34-meter-wide (114-foot-wide) radio frequency antenna to the agency’s deep space communications and navigation system. The network uses giant dish antennas located at three global facilities to support more than 40 spacecraft exploring the solar system and interstellar space. The new […]

Right on schedule – as always – there’s a new Genode OS Framework release, version 26.08. The highlights of Genode 26.08 are VirtualBox 7, improved PC performance of our custom microkernel, the new ability to transparently reconfigure virtual file systems, revised timing and timeout handling, and a Linux 6.18.19 device-driver environment for ARM. Furthermore, the first version of a Goa-based SDK has become natively available for Sculpt OS. ↫ Release announcement on the Genode website The release announcement linked above is a mere quick overview; if you want all the possible details you could want, the release notes got you covered.

NASA will announce the winners of the final phase of its LunaRecycle Challenge on Friday, Aug. 28, at The University of Alabama (UA) Lee Styslinger College of Engineering in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Launched in 2024, the challenge incentivizes the invention of new recycling systems that could support non-metabolic waste management efforts for future lunar missions. Media […]

Set to launch on Sunday, Aug. 30, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will empower astronomers to explore vast regions of the cosmos and settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, dark matter, planets outside our solar system, and the formation and growth of galaxies over cosmic time. Key contributions to Roman’s mission […]

The inaugural competition puts eight yellow-bellied marmots head-to-head while shining a light on the science behind their seasonal weight gain and survival at high elevations

NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley invites media to learn more about NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled to launch Sunday, Aug. 30, 2026, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Roman telescope will provide a wide, detailed view of the universe, helping scientists study dark energy, exoplanets, and cosmic structures. […]

The 7.5-foot-tall bronze artwork stands in the heart of historic New Bedford, the 19th-century whaling port that inspired the author's famous 1851 novel

Pandora, NASA’s newest exoplanet mission and the first satellite to launch through the agency’s Astrophysics Pioneers program, is now making unique observations of worlds beyond our solar system and the stars they orbit. The mission will determine the atmospheric make-up of at least 20 exoplanets, including the presence of hazes, clouds, and water. “Pandora’s data […]

Built with fitted stone and a clay-like material that may have helped retain liquid, the unusual structure has left researchers searching for an explanation

What we learned while building black-box and white-box detectors for AI deception during Aletheia's Quest.

Galaxies are like cosmic gems, each with characteristics including size and shape that make them distinct. A new gallery released today from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes displays a collection of galactic images that showcase this variety. Astronomers put galaxies into three main categories: spirals like our own Milky Way with arms emanating […]

Scientists have long known that some small mammals reduce their brain size during cold months and regrow them in the spring. Long-clawed shrews from Hokkaido, Japan, seem to follow that pattern—while their noses surprisingly do the opposite

NVIDIA is bringing the next wave of RTX gaming to the Gamescom conference running this week in Cologne, Germany, with support for new games, anti-cheat technologies and increased visual quality.  Electronic Arts, Embark and Ubisoft are among the latest game publishers and developers bringing their blockbuster titles to NVIDIA RTX Spark ahead of its launch […]

From left, Expedition 75 flight engineers Anil Menon of NASA (partially obscured and wearing the spacesuit with a red stripe on the legs) and Sophie Adenot of ESA (European Space Agency) work together during a six‑hour and 23‑minute spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Aug. 18, 2026. The pair will finish installing a high-speed […]

A new study offers clues about how the Luoyue people created rock paintings in what’s now southern China. The murals have somehow been durable enough to withstand rain, heat, wind and humidity for centuries

Fully autonomous space mission operations require the ability to detect faults and compensate for them without human intervention. To address this challenge and provide model-based support for system design and operations, it is important to connect fault management (FM) and model-based systems engineering (MBSE). This approach was successfully demonstrated with the model-based generation of a […]

The era of AI-generated viruses is here. Some scientists are using AI to design viruses that can attack bacteria. The hope is that these tailor-made viruses can fight drug-resistant bacterial infections in people. And longer-term, Brian Hie, the Stanford researcher spearheading this project, hopes that AI can help create more complicated biological systems to treat formidable diseases. But some experts warn that placed in the wrong hands, this technology could create the next pandemic.

Interested in more AI-related research? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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Coverage plans are ready for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope prelaunch and launch activities. Roman is NASA’s next-generation observatory designed to explore some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, including dark energy. NASA and SpaceX are targeting Roman’s liftoff for no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday, Aug. 30, aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket […]

Motif is great, I love how it looks and feels, and I want it to be actively maintained. I want a healthy ecosystem of Motif applications and even window managers and desktop environments, so I can run a real Motif environment. Sadly, while Motif has been open source for a while, the project itself stalled years ago, with little to no activity from anyone involved. That may be changing, as a number of developers decided to take matters into their own hands last year. This fork of Motif was born of a desire to keep Motif (and other X11 technologies) alive and well. The original upstream Sourceforge project hasn’t had any activity in over two years, none of the project admins have been active for at least that amount of time, the official bug tracker has disappeared into the void; and the user forum was closed way back in 2017. Sadly, it appears that the original upstream has abandoned the project. I’ve incorporated some fixes from upstream that have laid dormant for years, a few others from Gentoo, and made a few improvements of my own. I intend to maintain this fork, and in doing so advocate for the continued use of the user interface toolkit that defined an era, and influenced many of the user interfaces that came after it. ↫ Tim Hentenaar at the Motif fork’s GitHub page Some of the people involved are people I know online, so I have a bit of faith in this fork being able to stand the test of time, but of course, managing a complex project like this is hard, so who knows how long the enthusiasm remains. Still, this fork has seen five releases since its inception a little over a year ago, which seems promising. It may seem weird for some to have a love for Motif, but I’m the kind of person who installs weird, outdated corporate and industrial software I don’t understand on my HP c8000 dual PA-RISC workstation running HP-UX just to enjoy the Motif interfaces they sometimes ship. We all have our quirks. From my experiences talking to people online, I know there’s actually a rather solid number of people like me, and I hope that at some point the developers in this group can gain enough critical mass to build something like a basic Linux distribution or desktop environment using the disparate, actively-maintained Motif projects out there that yes, still exist. It’s a long shot, but in today’s computing landscape, where more and more people feel uncomfortable with “modern” software, I really feel like there’s a niche for something like this to exist. A really small niche, surely, but a niche all the same.

The colorful nasturtiums at the artist's house and gardens have been hit particularly hard this summer as France grapples with a record 52 heatwave days

AROS, the open source Amiga OS-compatible operating system, now has images available for the Raspberry Pi 3 (although some people state it also works on the Pi 4), in both 32bit and 64bit versions. According to the AROS team, they are quite stable, but not yet complete, so do know what you’re getting into. Dan Wood posted a YouTube video about these new images, providing much more insight into how well they work if you want more insight into how well they work. The images are, of course, the basic AROS operating system, so expect a rather barebones experience. If you’re used to some of the AROS distributions for x86, which come loaded with software and customisations, these images will feel quite bare to you. It’s going to take some time to port over all of these applications and customisations to the ARM version of AROS, but if and once that happens, I expect more complete images to appear as well. Great news for AROS and the Amiga community in general.

Description NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Mastcam-Z camera to capture the silhouette of Phobos, one of the two Martian moons, as it crossed in front of the Sun on Aug. 12, 2026, the 1,948th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.  The animation has been tinted to simulate what a human would see if […]

The museum opened in the spring and was founded by two aquarium experts who fled the Russia-Ukraine war

At the center of our solar system, the Sun influences every planet that orbits it. In two recent NASA-funded studies, scientists uncovered how ancient events in the Sun’s history may have helped create Earth’s unique climate and driven previously unexplained climatic shifts.   In new research, scientists at NASA’s SHIELD (Solar Wind with Hydrogen Ion charge Exchange and Large-Scale Dynamics) center — one of […]

NASA astronaut and Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman is seen in the two-seat IndyCar as he prepares for driver Conor Daly to take him on a lap ahead of the start of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, Sunday, Aug. 23, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

The pioneering treatment makes it easier for traditional chemotherapy drugs to penetrate cancer cells. After the procedure, the reptile, named Jodie Foster, made a speedy recovery

Description This roof-mounted air sensor in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, is one of 10 used by NASA’s Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) to study the city’s air quality. MAIA’s air sensors provide a detailed look at particulate matter that is 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter, also known as PM2.5, one of the world’s deadliest forms […]

Description This map of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, shows the locations of 10 air sensors that NASA’s Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) mission is using to provide one of the most detailed looks ever at the city’s air pollution. Over the course of three years, these sensors measured particulate matter that is 2.5 micrometers or less […]

Animal skeletons, Neolithic tools and pop culture memorabilia are among the dozens of objects to be displayed in the reopened “Nature and Us” exhibition

When researchers went looking for information about the legendary Magdalena Flood, they were surprised to discover that it was just one of many extreme weather events that ravaged the region in the early 1340s

The findings represent the first genomes, or complete genetic instruction books, designed entirely with generative A.I. The resulting viruses attack only bacteria, which could one day help overcome the problem of antibiotic-resistant microbes

Ah, Japan’s TRON project – every few years someone discovers it anew and it bubbles back up the surface, and deservedly so, as it’s an incredibly interesting operating system project that, like so many others, deserved a better fate. There’s a version of computing history where the desktop OS that won wasn’t Windows. Not because the alternative was Unix-based or because Apple pulled off something different, but because an operating system designed at the University of Tokyo in 1984 was ambitious enough to try to replace the file system with a hypermedia document model, run on a custom Japanese CPU architecture, and encode 1.5 million characters, only to have a US trade report single it out as an unfair trade barrier in 1989. That project was TRON (The Real-time Operating system Nucleus), a real, government-backed Japanese computing initiative whose desktop variant, BTRON, was named in a US trade barrier report and effectively killed before it could reach schools nationwide. Meanwhile, its embedded counterpart, ITRON, quietly became one of the most deployed operating systems in history. TRON’s history has since attracted some genuinely wild conspiracy theories, including one claiming that Japan Airlines Flight 123 was deliberately crashed in order to target the TRON developers on board, despite there being no evidence that any TRON developers were even on the flight. But the strangest part of the story isn’t even a conspiracy theory: BTRON’s hypermedia desktop was decades ahead of what the market could support, and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son may have helped sink it from the inside. ↫ Adam Conway at XDA The most interesting part of TRON for me was the different ways it treated files and documents compared to other operating systems. Instead of focusing on applications and files as the core interaction points for users, it focused on the document. While most operating systems associate specific files with specific applications, TRON associated individual components of documents with individual handlers. If you want to edit a Word document today, you open Word and do all your editing work inside Word, whether you’re editing blocks of text or an image, or you open entirely different applications when Word’s capabilities for a certain component in a document are too limited. In TRON, you’d open a document, and only once you wanted to edit specific components did it “open” an “application” to perform the editing, without actually leaving the document in question. Want to edit an image inside your document? In most operating systems, you’d have to open a separate image editor, load the relevant image file into it, make your edits, save the image file, and then paste said edited image file back into your document. There’s a considerable amount of overhead here that shouldn’t really exist; a computer is more than smart enough to open up just the editing controls from a different application if need be. In our current paradigm, applications often “solve” this by adding ever more features and controls and tools to cover every possible object or component you might have to deal with, but that just makes applications more complex, more bloated, and more difficult to use. TRON’s approach has been tried in a variety of times and places, but it never caught on. My personal pet theory is that the application-first model is far better at wealth extraction and concentration than TRON’s model, and as such, that’s what we ended up with. If a user’s document and all of its constituent parts are tied to and wrapped up into a single application from a single vendor, it’s much easier to control said user and extract wealth from them than when that user can just pick and choose whatever handler they want to use for whatever object they happen to run into in a document, without having to open tons of different applications and move, copy, and paste stuff all the time. In fact, this is also why consistency in user interface design is now all but dead; application developers and vendors use their own weird, non-standard, custom user interfaces for branding purposes. Sticking to a platform’s standards and conventions makes it harder to stand out and put your “brand” in people’s faces. But I digress. Regardless, I’m not sure if all the stories about the US trying to bury TRON have any real value to them, as even the article itself notes (undoing its own clickbaity headline) that the project already seemed to be in dire straights even before it got a buried mention in some trade document. On top of that, ITRON, the embedded TRON variant, survived and thrives to this very day, powering untold numbers of devices. It seems to have done quite well for itself, supposed US government intervention or no. This article by Steven J. Searle also takes a look at the workstation-focused variant of TRON.

To generate intelligence at scale, AI factories run continuously, and their economics are defined by delivered output: tokens per second, tokens per watt, cost per token, utilization and uptime.  That requires AI infrastructure designed and built as a full factory, not a collection of individual accelerators. Hyperscalers and AI-native companies building custom XPUs must consider […]

The next era of AI inference won’t be defined by a single breakthrough chip, network or system. It’ll be defined by how every layer of the AI factory works together. That’s why NVIDIA is extending Vera Rubin NVL72 with fast token generation for agentic systems. Announced today, the NVIDIA Vera Rubin rack-scale system NVIDIA Groq […]

According to OpenRouter data, agentic AI workloads consume 15x more tokens than a simple chat request. Why?  Consider what happens when an AI agent researches a company for an investment decision. The agent queries financial databases, searches news and filings, invokes a sub-agent to run peer comparisons and model valuations, then synthesizes everything into a […]

An updated view of categorization reflects the modern understanding that the nervous system is more of a prediction engine than a filing cabinet.

The post A New Framework for How the Brain Compresses Our Noisy World first appeared on Quanta Magazine

So that is the whole pipeline exercised end-to-end. GrandSlam authenticates the Apple Account and obtains the IDS delegate. authenticateDS and id-register turn the Linux process into a registered Apple messaging identity. The Friends sequence attaches that identity to the existing accepted relationship. A missing-key SubscribeAndFetch makes the sharing device deliver its current P-224 key over APNs/IDS, inside a sender-verified P-256 NGM envelope. A second SearchParty fetch returns the encrypted report, and the P-224 key opens it locally. So yeah, in one sentence: authenticate to Apple’s private services, register the Linux machine as an IDS client, receive the existing Find My share key, and use it to fetch and decrypt a consented friend’s latest location. ↫ Zerotistic I wonder if it would be possible to build a proper third-party client for Apple’s Find My network like this, or if it would be trivial for the company to block it. I’m fairly sure quite a few people would love to be able to keep using Find My when moving away from Apple’s operating systems.

Ever wish you could have been part of the Lewis and Clark expedition? Us too. The Corps of Discovery came across scores of plants and animals that were new to Western science: Grizzly bears, ponderosa pines, a “barking squirrel” that William Clark would later call the prairie dog. A modern effort is underway to see how much the country’s wildlife has changed in the 220-some years since their journey. Host Nate Rott tags along with some scientists re-surveying a part of the expedition’s route in western Montana. And he wishes he was in better shape.

Interested in more science in the news? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 24 – Comet… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Comet 220P […]

The drying of the massive lake exposed playas that became the setting for feats of engineering and technological ingenuity, as well as epic tales of exploration and desperation.

By Allison Dries-Padilla, Missions Operations Specialist at Malin Space Science Systems Earth planning date: Friday, Aug. 14, 2026 This week of Curiosity Mars rover operations takes us back to our “regularly scheduled programming.” After taking a slight detour to investigate the “erosional surface” we are back on course to ascend Mount Sharp. As we transition […]

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 22… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Mostly Perseids Explanation: Recorded […]

On Aug. 12, a total solar eclipse darkened skies over Greenland, Iceland, and Spain. As the Moon covered the Sun, it briefly revealed the Sun’s wispy outer atmosphere — the corona — to those in the path of totality who were lucky enough to have clear skies. NASA researchers and photographers were along the eclipse […]

The results, announced this week by Moderna and Merck, could pave the way for a new generation of treatments tailored to individual tumors

Minutes after it collided with a 10,000-ton cruiser, the HMS "Tiger" sank to the bottom of the English Channel. Divers and historians have spent the past four years searching for the Royal Navy vessel

For more information, contact Mark K. Leader, Glenn Research Center, mark.leader@nasa.gov Download the PDF version NASA’s Chemical Equilibrium with Applications (CEA) code is a foundational tool for propulsion system analysis. It provides equilibrium chemistry, rocket performance, shock, and detonation calculations used across NASA and the broader aerospace community. NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) Activity […]

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured this Aug. 6, 2026, infrared image of part of the Carina Nebula, a star-forming region also home to the Cosmic Cliffs. This feature, called the “Treasure Chest,” is an object known as a cometary globule. A cometary globule is an isolated cloud of gas and dust with a dense, […]

President Donald J. Trump will award each of NASA’s Artemis II crew members the Congressional Space Medal of Honor at 11 a.m. EDT on Friday, Aug. 28, during a ceremony at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, […]

A recent study found that man’s best friend processes positive and negative human emotions differently and can distinguish between fearful faces and those showing sadness or anger

For the first time in 30 years, computer scientists have found a better way to allocate objects evenly between two groups.

The post ‘Huge Breakthrough’ in the Math of Imbalance first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The unusual-looking bobolink is what's called a bilateral gynandromorph. The bird behaved like a male, eventually wooing a mate and raising fledglings

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum acquired the drawing book, which has artwork attributed to Rombout Uylenburgh, a celebrated 17th-century Dutch painter whose legacy later fell into obscurity

You've heard of black holes. You've heard of stars. But have you heard of the newly discovered black hole stars that may explain multiple mysteries of the universe? We just did and we're honestly freaking out about it. Learn everything you need to know about it in this episode. Plus, hear some other cool stories fresh off the presses: Which exercise can help reduce your risk of dementia and how shrews shrink — and then regrow — parts of their body throughout the year.

Interested in hearing more reporting on space, scientific mysteries or other emerging science? We want to know! Email us what you'd like us to talk about at shortwave@npr.org !

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A series of heat waves in 2026 is breaking records and taking a toll in Europe.

SmallSat 2026 Join NASA in the Exhibit Hall (Booth # 635, 835, 641, and 940) for Storytelling by NASA experts. Full Agenda below. MONDAY, AUGUST 24, 9:00 – 10:00 AM WelcomeJose NunezBryceTech’s Smallsats by the Numbers: 2026Fletcher FranklinSupply Chain ObservationsBruce YostTechnology Shortfall Rudy de RoseeSPARCS Camera and Early Science ObservationsKaitlyn AshcroftJPL: SkyfallTim CanhamSWIFT LINK ReboostBo NaaszFlight […]

The commercial LINK spacecraft was supposed to give NASA's Swift observatory a boost, pushing it higher into orbit to extend its life. But after launch, LINK experienced several problems. Swift is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere and burn up by the end of this year

Some historians think the 230-foot-long artwork is missing its final panel, which may have once depicted William the Conqueror's coronation. As the tapestry goes on view in London, students will be drafting endings of their own

A jacket decorated with Artemis I and II mission patches, along with other NASA patches hangs on the back of a chair on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026, inside the Rocco A. Petrone Launch Control Center at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a terminal countdown simulation for the Artemis III mission. NASA’s Exploration Ground […]

The Arctic whales are the only known animals with straight tusks, and ones that consistently twist to the left. New research reveals that the inner layer twists to the right and that the opposing spirals provide strength and help the tusks grow straight

No written records mention a fight in this specific part of Vienna at the time of the men's deaths. But the brutal nature of their injuries, particularly to the pelvis area, indicates that these individuals died on the battlefield

NASA has selected four university teams to help the agency transform the future of aviation through projects ranging from high-supersonic propulsion systems to low-noise routes for small aircraft flying through cities. The agency made awards through its University Leadership Initiative, which offers  student teams the opportunity to contribute to real-world flight research that advances NASA’s goals in aeronautics. […]

The bones were discovered on the Dingle Peninsula more than 30 years ago, but scientists recently decided to take another look at them, this time using modern techniques

NASA astronaut L. Gordon Cooper, Jr. took 29 color photographs of the Earth with a 70mm camera as he orbited our planet during the Mercury-Atlas 9 mission in May 1963. Cooper’s view from the window of his Faith 7 spacecraft was spectacular, and he reported that he could see vehicles motoring on dirt roads, smoke-belching trains, […]

NASA Earth science data is supporting machine-learning forecasts that inform decisions about water, power, and public safety in Washington state.

Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell discusses why artificial intelligence doesn’t “think” or “reason” like humans, and how we can create better methods for measuring machine cognition.

The post Are We Thinking Correctly About AI Intelligence? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Under the right conditions—wet and oxygen-deprived—the same chemical reactions that cause tissue to break down can instead have the opposite effect, according to a new study

It’s a new way into the cloud.  GeForce NOW welcomes Firefox support to the cloud, opening up another way to jump into high-performance PC gaming straight from the browser, starting today. Whether on a school laptop or everyday PC, it’s now even easier to play supported PC games without downloading a dedicated app. Plus, discover […]

APODScienceAPODAPOD: 2026 August 20 – The…Today’s APODArchiveSubmissionsIndexSearchCalendarRSSEducationAboutDiscuss  APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. The Elephant’s Trunk in Cepheus Explanation: Like an illustration in a galactic Just So Story, the […]

A large iceberg, observed in summer 2026, had drifted more than 1,000 kilometers south from the northeastern Greenland bay where it likely originated.

When I wrote about using Windows 11 for a month as part of the ongoing OSNews fundraiser (keep donating to get me to do the same for macOS!), one of the things I mentioned was that “the modern desktop context menu has its own classic Win32 context menu”. This is, in fact, a long-standing complaint I’ve repeatedly used as the perfect example of just how chaotic and low-quality Windows has become. Thankfully, and naturally I fully attribute this to my repeated complaints (*), Microsoft has been working on a brand new, faster, configurable context menu, and Neowin actually reviewed it. If you ask me, this revamped context menu addresses just about the biggest problem users had with the one in Windows 11, and that is the need to click through more buttons than necessary to do simple things like renaming a file or opening its properties. That problem is now basically gone. I have no issues with the new design. It looks modern, it feels more consistent with the rest of Windows, and even though all the new sections can still make it look a little busy, you now have the option to make it as simple or as button-packed as you want. That should cover most use cases and preferences well. I’d even say that when the new context menu becomes available to everyone, my guide on how to bring back the classic context menu might become obsolete. ↫ Ivan Jenic at Neowin The biggest reason I’m linking to this is not because I care about whatever monster of a context menu Windows users are having to deal with. No, I’m only linking to this because I never in my life imagined I’d be linking to a review of a context menu. I mean, at least it’s not the chess application icon. That would be embarrassing. I get a perverse sense of joy out of this.

Researchers thought that insects might not live there because their respiratory systems would implode from water pressure. But certain fly larvae in East Africa make daily trips toward the bottom of Lake Malawi with the help of strong air sacs that contain a stretchy protein

The Orbital Clarity Challenge — the sixth in the NASA TechLeap Prize series — is a collaborative effort between NASA’s Heliophysics Division, Flight Opportunities program, and Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation. The Heliophysics Division studies space weather, including how it heats and expands Earth’s outer atmosphere during intense solar activity, creating orbital drag through atmospheric density changes. The […]

Due to an ongoing commercial spacecraft attitude control issue, NASA and Katalyst Space announced Wednesday the LINK spacecraft will not capture or boost an agency satellite to a higher altitude to extend its science mission as planned. However, LINK still will attempt to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to […]

Lee esta historia en español aquí. Some of Earth’s microbes likely to hitch a ride to space with human explorers could survive in the shaded nooks and crannies of the Moon’s South Pole region, NASA scientists say.  Published on Aug. 19, 2026, in Science Advances, these findings highlight a need to better understand microbial persistence […]

The steel and concrete monument honoring the mother of Jesus is located in Konotopie, a rural village about 100 miles from Warsaw

This artist’s concept, released on Aug. 17, 2026, depicts a collision between our Milky Way galaxy and a dwarf galaxy known as LKH that happened about 12 billion years ago. A study of data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, recently published in the journal Nature Astronomy, shows definitive evidence of a dwarf galaxy merging with the young […]

Scientists discovered a strange feature in certain octopuses’ ribosomal RNA, molecules that create a 3D scaffold for cellular protein factories. It was found only in shallow-water creatures that have expanded nervous systems and can do complex behaviors

NASA has awarded approximately $10.5 million to seven institutions to help strengthen and streamline state-based pathways for students into skilled technical jobs in the aerospace industry. The awards were made through the new NASA Aerospace Skilled Technical Workforce Hubs initiative, or NASA State Hubs. This investment in state ecosystems is designed to accelerate the development […]

No one yet knows which technology will power the quantum computers of the future, but the race to create them has already produced some of science’s most intricate machinery.

The post Building a Quantum Computer, One Fragile Qubit at a Time first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Extremely wet conditions are known to help spread mosquito-borne diseases like yellow fever. But based on computer simulations, researchers suspect that a severe drought may have contributed to the South American country’s recent deadly epidemic

What does a mechanic do? Machines and engines are all around us. They power everything from cars and boats to airplanes and even rockets. Mechanics are experts who know how machinery works, especially engines, and how to fix them. When you think of a mechanic, you might picture someone working on cars. But mechanics can […]

The papyrus fragment contains three lines that don't appear in standard modern-day translations of Homer's epic poem

If you’re a guy – or even just friends with a guy – and on the Internet, you may have noticed that testosterone discourse is everywhere. There’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announcing testosterone screenings for soldiers, Joe Rogan discussing hormone therapy, and influencers discussing high- and low-T levels. Those levels affect more than just sex. They also affect metabolism, bone health, muscle mass, red blood cell production and brain function. NPR science reporter Will Stone took a deep dive into it all: What deficiency looks like in men, what doctors recommend and what the research says about who actually needs testosterone replacement therapy.

Interested in hearing more reporting on popular science topics? Email us what you’d like us to cover at shortwave@npr.org .

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Photographers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston have documented some of the most defining moments in human spaceflight.  From astronaut training and engineering tests to mission control operations and milestone celebrations, their images preserve the history of exploration while capturing the people and teams behind the missions shaping the next era.   Meet the photographers behind the lens and explore the […]

APODScienceAPODAPOD: 2026 August 19 – The…Today’s APODArchiveSubmissionsIndexSearchCalendarRSSEducationAboutDiscuss  APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports […]

This social behavior might reveal the evolutionary roots of traits that underlie pet-keeping in humans, scientists say, from caregiving to tolerance and curiosity. But it's not the same as a person keeping a cat or a dog

The Food and Drug Administration just greenlit a medication called Orzeyful for the treatment of narcolepsy type 1 in adults. The condition is caused by the loss of brain cells that produce orexin, a chemical important for regulating the sleep-wake cycle

Between Aug. 11 and 12, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured a series of images of a new crater on the Moon. The crater formed on Aug. 5, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage impacted the surface following its January 2025 launch of the Firefly Blue Ghost 1 mission. To capture imagery of the […]

NASA’s next Gateways to Blue Skies competition invites collegiate teams to imagine innovative new ways aircraft could inspect land-based infrastructure, such as bridges and tunnels, to improve safety, reliability, and costs by 2035 or sooner. Infrastructure is the foundation of the nation’s strong economy, global competitiveness, and daily quality of life. When that infrastructure is […]

Arborists are working to preserve the 45-foot-tall live oak in South Carolina's Eutaw Springs Battlefield Park. The historic tree suffered damage during a lightning strike 50 years ago

The artworks by Cézanne, Renoir and Matisse disappeared in a three-minute heist earlier this year. Now, police have arrested five suspects in connection with the burglary in northern Italy

NASA’s Boeing 777 shows off a new paint job in this Aug. 11, 2026, photo. The B777 was acquired to replace and extend the capabilities of the NASA DC-8, which was retired in 2024. The B777, set to begin operations from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia in 2027, will be a unique flying […]

Fish surveys in the 1960s detected what experts thought was a dead coral reef barrier off the country of Benin. Decades later, researchers set off in small fishing boats to investigate it using sonar mapping, underwater drone surveys and stationary video recorders

High blood pressure, diabetes and smoking are three major modifiable risk factors of dementia. New research tracked more than 12,000 participants to quantify how many years of healthy cognitive function you can gain by evading some or all of them during middle age

Many of NASA’s most important aerospace breakthroughs that began in the laboratory were ultimately proven in the sky. For decades, experts at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland conducted flight tests — piloting aircraft into targeted environments such as icing clouds and carefully defined atmospheric routes. This approach allowed them to collect measurements directly in flight, providing critical data […]

A great and concise history of the run-up to MS-DOS 2.0. Yet, there was a nagging feeling that a single-tasking CP/M clone was inadequate for the new generation of personal computers. Digital Research released multi-user, multitasking MP/M-86 in September 1981 and announced the single‑user multitasking Concurrent CP/M in early 1982. In response, Microsoft came up with a plan for tiered approach to its operating systems: single-user/single-tasking MS-DOS at the bottom; multi-user/multitasking XENIX at the top; and in the middle, something called XEDOS: a single-user version of XENIX. This “pyramid of upward-compatible operating systems” was announced in a Byte Magazine editorial in January 1982. ↫ Nemanja Trifunovic I’ve always found this tiered approach fascinating, and the world surely would’ve looked quite different had Microsoft been able to make it work. I doubt Windows NT would ever have existed, and most of the world would probably be running a XENIX-based Windows today (all else being equal, which is of course unlikely and silly). Regardless, MS-DOS 2.0 contained a few UNIX-like utilities to deal with its brand new support for directory trees and other new features, and even had a /dev directory.

If you thought pervert glasses weren’t bad enough, Apple is taking it up a notch by adding cameras to its AirPods. Apple is working on camera-equipped AirPods that appear to be nearly ready to launch, based on a video MacRumors found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate. In a short demo, a man holds a book up so the camera in the AirPods can see the title. “With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later,” says the voiceover text. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors AirPods are tiny. I’ve seen people use them at the gym. I’ve seen them on playgrounds. I’ve seen them around swimming pools. People use them at the beach. They’re used at schools. In locker rooms. Tiny cameras in tiny AirPods that can photograph anything in front of the user are a pervert’s wet dream. Abusers are going to love this. Why wear bulky glasses anyone can see and try to demand you take off, when you can wear tiny AirPods that have already been fully normalised in society? Was there not a single woman or parent on the team that made this? All over the United States, people are destroying Flock surveillance cameras. More and more communities are rising up and demanding these things removed from their streets and neighbourhoods. The awareness of just how pervasive mass government surveillance has become is growing, and Silicon Valley’s complicity is not exactly a secret. And in this climate of rapidly growing concern and anger, Apple is going to add tiny cameras to its tiny AirPods. Was there not a single person of colour or protester on the team that made this? How detached from reality do you have to be to greenlight something like this? Does anyone – regardless of skin colour, gender, or political leaning – want even more cameras around them?

I was around when Quake was launched, but I was entirely unaware of this story. By June 1996, after three years of hard work, id Software had completed their next title, Quake. As for their previous title, they were going to release both a shareware version and a full version of their game. Since it used a mere 22 MiB of storage, people at id Software had the idea of leveraging the remaining capacity of a CD-ROM. Why not include encrypted versions of the full id catalogue of games? Not only this would cut out the middlemen, it would give instant access to gamers with a simple phone call and a credit card. The concept was implemented. The CD was announced on July 3, 1996 and released on August 30th. The hacker group GNOMON released Quakecrk.zip only 39 days later. The archive contained QCRACK.EXE, a tool allowing to decrypt every single game on the CD-ROM. ↫ Fabien Sanglard The system id employed turned out to be incredibly primitive and simple, and hackers found out quite easily that the system required no secret sauce from id at all – the code you’d get over the phone contained no secret, and all the validation program on the disk did was check to ensure the code received over the phone matched the code generated by the disk. No wonder it took them only 39 days to crack this.

Earlier this year, Natalie Vock made a splash with a set of patches to the Linux kernel that greatly increased performance on AMD GPUs with lower amounts of VRAM. With that work now accepted by upstream, Vock decided to turn their attention to another interesting problem: what if you run out of VRAM, and how can we improve performance when we do? Regardless, what I hope this blogpost can demonstrate is that even if you end up with some memory evicted to system RAM, the slowdown can be manageable. There’s measures that drivers (particularly, the kernel driver) can take to make overcommit work as fast as possible, and even applications can do their part in coordinating with the driver stack to mitigate the effects of their memory being evicted. With everything in place, VRAM overcommit isn’t really as big of a deal as one may think it is at first sight. ↫ Natalie Vock The work Vock has done has already been in SteamOS for a while, and they’re currently in the process of upstreaming it to the vanilla kernel as well. Since this is a complex set of patches and changes, this may take a while, and as such, they’ve prepared custom kernel and Mesa branches for adventurous users. Do note that these branches won’t be maintained much, and are entirely experimental, not as well-tested as the SteamOS kernel, and probably won’t yield the same performance improvements. Still, this is the kind of work that has a material impact for users. Not everyone has a 16GB monster GPU, especially not today with supply chains ravaged and ruined by slopmakers, so it’s great to see the Linux world working to improve performance for everyone, not just the wealthy few.

The Touch Bar arrived in 2016 seemingly already pre-doomed, on a generation of machines that had a “we’ve run out of ideas” smell all around them. The arrow keys were reshaped, the keyboard got a slimming down, and even the beloved MagSafe wasn’t, in fact, safe. All of these changes would prove unpopular and get reverted in time, and the axe would eventually come for the Touch Bar, too. With an enormous benefit of hindsight, a decade after its arrival, and on the (rumored) eve of fully multitouch MacBooks, I wanted to look critically at the Touch Bar in more detail. I put a spicy title above this post, and while I’m not sure I can answer it in the affirmative, I feel I got surprisingly close to that. ↫ Marcin Wichary I have never spent this much reading about and pondering a technology seemingly nobody liked and that I never really used. I still think there’s merit to the idea of screen on a keyboard, but only if the screens are integrated into the individual keys (as some products have tried over the years). Of course, this would also be astronomically expensive, delicate, and virtually impossible to repair, so I’m not sure something like that can be reasonably made at an affordable price.

What’s the dumbest thing Perry Samson says he’s ever done? Getting caught inside a tornado.  But when you’re an atmospheric scientist who studies supercell thunderstorms—with a special interest in the ones that cause tornadoes—that sort of thing is a bit of an occupational hazard. Lucky for Perry, he also made a split-second decision while in the tornado that may be the smartest thing he’s ever done. So today on the show: What we can learn from nature at its wildest.

Interested in more science behind the weather? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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APODScienceAPODAPOD: 2026 August 18 –…Today’s APODArchiveSubmissionsIndexSearchCalendarRSSEducationAboutDiscuss  APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Perseids from Perseus Explanation: This was a good year for the Perseids meteor shower. A key reason was the Moon was […]

The powerful storm delivered extreme rainfall and damaging winds to the state, passing the Island of Hawaiʻi as a category 1 hurricane.

By Susanne P. Schwenzer, Professor of Planetary Mineralogy at The Open University, UK Earth planning date: Friday, Aug. 7, 2026 This week was very special for the Curiosity team here on Earth as we celebrated the 14th landing anniversary. I still remember watching the buildup to the entry phase on “Eyes on the Solar System” […]

NASA has selected four companies to provide payload processing facilities under the Spacecraft Processing Operations Contract on‑ramp provision. The provision enables qualified providers to offer commercial payload processing services for agency missions launching from multiple locations where capabilities were not available at the time of the initial contract award. Contract awardees are: Through the contract, […]

The missing works include three panels from a 15th-century altarpiece by Antonello da Messina, as well as a two-sided devotional painting by the artist

A NASA-funded air pollution monitoring network has provided one of the most detailed long-term views yet of the role of black carbon, or soot produced by fires, diesel vehicles, and other combustion sources, in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. The detailed measurements show how pollution changes by time of day and season, including increases associated with […]

The galaxy’s light took about 12.5 billion years to reach the James Webb Space Telescope, meaning the instrument saw the black holes a little more than one billion years after the Big Bang. Two of the black holes seemed on track to merge, illustrating how the objects grow

FORCE is a world-class laboratory that uses high-pressure experimental equipment to recreate the extreme conditions found deep within Earth and other planetary bodies, enabling researchers to better understand how planets form, evolve, and behave under immense pressures.

A bone feature found in a mammal ancestor hints that the creature was relatively large as a newborn, more in line with the size of a creature birthed live than hatched from an egg. Still, it provides only indirect evidence

Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope combine to reveal a vibrant view of 30 Doradus, or the Tarantula Nebula, in this Aug. 11, 2026, image. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbor galaxy to the Milky Way about 160,000 light-years from Earth, the […]

From the 1800s to the early 2000s, physicists used the same theory to understand the behavior of fluids. Now, using a modern insight, they have redefined fluids from the bottom up.

The post Theory of Fluids Enters the 21st Century first appeared on Quanta Magazine

As NASA prepares to establish the Moon Base, advancing surface mobility will be key to helping crews and robotic systems travel farther across the lunar surface.  To help advance that capability, the Rock and Roll with NASA Challenge invited public innovators to design and build next-generation lunar rover wheels.  Five teams from 128 submissions and 49 countries advanced to the final phase of the […]

New Hubble data shows definitive evidence of a dwarf galaxy merging with the young Milky Way in the earliest phases of its evolution.

After discovering a large limestone bust on their San Francisco property in May, Greg Gatwood and Judy Gittelsohn have spent the past few months trying to unravel its backstory

Runners often experience conditions like shin splints, runner’s knee and plantar fasciitis, which causes pain in the bottom of the heel. But pushing a stroller’s handlebar seems to make you distribute your weight differently

Version 7.2 of the Linux kernel has been released. Significant features in this release include common attributes support in the bpf()vsystem call, cache-aware load balancing for the CPU scheduler, large-folio support in the Btrfs filesystem, further swap subsystem improvements, improvements to the Landlock security module, support for block devices with inline encryption hardware via the dm-inlinecrypt device-mapper target, and much more. ↫ corbet at LWN.net If you run Linux, you’ll get it sooner or later.

We talked about the latest release of Delphi a few days ago, and that brought me to Hans Otten’s website. This site is about my experience with the Wirth school of languages, based on the ideas and implementations of Prof Niklaus Wirth, Kenneth Bowles, Per Brinch Hansen, colleagues, and their students. And my experience with the various variants, from the P2 and P4 compilers originating in Zürich ETH, via UCSD Pascal P-System to the Borland compilers and Modula and Oberon systems. All applicable to small computers and device control. On this website you will find information on Pascal for small machines, like Wirth compilers, the UCSD Pascal system, many scanned books and other files on UCSD Pascal, Pascal on MSX and CP/M, Delphi programming on PC, Freepascal and Lazarus on Windows and Raspberry Pi, Oberon systems. Many sources of early Pascal compilers! And last but not least my Pascal-M system! ↫ Hans Otten If you’re into Pascal and its related languages and technologies, this is a treasure trove of information.

One of the most surprising aspects of the Nix language is that it is lazy, especially if you have never used a lazy language before. This laziness is what makes much of Nixpkgs possible, and its complexity. I decided to take that idea and make the attribute path a sequence of button presses in Super Mario Bros. 3. Each node in the tree is a frame of the game, and each child is a button press that produces a new frame. Game states are recursive by nature. ↫ Farid Zakaria This has zero practical applications, and yet, it’s absolutely genius. I love this.

AI factories are the defining infrastructure of the AI era — where compute transforms energy and data into intelligence that powers every business, industry and country. In the AI economy, compute is revenue. AI factories require a full stack of critical resources: advanced chips, packaging, memory and networking — as well as land, power and […]

This year, the Department of Defense announced that they’d entered agreements with eight artificial intelligence companies. It follows decades of popular media exploring the idea of artificial intelligence in war – from the computer threatening global thermonuclear conflict in the movie WarGames to the Skynet neural net in Terminator. In 2026, when Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are just a click away, the concept of AI-supported war is suddenly much closer to reality. So what does it really mean for militaries to use AI? And what are the potential implications if they succeed? Short Wave producer Hannah Chinn reports.

Listen to the whole Tech Camp series .

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 17 – A… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. A Golden […]

NASA aircraft are sampling smoke lofted high into the atmosphere by one of the most formidable cloud types in the sky—towering, smoke-infused pyrocumulonimbus.

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 16 – Milky… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Milky Way […]

Bird constellations abound in the night sky, including Cygnus, the majestic swan. Easy to find with its dazzling stars, it is one of the few constellations that look like its namesake, and it is full of treasures. Visible in the Northern Hemisphere all summer long, there’s so much to see and even some things that […]

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 15 –… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Bright Perseids from […]