The Antenna

Five centuries after children were sacrificed on volcanic peaks in the Andes, chemical clues preserved in their hair and fingernails show how the empire used intoxicating blends to soothe the children during their final months

Math has created some of humanity's oldest intellectual challenges. And AI is completely changing the game. This year AI solved one of math’s most difficult problems. Since then, OpenAI published hundreds of new math results. So is this the end for the people who’ve dedicated their careers to pushing forward math? We get into it with NPR science correspondent Geoff Brumfel, who weighs the risks and rewards of AI’s math takeover.

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 November 4 – 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 Not-So-Hidden […]

With hardly a cloud in sight, astronauts had a sweeping view of nighttime lights in the U.S. Midwest.

Standing a little more than 109 feet tall—roughly the height of an 11-story building—the colorful "La Catrina" figure in Mexico City broke the previous record of 92 feet set in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in 2023

A digital facial reconstruction of the man, whose head was severed after his death, will soon go on view in Edinburgh. It depicts an individual in his early 50s, with graying hair and brown eyes

The model, created by researchers at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, and other institutions, captures how the first stars and black holes gradually illuminated the universe after millions of years of darkness

Researchers studied DNA from more than 1,000 modern-day Polynesians and found that Native Hawaiians and Easter Islanders were most closely related. The findings help trace the epic settlement of the Polynesian islands while also revealing genetic vulnerabilities among their communities

Visitors can choose from dozens of designs pulled from Rembrandt's works, including lions, windmills and even his self-portraits. One participant was selected for a full-back tattoo of "The Descent from the Cross"

CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Joshua Kutryk is pictured during the Oct. 29, 2026, spacewalk. The International Space Station was soaring 267 miles above the South Atlantic Ocean at the time of this photograph. Kutryk and NASA astronaut Anil Menon installed a new roll-out solar array on the space station and performed some get-ahead work […]

Demand for advanced chips is rising. The processes to build them are getting more complex. And the margin for error is shrinking. For engineers, understanding how a process change will behave, how a material will interact with a new step, how a defect maps back to a root cause are critical, challenging steps in semiconductor […]

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory launched in 2004 and detected thousands of astrophysical phenomena, leading to some huge discoveries. Earlier this year, experts attempted a first-of-its-kind rescue mission to save the falling telescope, but it failed

For more information, contact Joel W. Sills, Langley Research Center, joel.w.sills@nasa.gov. Download PDF here Chip resistors are widely used in NASA projects, yet cases of alumina substrate cracking during environmental testing are rare. Two instances of thick-film chip resistor cracking were observed during thermal cycling after vibration, with fractures occurring across the short axis due […]

Students across the country will have the opportunity to connect directly with the International Space Station during a live, interactive in-flight call with NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Mark Rober STEM content creator and founder of ClassCrunchLabs Foundation. The event, hosted by NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement, celebrates National STEM Day by bringing real‑world science, […]

A new exhibition in Germany traces how the low-slung breed captured the imaginations of artistic heavyweights like Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and David Hockney. The museum even lets well-behaved pups tour the galleries

Check out NPR’s newest podcast, Machine Gods. It’s the official podcast of the singularity, meaning — the hypothetical future when machines will outpace our own intelligence…and our control. Whether you think that future is coming or not, hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are here to help you understand the people trying to build it… and how their technology works.

On this episode, listen to their exclusive interview with safety researchers who were fired by OpenAI.

Interested in more technology and AI news? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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Cities generate enormous amounts of data from cameras, sensors and operational systems, but turning it into useful action — for planning, maintenance and public services — remains a challenge. Physical and agentic AI offer new ways to close that gap, from digital twins for infrastructure planning to vision and service agents, while keeping local governments […]

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 November 3 –… 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 PanSTARRs and […]

Super Typhoon In-fa developed an unusually large eye, and the remnants of Typhoon Champi transitioned into an extratropical storm that targeted Alaska.

The operation marks a major milestone in efforts to address the risks posed by the sunken American military cargo ship, which still contains a massive cache of unexploded munitions

The Bangka slow loris is still close to extinction, but new research suggests it continues to survive on a tropical Indonesian island. Conservationists are calling for stronger habitat protections and a breeding program, among other measures

Sixty-five years ago, a bold vision took root in Houston: a NASA center dedicated to human spaceflight. Since its founding, NASA’s Johnson Space Center has helped lead the nation’s human spaceflight program, supporting missions from Project Mercury through Artemis. Today, Johnson serves as NASA’s Center of Excellence for Human Spaceflight, and its workforce is helping […]

For more information, contact Joel W. Sills, Langley Research Center, joel.w.sills@nasa.gov. Download the PDF version An instrumented hammer test does not require an idealized single half-sine waveform. When the complete force and response are measured accurately, crest ripples and separated contacts remain known inputs. Force shape changes excitation, but does not inherently invalidate the record. […]

A species of jumping spider appears to enter a deep sleep phase that resembles rapid eye movement (REM) in humans, the stage in which we typically dream

Enlightenment, the long-running desktop environment and associated libraries and frameworks, just released version 0.28.0. It brings initial support for NetBSD, support for Network Manager and a whole slew of related changes and fixes to make that possible, as well as native PipeWire support. There’s also a brand new clipboard manager, which brings with it modernisations and bug fixes for related UI elements. This release also reworks a ton code related to battery management, AC polling, and more, adding features like setting battery thresholds, ACPI power profile support, and so on. Of course, there’s also the long list of smaller fixes and changes. You can download the release and build it yourself, or wait for your distribution of BSD variant to package it.

A little while ago, we talked about 9front’s Good Enough File System being ported to OpenBSD. A lot of progress has been made on this front lately. Aside from fixing bugs and porting over fixes from the 9front side, there’s also been a ton more substantial changes. Some userspace tools have been done (you can now mkfs on openbsd!), but snapshot control hasn’t. I’m thinking we have a userspace ‘gefs’ program that lets you handle this, trying to keep the interface similar to the 9front ctl file. ↫ Ori Bernstein There’s still some major hurdles to overcome, some of which have already been addressed on the 9front side, but the progress is clear. Considering OpenBSD desperately needs a more modern file system, this is great news. A fun sidenote is that I’m actually posting this news item from OpenBSD.

New historical research shows how the city of Exeter hunted down accused witches while the rest of the country relented. Its prosecution of benign local sleuths shows how far the authorities were willing to go

The four-member Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) crew poses outside for the first time in more than a year following the end of their simulated Mars journey on Oct. 31, 2026. Crew members Matthew Montgomery (left), James Spicer (middle left), Ross Elder (middle right), and Ellen Ellis (right) spent more than a year […]

Meteor Showers, a Spacecraft Milestone, and a Supermoon Catch Taurid and Leonid meteors, spot Mars near Jupiter, celebrate Voyager 1’s light-day milestone, and watch November’s supermoon. Skywatching Highlights Transcript A month of meteor showers … a close pairing of Mars and Jupiter … and a supermoon! That’s What’s Up for November. November offers a buffet […]

Media accreditation is open for the next launch to deliver NASA science investigations, supplies, and equipment to the International Space Station. A Northrop Grumman Cygnus XL spacecraft will launch in November to the orbital laboratory on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for NASA. The mission is known as NASA’s Northrop Grumman Commercial Resupply Services 25, […]

“From a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time,” Altman said. “You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.” ↫ Andrew E. Freedman at Tom’s Hardware I’m installing a 32bit operating system without support for physical address extension on my laptop with 64GB of RAM, just because I can.

Dig a little deeper and you’ll find a thriving research program with exotic atoms that won’t solve the energy crisis but stretches the boundaries of physics.

The post Is There Anything Left in the Dream of Cold Fusion? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

NASA’s Hubble studied 37 nearby dwarf galaxies and found that much of the oxygen they expected to see is missing.

Invictibellatrix amberina was a long-clawed, tiger-size dinosaur that lived around 120 million years ago. It's helping scientists piece together the global spread of megaraptors, which later became apex predators

Following low snowfall and record-breaking summer heat, the Italian Army is hunting for unexploded shells and bombs. "When they re-emerge, they are very, very dangerous," one expert warns

Does swinging a lightsaber help us learn? New research from Florida Atlantic University and Brown University found that movement dramatically helps with certain kinds of complex learning. The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

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APODScienceAPODAPOD: 2026 November 2 – A…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. A Long Cloud on Mars Explanation: What’s causing this unusually long cloud on Mars? Known as the […]

Amid the warm hues of fall foliage, Pine Creek Gorge forms a deep scar in the Allegheny Plateau.

Forgejo is removing OpenID Authentication 2.0 support in 2027.

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 November 1 –… 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. Colors of the […]

Sculpt OS 26.10 brings quite a few new features, like scalable cursors, support for UK keyboards, better webcam support, and more, but the real meat of this release is much tastier. First, Sculpt 26.10 is the first version based on Genode’s custom microkernel instead of relying on a 3rd-party kernel. This kernel – designed from the ground up for the needs of Genode and Sculpt OS in particular – is not only more “micro” than any other of the microkernels supported by Genode, it also solves long-standing deficiencies concerning CPU scheduling and kernel-memory management. Sculpt OS finally stands on Genode’s own footing! Finally, Sculpt OS 26.10 pays tribute to this year’s overall theme of “building bridges” by featuring our software development kit (Goa SDK) running directly on Sculpt OS without virtualization. This entails a wealth of tooling including GCC, Binutils, Git, Sequoia, Expect, Curl, man, Make, and CMake having landed on Genode. Although still young and not time-tested yet, it shows what’s possible today and allows us developers to gradually shift more and more development routine into this self-hosted environment, stressing the general-purpose qualities of Genode and motivating further optimizations. ↫ Sculpt OS release 26.10 announcement This new release also completes the transition from XML to Genode’s own HID language for configuration, moves from VirtualBox 6 to 7, and upgrades a whole slew of its Linux-based drivers

Raymond Chen published another story from the Windows development trenches, this time about what happens when you hold down the power button. If you hold a PC’s power button for 12 seconds, it will turn off at the hardware level without notifying the operating system. This is a safety feature so that you can turn of the computer even if the operating system’s “Shut down” command isn’t working. After eight seconds of the power button being held down, the Windows kernel realizes that the user is trying to do a force-power-off of the system, and it quickly takes a kernel dump that can be uploaded to the Windows Error Reporting service the next time you turn the system on. ↫ Raymond Chen I’m a bit confused by these numbers, because I have never seen a PC take this long to power off when holding down the power button; usually it takes only a few seconds to do so, meaning Windows would never generate said kernel dump. I tried reading through the various ATX specification documents to find more information on this, but then I remembered I’m not an electrical engineer so I have no idea what I’m looking at. The baseline is that ATX always provides standby power to the motherboard, and pressing the power button shorts the power button pin to ground, telling the PSU to power on fully. Pressing the power button if the computer is running tells the operating system to initiate a shutdown (although you can change this behaviour), but if you hold the button down for a certain number of seconds, it forces a power-off. So far, so good; basic information. It seems that the length of time you need to hold down the power button to force a power-off is dependent on the motherboard in question, handled by a microcontroller or some other IC. Virtually every source I can find says this timing is set to about 4-5 seconds, which is quite a bit shorter than the number of seconds given by Chen. Perhaps motherboard manufacturers consider the 12 seconds to be too long, and just do their own thing, regardless what the ATX specification suggests? What further complicates matters is that Chen details how the kernel dumps created after pressing the power button for 8 seconds do, in fact, get sent to Microsoft once the computer turns on again. In fact, he is one of the people who gets to see these dumps and respond to them, so obviously they are indeed rolling in. Does this mean there’s a huge number of computers out there that require you to hold down the power button for 12 seconds to force a shutdown that nobody’s ever seen? These emergency kernel dumps are internally classified as “long power button hold” (LPBH) failures. One of the pieces of information recorded in these emergency kernel dumps is whether the screen consists entirely of black pixels. Those failures are sub-classified as “black screen LPBH”, and they go to a special virtual team for analysis. (I happen to be a member of this black screen LPBH team.) ↫ Raymond Chen What’s going on here? Obviously, I’m not going to doubt Chen, so there must be something here I don’t quite understand or that I’m missing. The ATX specification might suggest 12 seconds, but could Windows perhaps adapt its kernel dump behaviour – dumping much sooner than 8 seconds – based on the motherboard it’s running on, maybe through information provided by the chipset drivers? I would love it if someone more knowledgeable than me can help us unravel this small mystery.

From curl 8.12 through 8.16, config files could slice variable values and include other config files without an explicit depth cap. Together, these features let curl simulate any two-counter Minsky program. Under the usual idealization of unbounded strings and resources, this construction was Turing-complete. Curl 8.17.0 added a five-level include cap that breaks this reduction. ↫ Nicolas Seriot Neat.

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 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. Night on a […]

After more than 150 years of excavations, the object is the first musical instrument ever discovered in the ruins of the ancient city, which is located in modern-day Turkey

The brick was found at Tavsanli Hoyuk, an archaeological site in western Turkey. Humans and dogs in this region have had a close relationship for thousands of years

America’s newest aerospace expo and air show – MAX POWER – is fast approaching, and NASA has announced key events beginning Friday, Nov. 6, and running through Sunday, Nov. 8, hosted on and near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Through multiple park experiences at MAX POWER, NASA and a variety of external collaborators […]

In a new study, researchers looked at museum specimens of the island’s flying foxes, spanning 150 years of history. They found a significant decline in size—right when commercial hunting ramped up

Martian samples this old are extremely rare and offer clues about the Red Planet's youth. This meteorite further hints that our celestial neighbor was once a watery world, suggesting it could've had the conditions to host life

The Brooklyn Museum's "Art of Manga" exhibition highlights the "mangaka," or creators, who have shaped the medium. Hundreds of original illustrations are making a rare trip to the United States

Tree-ring dating shows that a historic tavern in Somerset has been continually operating as an inn since the 1430s, when local monks built it to lodge wool merchants

Intricate structures within the Cat’s Head Nebula are illuminated in this mid-infrared view from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope released on Oct. 29, 2026. The distinctive “cat’s head” shape of the nebula was likely sculpted over time by the intense ultraviolet radiation and winds from massive stars in the Carina Nebula. As this stellar feedback […]

The researchers also estimate that around one in four of the former football players had dementia, a common feature of late-stage CTE

While science fiction lore tells us that humans will meet extraterrestrial life in the form of little green men, the detail that should raise hairs this Halloween is this: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence took a major leap forward with AI, and it increasingly focuses on AI agents built by humans listening for AI agents […]

For decades, astronomers treated the interstellar medium as a static backdrop to the goings-on of the universe. Now, a wave of 3D mapping is bringing the interstellar medium’s dynamic nature into focus.

The post A New Map of ‘Empty’ Space Challenges a Tranquil Picture of the Galaxy first appeared on Quanta Magazine

NASA issued a Request for Information Oct. 29 to learn more about industry capabilities for in-space servicing to support the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Even though the brain structures of birds and mammals are different, a new study suggests that crows and primates have similar decision-making nerve cell circuitry

Twin Travelers In 1977, NASA launched twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2, taking advantage of a once-every-175-year planetary alignment of the four largest planets in our solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Using six gravity assists between them, this Grand Tour gave us up-close views of the gas and ice giants, including several moons. […]

If you’ve ever seen a crime show, you probably know how the plot unfolds: A victim is found, an investigation ensues and police conduct a high-stakes search for the culprit. Detectives and crime lab techs collect hair, examine bullet casings and photograph bloodstains. But just how reliable are these clues – and does science back them up? Well, today on the show, with the help of legal expert Chris Fabricant, we’re diving into which of these forensic techniques are junk “science”, which we should be more cautious about – and why all of them haunt the legal system.

Interested in more crime and pop science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 30 –… 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. Haunting the Cepheus […]

The sight of an icy skull-like visage on the Antarctic island could make one’s blood run cold.

AlpineBSD is an operating system based on the NetBSD kernel with a userspace inspired by Alpine Linux and the objective of making it possible to use as little AI-generated software as possible. There is no LLM output included in the base system or main package repository (AlpineBSD AI policy). ↫ AlpineBSD’s website AlpineBSD uses the NetBSD kernel, libc, and essential tools, and combines them with Alpine’s apk-tools package manager, busybox, and generlaly preferring GNU tools over their BSD equivalents. It uses the s6 init system, but the project intends to add OpenRC as an alternative. The project is in its very early stages, so don’t expect things like an installer; you’re on your own, basically.

The Nintendo Wii (and its related consoles) were already made to run the PowerPC version of Windows NT as well as Mac OS X, but now we can add another milestone to the list: classic Mac OS. So today I reached a nice milestone in one of my projects: my work porting classic Mac OS to PowerPC systems with what I affectionately call ArtX chipsets (Nintendo GameCube, Wii, eventually Wii U; the GameCube’s Flipper integrated chipset was very much designed by ArtX as it was effectively finished when ATI acquired the company, and the Wii’s Vegas (and its later revision Bollywood) and Wii U’s Latte are effectively straight successors) reached the desktop for the first time, most likely the first time since the CHRP clone era that someone outside of Apple brought up classic Mac OS on a new system to the desktop. Despite still being nowhere near ready for a public release, I want to talk about the challenges I faced with this project so far. ↫ Rairii at Virtuallyfun Various versions of Mac OS boot to the desktop, including Mac OS 9.2.2, the last ever version, but there’s still a ton or work to be done before this is ready for release. Still, with Rairii amazing track record of porting all kinds of things to various PowerPC machines, including getting the PowerPC version of Windows NT to run on various PowerPC Macs, I have little doubt they’ll manager to get this to a releasable state. I absolutely love this kind of work.

Description This global map of Mars shows 13 locations that match the mineralogy and chemistry of Teghaza 001, one of the most ancient Martian meteorites ever found on Earth. While scientists can never know for sure where a Martian meteorite originated, Teghaza 001 includes clues that link it to highlands in the southern hemisphere of […]

I think it’s safe to say that Windows’ Modern Standby feature isn’t exactly free from issues. The biggest problem seems to be that it’s not very good at actually determining when to transition between regular sleep and hibernation, often leaving users with an empty battery as they open their laptop’s lid. Microsoft has now released an update to hopefully address this long-standing problem. This update improves the adaptive hibernate policy to provide more instant-on resumes from Modern Standby while helping preserve battery life when the charge is low. Noticeable changes include less hibernation while the battery is above 80% and hibernating sooner when the battery is below 10%. ↫ KB5127936 Among other new features and changes this update brings are Cloud Rebuild, a way for devices to install Windows without needing a local image. Cloud Rebuild can be started form within an existing installation, remotely by administrators, or through the Windows Recovery Environment. Obviously, a working internet connection, wired or wireless, is required for this feature to work. This is the same update that introduces CLAT, which we talked about yesterday, to smooth the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.

Description This slice of Teghaza 001, one of the most ancient Martian meteorites ever found on Earth, was used to determine the age of the rock. Reflected light images like these serve as a scientist’s road map, helping them find minerals of interest to analyze by different instruments. Figure A is the same image with […]

Although no ghouls, goblins, or trick-or-treaters come knocking at the International Space Station’s front hatch, crew members aboard the orbiting laboratory still like to get in the Halloween spirit. Whether individually or as an entire crew, they dress up in sometimes spooky, sometimes scary, but always creative costumes, often designed from materials available aboard the […]

A new exhibition at the Vatican Museums highlights a century of collaboration with Mercedes-Benz, showcasing eight papal vehicles that developed from a "means of transportation into an instrument of encounter," per Pope Leo XIV

When a rose-colored meteorite was found in the Sahara Desert in 2022, no one knew how old it was or where it came from. Not until NASA-funded scientists age-dated its minerals did they realize the nearly 2-pound (800-gram) rock was a piece of Mars that formed more than 4.1 billion years ago, making it one […]

Since it was first published in October 1726, the novel purporting to tell the fantastical travel tales of Captain Lemuel Gulliver has never left print. An exhibition of rare editions and adaptations in Dublin celebrates Swift's most famous work

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has named Troy Asher director of the agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Asher, a veteran test pilot and aerospace engineer with decades of experience in flight research and operations, has served as the center’s acting director since March. “Troy has spent his career pushing the boundaries of flight, […]

The Quantum-Enabled Predictive Preclinical NAMs for Toxicity and Safety (QuSAFE) Challenge, a collaboration between the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NASA, advances quantum-enabled sensing for in vitro NAMs, such as organoids and microphysiological systems (MPS), to improve drug safety while reducing animal use. In vitro NAMs, such as organoids and microphysiological systems (MPS), can […]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified 19 "superbugs" that currently pose a threat to human health in the United States, plus another six that are being monitored as potential threats

Turning a simulation idea into a working application means assembling assets, connecting physics and rendering, and checking that the scene behaves as intended. Developers are combining frontier AI models with NVIDIA Omniverse libraries to help carry out that work — building applications for exploring scenarios, investigating failures and improving designs. Developers direct AI agents through […]

Read this release in English here. Puede que nunca llegues a surcar los cielos bajo las nubes o sobre las arenas orgánicas de la luna Titán de Saturno, ¡pero tu nombre sí puede hacerlo! La NASA invita al público a enviar su nombre a bordo de la aeronave de ala giratoria Dragonfly de la agencia […]

Astrophysicist Shep Doeleman explains how capturing the first image of a black hole required a telescope the size of the world, and why the next goal is to create a movie.

The post How Do You Take a Picture of a Black Hole? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Two nearly complete fossilized skeletons of the strange new species were found in southwestern China. Scientists suspect its marine lifestyle was an evolutionary accident

Paleontologists have long argued over whether some small tyrannosaur skeletons belonged to a new genus, called Nanotyrannus, or were young Tyrannosaurus rex. "Jodi" was sold just one year after researchers reported the most conclusive evidence yet that Nanotyrannus is valid

This Halloween week, GFN Thursday is delivering a fresh batch of gaming treats. Something wicked this blade comes. S-GAME’s Phantom Blade Zero launches on GeForce NOW today, bringing a scarily good blend of martial arts and punk fantasy to the cloud. There’s also something on the horizon for adventurers: World of Warcraft: Forever arrives Wednesday, […]

A century after A.A. Milne first published his classic children's tales, British admirers and royal emissaries have made a polite push to bring Christopher Robin's original toys back home, if only for a royal vacation

APOD Science APOD APOD: 29 October 2026 – 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 Horns […]

The first named storm of the North Indian Ocean’s cyclone season made landfall along the coast of Andhra Pradesh.

Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman has been named Caltech associate vice president and deputy director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The emeritus astronaut and retired U.S. Navy captain begins his new role at NASA’s center of excellence for robotics and deep space exploration and at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA, on […]

Flag LinuxNetBSD made a seemingly small, but very welcome announcement today: they’re adding a more user-friendly, easier to use command-line text editor to the base install. To ease the transition for new users, NetBSD -current now includes an alternative editor to vi(1) and xedit(1) in its base system, atto(1). It is a modeless screen-based editor similar to nano, pico, xedit, or emacs. It is only 48 kilobytes, making it suitable for inclusion in the rescue system. ↫ NetBSD Foundation on Fedi Most guides and how-to article for operating systems like NetBSD assume the use of vi, and while I don’t want to ignite a flamewar, vi isn’t exactly the most approachable or friendly piece of software out there. My occassional text editing in the command line is all done through nano, but now I’m definitely curious to give atto a go. While other tech news websites are plastered with articles about a PC maker adding a touch screen to one of their laptops, we’re talking about a new CLI text editor in NetBSD’s base system. Priorities, folks.

Windows 11 25H2, starting with build 26200.9550, now comes with something called CLAT. As organizations move toward IPv6-only and IPv6-mostly networks, some applications still depend on IPv4-only applications or services. Windows CLAT helps those applications continue to work when a network does not provide native IPv4 connectivity. CLAT is the client-side component of 464XLAT. It statelessly translates IPv4 traffic from the Windows client into IPv6 for transport across the network to a provider-side translator (PLAT), which provides stateful NAT64 translation to IPv4. ↫ Jim Alumbaugh at Microsoft’s Networking Blog Yet another important component of the long, neverending transition to IPv6. Like endlessly cutting a cucumber in half, you’ll never quite run out of cucumber to cut.

Do you want a hobby operating system with a desktop for a microcontroller-based computer? Sylphide OS is a new project aiming to build just that. For the last few weeks, I’ve worked on a new pet project: an operating system for computers based on microcontrollers. There aren’t many yet, but I expect them to be more and more common. Why MCU computers ? You get a relatively very simple platform, booting straight to your code (or almost), and you can understand the whole architecture. Exactly as it was with home computers long ago. And not at all what you get with modern computers. Even booting involves lot of very different systems, black magic, and even blog/proprietary software. ↫ Thomas Capricelli It’s very early in development, but by building it atop FreeRTOS, Capricelli had a head-start. It’s got a basic desktop, one that might need some changes to avoid the lawyers. The code’s open source, of course.

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam became the 78th nation to sign the Artemis Accords, joining a growing coalition of like-minded nations committed to the peaceful, transparent, and responsible exploration of space.   “Vietnam is joining at an important point in the development of its own space program,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Matt Anderson in recorded remarks […]

A pioneering labor organizer who co-founded the United Farm Workers union, Huerta spent a lifetime fighting for migrant laborers' rights, advocating for women and supporting marginalized communities

From tranquil landscapes to a thunderous flock of seabirds, the recognized photos reveal stunning scenes of often-hidden aspects of the natural world

NASA’s Artemis III SLS (Space Launch System) core stage is integrated alongside the twin solid rocket boosters on Oct. 28 inside the Vehicle Assembly Building’s High Bay 3 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.   Technicians lifted the 212-foot rocket stage from the facility’s High Bay 2 using a one-of-a kind lifting beam designed […]

A new campaign encourages visitors to take in the lavish art above their heads at five historic sites across England. There are even cushions for maximum comfort while you gaze

Five years ago, Gavin Gardner was a Michigan State University engineering student researching next-generation drone technology as part of a NASA grant. Garder expected the research to be demanding – but he was surprised that navigating the financial side of the work presented an even greater challenge. Although Gardner was used to leading fellow students […]

A new study found that adult women and juveniles under the age of 15 accounted for 67 percent of the fingerprints analyzed. The research challenges long-held assumptions about the age and gender of the workers who sculpted Qin Shi Huang's soldiers

So far, 2026 has seen a flood of successes for volunteers who do NASA science, exemplifying NASA’s commitment to gold-standard science—transparent, reproducible and intrinsically collaborative. The Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project announced that their project volunteers have now discovered most of the known brown dwarfs, celestial objects that are similar to planets. The Zooniverse platform, […]

By probing its molecular structure, biologists are uncovering how a tangle of unstructured proteins turns into a strong, flexible fiber.

The post How Spiders Spin ‘Silk Dope’ Into Nature’s Toughest Material first appeared on Quanta Magazine

In this Webb image released on Oct. 22, 2026, we see a turbulent cauldron of star formation filled with dense clumps of gas. This region is named N159 and is located 161,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way galaxy. This region has a lower metallicity […]

Macaques that had gotten sick or seen others become ill were less likely to eat a tasty treat that looked like it was contaminated with poop than primates that didn't witness the outbreak—even though they didn't know how the infection spreads

NVIDIA RTX Spark powers thin and light laptops built for everything that developers, creators and gamers do. RTX Spark laptops are now available from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI. These powerful systems combine an NVIDIA Blackwell RTX GPU and an NVIDIA Grace CPU in a single superchip with up to 128GB of unified […]

Their leading hypothesis is that the young cetaceans are dying from a bacterial infection, but experts are still trying to figure out why this year's mortality rates are so high. Adults have also been washing up dead, possibly because of a toxic algal bloom

The 14-day mission, slated for mid-2027, will serve as a test to see which company's lunar lander performs better in low-Earth orbit. Both will practice docking, habitation and operational procedures essential for the return to the moon, planned for 2028

Researchers were inspired by Lycurgus Cup, a chalice from the fourth century C.E. that appears opaque green under reflected light but wine red when lit directly. "To me, it’s magic," the lead researcher says

It’s been just over two years since the rise of Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA. The movement united a coalition of moms, wellness influencers and voters across the political spectrum over concerns about chronic illness and childhood diseases. And when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took over as Secretary of Health and Human Services, it seemed like MAHA would be front and center in Washington.

But as we approach the midterm elections, has the Trump administration made good on the MAHA agenda? On today’s episode, we dig into what’s changed, what hasn’t and what that means for your health.

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

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Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Earth planning date: Friday, Oct. 16, 2026 Following the Basque Lakes drill campaign, Curiosity has returned to a spot just a few meters away from the “Chiu Chiu” block to conduct our next drill campaign. “Chiu Chiu” itself wasn’t a good candidate for […]

APODScienceAPODAPOD: 2026 October 28 – 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 […]

A national monument since the 1920s, Chiricahua is America’s newest national park.

"Das bunte Leben," the Russian artist's dreamlike panorama, bridges folklore and early modernism. The sale follows a 2023 ruling concluding that the work was seized from its rightful Dutch Jewish owners

The four volunteers who lived and worked in a simulated NASA Mars mission for more than a year will exit their habitat on Saturday, Oct. 31, after 378 days of isolation in a facility at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Health and performance data collected from the simulation can help NASA develop methods […]

Hidden under multi-paneled Symbolist murals by French artist Odilon Redon were sketches that he had drawn directly on the walls of the 11th-century Abbaye de Fontfroide

Nobody knows how the three-legged iron cauldron ended up in the River Wear. Weeks before Halloween, it finally returned to the surface

A technician inspects the large sunshade of NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission in this image released on Oct. 26, 2026. The sunshade structure, which stands 20 feet (6 meters) tall and measures 8 feet (2.4 meters) wide at its base, will keep the infrared space telescope cool as it searches for near-Earth asteroids and […]

The mysterious, shiny object has not been conclusively identified, but it might be space junk from a rocket built by the Chinese company LandSpace and launched on September 15. Metal pieces were also recently found in Borneo, believed to be shed by a different LandSpace rocket

The spacecraft is designed to drag two dead satellites into Earth's atmosphere, where they are expected to disintegrate. The mission is slated to launch in 2029 and be completed by 2032

There are 57 million people worldwide living with dementia today. For the researchers working to help them, the obstacle isn’t a lack of effort — it’s too much data, too few experts to synthesize it and a pace of discovery that can’t keep up with the disease.  The Consortium for Biomedical Research and AI in […]

All that's left of a gargantuan ice sheet that once covered nearly 30 percent of North America is a Delaware-size ice cap in Canada. Scientists have found that the ice cap began to expand around 2,000 years ago—a sign of a new ice age—but it started shrinking in the 1960s

The Desert Shield and Desert Storm Memorial is an oasis-like place for honoring the Americans who served and lost their lives in combat to liberate Kuwait in the early 1990s

When Rice University student Malvika Bhardwaj asked her mentor Daniel Cohen, a Guidance, Navigation & Control (GN&C) engineer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, whether he had time to keep teaching interns with his busy workload, he answered, “You decide what’s important.”  In honor of National Mentoring Day on Oct. 27, Bhardwaj reflects on how Cohen’s […]

It feels like everyone we know is talking about the new documentary You Can See Everything. It tracks the effort of comedian and documentarian Nathan Fielder to suss out how deceptive Elizabeth Holmes, disgraced founder of the company Theranos, is. And after watching the film, we all left the theater wondering -- what could we see? How possible is it to ever really spot someone lying? So we of course called up an expert in deception and counter-deception research, Maria Hartwig, a professor of psychology at CUNY, the City University of New York.

For more on sussing out a liar, check out our episode about what's wrong with the polygraph.

Interested in more deep dives on the science behind pop culture blockbusters? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 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. Noctilucent Clouds over […]

The Antarctic iceberg made a relatively quick exit from the Weddell Sea, only to slow at the edge of a remote island’s underwater shelf.

What’s the oldest Windows GUI application you can still run on Windows 11 today, without any modifications? For now, the best answer Boris Popik can come up with is an innocuous application from build 347 of Windows NT 3.1, an early prerelease: CDPLAYER.EXE. You can’t go any older than that, because earlier prerelease builds had not yet finalised its PE format and calling convention. Neat find. Popik also mentions a few other contenders, but I won’t spoil those here.

Another month has crumbled to dust under the oppressive boots of time, so it’s time for another month of Redox improvements. This past month, Redox’ build system gained support for Clang, SDL2 saw performance improvements, and WebKitGTK3’s HTML layout rendering was fixed. Users of Intel Tiger Lake processors can now enjoy external display hot-plugging, and overall system performance has been improved in a variety of ways. And as always, there’s the long lists of kernel, relibc, and driver improvements and fixes as well. Redox keeps making big strides every month, and it’s definitely one of the few alternative operating systems that actually feels like it might, one day, be an actual contender for general purpose use.

Thew day ends in a Y, so Microsoft is launching a new way to build Windows applications. Get excited, Windows application developers! If you caught our session at Microsoft Build 2026 or you’ve been watching the repo, you’ve seen this one taking shape in public for a while now, and a lot has changed since Build. Here’s the longer tour: Microsoft.UI.Reactor, an experimental C# framework that brings the MVU (Model-View-Update) pattern to WinUI desktop apps. No XAML files, no code-behind, no ViewModels. Two things before the fun part. Reactor is experimental: no support policy, no API guarantees, published this early on purpose because we’d rather hear we got the design wrong now than once people have shipped on it. And it is not a replacement for XAML or MVVM, which we’ll come back to. ↫ Alexandre Zollinger Chohfi at Microsoft’s Dev Blogs At multiple points in the linked blog post, Microsoft underlines that no, Reactor is not going to replace XAML. I’m sure Windows developers who learned Win32, Silverlight, WinRT XAML, WPF, UWP, WinUI 2 and 3, and all the others, over the past two decades will feel deeply comforted by Microsoft’s insistence that Reactor will not replace XAML. Microsoft repeats: this won’t replace XAML. They swear.

We’ve been following along with Carmen Kaiser’s Apple Network Server exploits, and by now things are really starting to come together for owners of this machine. When we last left off, the ROM to allow Mac OS to run on the machine which normally runs IBM’s AIX, but there were still a number of bugs, limitations, and issues to be worked out. A lot of progress on that front has been made. The good news is, many of the issues with the preproduction ROM in Mac OS can be fixed or worked around in software. So I’ve fixed or worked around many of them in software: the MACE Ethernet is fixed, the on-board video is now supported, and the ANS can restart properly back into Mac OS. Plus, because it’s the preproduction ROM, you can still boot AIX, thus preserving the entire historical reason for Shiner’s existence. Here’s the first cut of that software and how it was developed. ↫ Cameron Kaiser There’s still two issues Kaiser wishes to address – the internal SCSI bays don’t work, and the ROM doesn’t properly register parity RAM – but the progress here is amazing.

Description This 360-degree look at Neretva Vallis within Mars’ Jezero Crater was stitched together using 217 images acquired by the rover’s Mastcam-Z on May 20, 2024, the 1,155th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. While it is a wind-swept dusty vista today, billions of years ago it was home to a river channel that fed fresh water into […]

Police have detained a 33-year-old German citizen in connection with the blaze, which gutted the infamous historic building. In recent years, the mountaintop guesthouse hosted a restaurant, beer garden and exhibit about the site's dark past

Over 1,645 Martian days, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover measured the fine and ultrafine Martian dust particles found clinging to samples of spacesuit materials that are carried aboard the rover, including some that are small enough to penetrate the lungs and enter the bloodstream. The findings will be published Tuesday, Oct. 27, in the Proceedings of […]

Description The large sunshade of NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor is mounted on an assembly ring during inspections in a clean room at BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in July 2026.  The sunshade structure stands 20 feet (6 meters) tall and measures 8 feet (2.4 meters) wide at its base. Its two flat […]

Description The large sunshade of NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission is inspected by a technician at BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in late July.  Built by Applied Aerospace in Stockton, California, the sunshade structure was outfitted with its solar cells by SolAero Technologies in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in January. Environmental […]

The NASA STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Enhancement in Earth Science (SEES) Internship Program at the University of Texas Center for Space Research places high school students on small, mission-focused research teams mentored by NASA, academic, and industry experts. During summer 2026, the SEES Mission Architecture Tool for Research, Integration, and eXploration (MATRIX) team […]

The patient, a French man in his 60s with leukemia, died earlier this month. Health officials say the risk to the public is low

As the Brewers take on the Rays in the Fall Classic, two art museums are engaged in a friendly bit of sports betting: The winning city (temporarily) gets a Monet from the other city's collection

Members of the media are invited to tour a new lunar landing simulator at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley on Thursday, Oct. 29, and Friday, Oct. 30.

The first-ever global assessment of these vibrant underwater ecosystems paints a grim picture: Climate change projections put 96 percent of shallow-water reefs at the highest level of threat

NASA test pilot Mike Lippert poses for a photo ahead of his first time flying the agency’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft on Oct. 21, 2026. The X-59 has flown numerous times since its inaugural flight in November 2025; its first supersonic flight was on June 5, 2026. Lippert took off from NASA’s Armstrong Flight […]

A new topological model connects a centuries-old voting paradox to a surface with no distinct inside or outside.

The post How Voting Is Like a Klein Bottle first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The new research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed but was accepted for publication, suggests that climate change is responsible for two-thirds of the deaths

Experiments with real participants—and digital twins based on them—show how a small number of bad apples can spoil the whole barrel. However, the research scenarios don't exactly mimic the real world

The Impressionist painted "Iris" a year or two before his death, at a time when his work was becoming increasingly abstract and falling out of favor with critics. Now, it’s considered a masterpiece ahead of its time

At the beginning of our universe, in addition to matter, there was also an equal amount of antimatter, matter's opposite. But today, there's lots more matter than antimatter. So how did that happen? Well, the answer might have to do with neutrinos, a very mysterious, elusive particle. They're incredibly difficult to catch and study because they don't really interact with anything. But a group of scientists is now betting that one specific, hypothetical type of neutrino might have played a very important role in getting matter to win the war against antimatter. Today, we go galaxy brain and delight in getting to spend a little time pondering this hypothetical, long ignored particle.

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APOD Science APOD 2026 October 26 – M42: 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. M42: The […]

A modern satellite makes it possible to pursue the ancient tradition of leaf-peeping in a whole new way.

Thomas Adam, one of the core developers of FVWM, has been working on CoW for a while now. CoW can best be described as “FVWM for Wayland”, which uniquely uses the River compositor. River, in turn, is unique in that it does not combine the compositor and window manager into a single program, allowing for a more traditional X11-like approach. Adam released version 0.4 today, which comes with a load of fixes, changes, and minor improvements, as well as one bigger-ticket item: container windows. This PR introduces the concept of a top-level container window. This means a window can be subdivided into columns and rows (called panes) and can be resized independently of one another. The idea for this has been unashamedly stolen from shod. ↫ Thomas Adam I’ve been keeping an eye on CoW ever since I learned about it when it was first released, and at some point soon I want to build a desktop around it for myself.

Speaking of games, if you’ve ever heard anything about or even played Sonic ’06, you know this wasn’t the most polished entry in the hedgehog’s franchise. In fact, it’s probably one of the worst, and considering the average quality of Sonic games, that’s quite an achievement. The team that’s working on decompiling the game to make it run on the PC obviously had to dive deep into the game’s inner workings, and the process learned a lot about why, exactly, the game is so notoriously bad. It really makes you wonder what exactly went wrong? If you look at what limited footage we have of beta content, we can see many effects that aren’t present in the final game. Kingdom Valley had full bump maps, Castle Town had more complex geometry and plants, and New City’s collision implies a very different building layout at some point in development. It turns out, much of the cut content is actually still in the game, but is simply not enabled for performance reasons in vanilla. Even with the cut-back visuals, the game struggles to reach target FPS on real hardware. It’s not surprising that given the crunch Sonic Team were under to get the game out the door, these features were among the first to go. ↫ Isaac Marovitz The article details what, exactly, was turned off for the final release, and it’s quite an interesting read. Of course, the team intends to try and address many of these issues, and they think they can push the game and its engine to much greater heights.

When thinking about impressive technical achievements in retro games, most people will first point to graphical milestones set by action games like Doom or Quake. Rightfully so, but at least I am personally far more impressed by the early examples of the city builder genre. Simulating whole economies on a large scale with a fraction of today’s power seems impossible if modern builder games even struggle on modern machines. Of course this didn’t stop developers in the past to develop and run city builder games on significantly weaker hardware. The original SimCity for example lists Intel’s 386SX as the CPU in it’s system requirements. A CPU which at the time of it’s launch ran at magnificent 16 MHz. ↫ Lars Thießen What’s even more impressive are some of the other systems the origin al SimCity was ported to, which had even more limited hardware than a 386SX. The Super Nintendo got a SimCity port, which even included fun extras like a Mario statue and Bowser taking up the mantle of the Godzilla disaster, and additional systems the PC version didn’t have. Hell, they even worked on a port to the NES, but it was cancelled and thought lost, until a relatively complete and working copy was discovered in 2017. Even this NES version contained features not available in the PC version. Hardware limitations really did breed a lot of innovation back in those days, and sometimes I wonder if programmers and developers could benefit from tasking themselves with working within such limitations today, if only to become a bit more prudent with resources.

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 25 – Dark… 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. Dark Matter […]

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 24 –… 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. Rosetta’s Selfie Explanation: […]

As NASA returns humans to the lunar surface and establishes a long-term presence on our closest celestial neighbor, the agency and commercial human landing system providers Blue Origin and SpaceX have streamlined the designs and changed both concepts of operations for its future crewed landers. Since NASA established initial contracts with Blue Origin and SpaceX […]

Before astronauts return to the lunar surface, NASA will first conduct one of the most ambitious and complex test missions in the agency’s history.  Launching in 2027, Artemis III will send NASA astronauts Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio, Andre Douglas, and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Luca Parmitano aboard the Orion spacecraft into low Earth orbit […]

NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has ended its science mission now that the spacecraft is orbiting less than 171 miles (275 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. The greater atmospheric drag at this height prevents the satellite’s telescopes from steadily gazing at their astronomical targets. Swift conducted its final observation on Oct. 20. It is expected to […]

Very few night skies seen from the south of France during the summer of 1889 would match the scene on van Gogh's canvas. A new study argues that it could have been July 22

The standard model of particle physics works really well, but it can't explain why the universe exists. Something is missing, and this trapped particle might hold a clue to the answer

Teams at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi tested RS-25 engine No. 10001 on Oct. 21, 2026. The hot fire test lasted for almost eight-and-a-half minutes (500 seconds), the same amount of time RS-25 engines fire during launch of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, with a 111% power level. For each […]

Completed in 1958, the domed building is located on the campus of Florida Southern College, home to 13 Wright-designed buildings, the world's largest single-site collection of the architect's work

NASA is helping to foster long-term energy security in Virginia.  NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, is partnering with the Virginia Department of Energy to support informed decisions for effective energy generation, delivery and use by providing solar, meteorological, and future weather risk datasets for energy system modeling and planning purposes. Under a new […]

The universe formed 13.8 billion years ago, so this far-traveled burst of radio waves can help scientists learn more about the early cosmos. However, researchers still aren't sure what produces these strange flashes

Zoo staffers don’t know whether the bright green eggs are viable and will ultimately hatch into chicks. However, the eggs themselves are a major win, because breeding the birds in captivity is tricky

To invade red blood cells, the deadly protist creates a temporary molecular portal that disappears behind it — a door we can now see in fine detail.

The post Malaria Parasite Caught in the Act of Breaking and Entering first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Fewer than 20 coins minted under Norwegian King Olaf II Haraldsson have ever been found. "We can almost imagine Olaf himself holding this coin in his hand," one researcher says

Virtually every human on Earth has a slew of different types of dormant viruses in our bodies. They are remnants of past infections and are—generally—harmless. Unless they wake up, which can be triggered by extreme stress or something that severely compromises the immune system. But now, through a unique study on the immune systems of astronauts, scientists are considering broadening their ideas about what can wake up our dormant viruses…and learning what all this has to do with long COVID.

If you liked this episode, check out our episodes on a universal flu vaccine and what scientists got wrong about covid .

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APODScienceAPODAPOD: 2026 October 23 –…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. Andromeda in Southern Spring Explanation: Looking toward the north from Mullion, New South Wales, Australia, the Andromeda […]

A 35-year satellite altimetry record lets scientists hold this year’s El Niño up against its strongest predecessors.

Kazakhstan’s AI ecosystem is moving from infrastructure plans to deployment.  The shift is visible across the full AI stack — from infrastructure to models to applications. The announcements below — coinciding with a visit to Astana by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang — point to the nation’s increasing supply of accelerated computing, along with […]

Earlier this year, I needed to learn PowerShell scripting for one Windows-related project, and I have tried it out a few more times on Mac. It has quickly become one of my favorite tools for automation and scripting—taking on jobs that I would have otherwise tried to do with Node.js, Shortcuts, macOS Automator, or heaven forbid, Bash scripts. I get it now. PowerShell is great, even if you don’t use it as your shell, and even if you’re on Mac or Linux. ↫ Corbin Davenport I don’t use the shell often enough on any of my main machines to have much of an idea about the strenghths and weaknesses of PowerShell compared to more traditional shells, but this is definitely not the first time I’ve heard a lot of praise for it from people otherwise knee-deep in the UNIX and traditional shell world. There really must be something to this, and since PowerShell is also available on Linux and macOS, it’s pretty straightforward to give it a go without having to deal with Windows.

Earlier this year, Garmin closed its Connect API developer program because it was being flooded with “AI”-generated applications to the point it couldn’t handle them anymore. What made it worse was that half of the applications were never actually used, not even once. It also didn’t help that Garmin treated every single application to the program the same way, whether it was from a hobbyist just wanting access to their own data, to a massive corporation developing a popular service used by god knows how many people. Today, the company has relaunched the program, and it’s been considerably overhauled. While hobbyist use of the API is going to be free – which is way better than it was before – once you hit a thousand users, you’re going to have to start paying. Still, Garmin’s shift here towards charging for API access will set a dangerous precedent for the industry. Especially for a company that bills itself as a (or the?) premium sports hardware provider. On the flip side, there’s simply no ignoring the flood of mostly AI apps that take up resources at Garmin and elsewhere to support. Heck, my inbox is flooded with these apps daily requesting reviews. It sounds like when Garmin shut off access to the API last spring, they were seeing inbound API requests at a daily scale that they’d previously only seen over a period of weeks. Simply put, there’s no good answer. ↫ Ray Maker at DC Rainmaker The excesses of the easy availability of “AI” code generation impacts the entire industry. At least one good thing has come out of this: hobbyists can now access the Connect API developer program much easier than before.

If you’ve ever written C (or c++) on a mac, you’ll know that the so-called gcc is just clang in disguise. Most people (fairly) assume that this is just an alias, but this is not true! It’s a binary! Now, what is this binary? I naively assumed that it would just be shelling out to clang but it turns out the answer is more interesting than that. ↫ juliethefoxcoon It’s all smoke and mirrors.

Unlike traditional OSs that separate user applications from the kernel, a unikernel bundles everything into a single, isolated image that runs directly on a hypervisor (like KVM, BHyve, or OpenVMM). Because it removes unnecessary drivers and background services, a unikernel is extremely small, fast to boot, and efficient with resources. Here, we will learn how to develop and deploy unikernels built using the OCaml language and the Solo5 unikernel. These are the two fundamental components that will then enable us to develop our own applications in the form of unikernels, which we can subsequently deploy using Albatross. ↫ Unikernels in OCaml Some light reading for the weekend.

Members of the media are invited to join NASA at the 2026 von Braun Space Exploration Symposium from Monday, Oct. 26, to Wednesday, Oct. 28, at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. This year’s symposium is focused on humanity’s return to the Moon, sustainable lunar infrastructure, advanced space propulsion, and the evolving space workforce. Panels […]

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image released on Oct. 16, 2026, features the edge-on, intermediate spiral galaxy NGC 1827, located roughly 37 million light-years away in the constellation Columba, the Dove. Hubble captured the image as part of a survey looking at 260 satellite galaxies around 22 Milky Way-like host galaxies within a radius of […]

A new study claims that the pages of the Voynich Manuscript, thought to be written by several different scribes in 16th-century Europe, alternate irregularly. It may change the way codebreakers approach the text

Outside experts warn that more research is needed before "circadian depression" can be classified as a subtype

This observation is one of many gravitational lensing images taken by Hubble in preparation for science with the new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

A 17-person crew traveled to a remote atoll in the South Pacific to investigate the so-called Taraia Object. After surveying the site, the team announced that the anomaly was not a fragment of the long-lost Lockheed Electra aircraft

Home to the world’s largest public collection of his artworks, a new pavilion at Quebec's Musée National des Beaux-Arts showcases the more than 50-year career of Riopelle, who was a key member of the avant-garde Automatistes movement

Launched today, NVIDIA Minerva is an AIOps platform built to help teams find problems earlier and keep AI factories productive. It brings together telemetry from infrastructure and AI workloads, then applies purpose-built AI models to turn that data into timely, actionable insight. AI factories are among the most complex operations in the world, with vast […]

On the evening of October 16, more than five million birds are estimated to have flown through Cook County, which includes Chicago. They were propelled by favorable winds brought by a cold front

Lock in and load out this GFN Thursday. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 arrives on GeForce NOW at launch, bringing a new campaign, multiplayer action and DMZ, high-stakes extraction mode to supported devices. The campaign also gets an enhanced look: GeForce RTX 5080-class performance arrives for Ultimate members, bringing support for ray-tracing features in […]

Chiricahua National Monument in southeastern Arizona is now Chiricahua National Park, the 64th national park in the United States. Its striking geologic landscape and biodiversity have drawn humans for thousands of years

Graybeards like me remember trying to painstakingly type source code from a magazine. This is a very accurate account of what a young computer user in 1986 needed to do to get a new game for the Commodore 64, complete with an immersive emulation. It’s time to install an app! But here in 1986, we still call them “programs,” not apps. So, you’ll want to set aside some time to get started installing a program.

At GTC Berlin, banks, payment companies and financial data providers are showing what production-scale intelligence looks like — built on NVIDIA accelerated computing, powered by open weight models and running on their own infrastructure. Revolut is rebuilding its technology stack on a single foundation model PRAGMA, powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing. Using the NVIDIA cuDF […]

To help developers rapidly build world models, which help physical AI systems understand and simulate the real world, NVIDIA has expanded the Cosmos platform with new training tools, simulation checkpoints and Cosmos Data Factory blueprints.  Ranking top five on six different open models leaderboards, the NVIDIA Cosmos platform gives world model builders the frontier open […]

Companies around the world are building on the NVIDIA DSX AI Factory Platform to plan, simulate and run the grid and the AI factory as one system, from the substation to the rack. Their adoption of the platform responds to an acute problem. Power is now the biggest bottleneck in infrastructure. More than $300 billion […]

European retailers are using open models and physical intelligence across use cases — from a commerce platform cutting inference costs by 90% to to a fulfillment center where collaboration of different robotic fleets is simulated inside a digital twin. Frontier Results With Open Models Retail leaders and technology companies across Europe are using NVIDIA-accelerated open […]

Weather forecasts shape more than daily plans; timely weather information is crucial for energy producers, insurers and transport operators to plan around changing conditions. A global forecast can show a storm taking shape, but decisions about solar farms, shipping routes or insured property depend on what happens locally. NVIDIA Earth-2 gives developers and researchers a […]

Governments need modern solutions to serve the public while keeping sensitive information under their control. Open models provide a path forward, letting governments evaluate them, adapt them to local languages and public services, run them on infrastructure they control, apply their own safeguards and keep sensitive data within controlled environments. Some open models go further, […]

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 22 – 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 First […]

Emissions on both sides of the island are unusually high as human-set fires spread in a landscape parched by drought.

NASA Science wants to deliver science faster, so we’re changing how we compete and select missions. On Monday, October 26, we will host a virtual NASA Science Town Hall.

NASA tested RS-25 engine No. 10001 on Oct. 21 on the Fred Haise Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Test teams fired the developmental engine for almost eight-and-a-half minutes (500 seconds), the same amount of time RS-25 engines fire during launch of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket. During […]

New research suggests that the ancient coffin was repurposed in the 10th or 11th century to hold the remains of an abbot who had overseen the London monastery

At first, plants below an elephant carcass die. Soil microbes and plants grow back soon after, but only a few select species. Herbivores later come in to munch on the nutrient-rich greens

Interstellar probes. Lunar drones. Helicopters on Mars. When a group of Caltech graduate students and enthusiasts began conducting rocket-propulsion tests in Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco on Oct. 31, 1936, they had no idea that their work marked the inception of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ninety years later, the lab, now managed by Caltech for NASA, isn’t […]

The riverfront opera house is Shanghai's latest cultural statement. It features three performance halls and is designed to be accessible to everyone, not just ticket-holders

As part of the agency’s Inspiration Tour, NASA will conduct a flyover at the University of Alabama vs. Texas A&M football game in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on Saturday, Oct. 24. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman will pilot one of three F-5 fighter jets during the flyover, highlighting NASA’s contributions to aeronautics and the agency’s continued commitment to […]

The sleuths spent two years digging into archives and building 3D models of 19th-century Paris. The location is now immortalized by a bronze plaque celebrating the historic site and the "poetic" early photograph

Few women worked as professional artists in the 16th century. A new exhibition in Antwerp, Belgium, seeks to restore this Flemish painter to the pantheon of art history giants

When they're rolling, some snakes belonging to the Pseudorabdion genus can reach top speeds of 3.8 to 8.3 miles per hour, according to a new study

Written by Vandi Verma, Chief Engineer for Robotic Operations at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Oct. 12, 2026 Since the last blog update, Perseverance has achieved a major milestone on Mars. On Sol 2006 (Oct. 11, 2026), its odometer reached 45.22 kilometers (28.10 miles), setting a new record for the farthest distance driven on another celestial […]

NASA astronaut and Expedition 75 flight engineer Jessica Watkins works inside the Kibo laboratory module’s Life Science Glovebox on Oct. 9, 2026, safely mixing living cell samples with a bioink and then filling a special cartridge with the cell‑ink mixture. The advanced research operations were part of the InSPA‑Auxilium Bioprinter‑Cell Printing investigation, which explores 3D […]

Winning entries in the 2026 Nikon Small World competitions reveal the hidden interactions that govern everyday life.

The post See Inside Cells Like Never Before in These Vivid Microscopic Images first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The Nikon Small World Competition has announced its photography winners for its 52nd annual contest. This comes weeks after its video winner was dethroned for use of generative A.I.

White dwarf stars are too far from Earth to be observed directly. So, scientists reconstructed how they'd look to human eyes based on the wavelengths of light they emit and found a colorful array of objects that might appear yellow, purple or pink

From orbit, today’s space-based laser instruments measure Earth’s forests and terrain one narrow line at a time. Between those lines are enormous gaps that include millions of acres of land scientists never directly measure. NASA’s CASALS instrument will blend machine learning with an ultra-compact lidar instrument to adaptively ‘sweep’ large swaths of Earth’s surface. This […]

Some residents of the Peaks District in the 13th century may have experienced worse lead pollution than city-dwellers during the Industrial Revolution. Female skeletons showed higher lead levels and earlier ages of death

At GTC Berlin, NVIDIA is showcasing its full lineup of local AI hardware. RTX Spark, which launched last week, powers personal agents on Windows PCs; DGX Spark supports developers building and scaling applications on Linux; and DGX Station serves enterprise teams running frontier workloads on Linux, with a Windows version arriving in December. Announcements include: […]

General availability of the instances is coming next month, with planned expansion of availability to Europe — bringing an integrated platform for training, inference and large-scale reinforcement learning to cloud customers. A5X instances bring together NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, NVIDIA ConnectX-9 SuperNICs, Google Cloud Virgo Network and Google Cloud’s fourth-generation advanced liquid-cooling technology for demanding […]

Demand from AI-natives is pulling the European AI cloud ecosystem forward faster than ever. Developers need compute closer to their data, open models they can customize and serve at scale, and full-stack infrastructure that is secure by design.  NVIDIA Cloud Partners across Europe, the Nordics, Africa, and Central Asia are expanding regional compute capacity for […]

To increase productivity, accelerate innovation and create new opportunities for economic growth, Europe’s industrial leaders are tapping NVIDIA CUDA-X and Omniverse libraries, as well as NVIDIA Cosmos and Nemotron open models, across the engineering and manufacturing lifecycle.  Bringing those capabilities together on the factory floor, the NVIDIA Factory Operations Blueprint (FOX) is now available in […]

NVIDIA cuDSS, launched today in general availability, is an NVIDIA CUDA-X library that shifts a critical part of engineering and scientific simulations onto GPUs.  Complex engineering feats — from advanced chips to aircraft to industrial systems —– depend on simulation to predict how designs will perform before they’re built. As designs become more complex, simulations […]

NVIDIA builds tools to enable safe agents across the stack. The NVIDIA OpenShell Reference Architecture, announced today, is part of NVIDIA’s growing portfolio of technologies that enables organizations to safely deploy agents at scale. NVIDIA Confidential Computing is the infrastructure layer that protects the models and data those agents depend on while running. Today, NVIDIA […]

Agents are only as useful as what they know, and only as trustworthy as the boundaries they run within.  Leading enterprises are using the open source NVIDIA Agent Toolkit — now expanded with new tools — to customize and control agents, use company data to inform their answers and actions, monitor what they do and […]

NVIDIA is expanding its family of open models across language, robotics, biology, and quantum computing, giving developers, researchers and enterprises what they need to build applications tailored to local languages and industries The portfolio includes the new NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL and Nemotron 3.5 Bolt models; new NVIDIA Nemotron Retriever models for embedding, reranking […]

Founded in a tent near the Berlin Wall in 1980, the Tempodrom moved several times before settling near Anhalter Bahnhof in 2001. Its permanent home has since hosted concerts, galas and political events. Today, it hosts a different kind of spectacle. GTC Berlin runs three days, with more than 100 sessions on agentic AI, robotics, […]

Trees provide shade and clean air in congested cities, so planting more of them seems like a straightforward solution. But trees also produce a natural pollutant— pollen. In this episode, producer Juan Diego Ramirez reports on the link between growing urban canopies and allergy exposure, and what you can do to protect yourself.

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

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APODScienceAPODAPOD: 2026 October 21 – New…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. OriginalAnnotated New Ghosts Revealed in Cassiopeia Explanation: Jinkies, look at all those ghosts! It took 100 […]

The powerful low-pressure system formed over the North Atlantic out of the remnants of Hurricane Isaias.

Early 2025, I wrote about how I think macOS’ UNIX certification was basically a lie. It required so many convoluted and cumbersome changes to macOS that literally nobody applies to their system that it the certification had kind of become a farce. At the end of the article I wondered for how much longer Apple would be playing this little charade to hammer macOS through a meaningless UNIX-shaped hole, and it turns out the answer was “about 18 months”. When you go to the Open Group’s website and the list of certified UNIX operating systems, macOS is no longer listed. For the past few weeks, it was still listed if you drilled down specifically to the UNIX 03 certification, but that, too, has now been removed. Assuming macOS 27 doesn’t return in the near future with a brand new certification, we can safely say that Apple got tired of paying a few employees to get its desktop operating system certified. With one more operating system gone from the list, there’s now only one UNIX operating systems left: AIX. While the registry also lists HP-UX, z/OS, and UnixWare/OpenServer, those either only conform to really old UNIX certifications (from the ’90s), or simply aren’t developed anymore (HP sunset HP-UX at the end of last year). Only one operating system version conforms to the latest version of the certification, UNIX 07, and that’s AIX 7.2 TL5 “and later”, which possibly includes AIX 7.3, the most recent version of AIX. Not that any of this really matters.

On October 10, Ron Wallace took the pumpkin king crown with a 3,156-pounder. The previous record—a respectable, nearly 2,857-pound pumpkin—was set just a week earlier by British grower Ian Paton

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on Oct. 15, 2026, and has been updated to correct the location of the flights. A NASA Dynamic Aviation A200 aircraft will conduct low-flying research flights over farmland near Amarillo, Texas, from Thursday, Oct. 22, through Monday, Nov. 9. These flights will measure gaseous and particulate emissions from […]

A coral is often a colony of tiny, genetically identical animals. New research suggests that when a bleached coral fragment comes into physical contact with a colorful, thriving clone, the pale one can revive within weeks

The privacy movement often asks people to make significant changes. Switch phones. Change operating systems. Learn new tools. Adopt new habits. We do that too.

The post The First Step Toward Digital Independence: Why AweSIM Matters appeared first on Purism.

Using AI to comb through hundreds of thousands of handwritten pages of port records, historians have constructed an interactive map of Britain’s maritime trading routes. Even as it expanded in Asia and the Americas, Britain's commerce with Europe remained overwhelming

Destined for Mars and beyond, NASA’s Space Reactor-1 (SR-1) Freedom will be humanity’s first fission-powered spacecraft to travel outside Earth’s orbit. Announced during NASA’s “Ignition” event, this mission will demonstrate nuclear electric propulsion in deep space, and progress is underway on its key element: the nuclear power module. To expedite development of the spacecraft, NASA […]

Hot on the heels of Wine being ported to OpenBSD, we now have the release of OpenBSD 8.0. It adds hibernate support for arm64, switches the sparc64 toolchain to LLVM, and updates the DRM graphics drivers to Linux 6.18.53, which also adds support for Intel Arc A-Series (DG2/Alchemist) graphics cards. There’s a whole bunch of improvements, fixes, and changes for RISC-V and ARM in general, of course, as well as to the various Wi-Fi drivers. On top of that, it also comes with new versions of OpenSSH and LibreSSL, as well as a massive list of other improvements and fixes. If you’ve never installed OpenBSD before, be sure to read this detailed guide to know what to do once everything’s installed, while listening to the official release song, of course.

NASA researchers are developing the future of flight on Mars, laying the groundwork for helicopters with the ability to fly higher and farther while conducting science on the Red Planet. Using high-fidelity computer simulations and wind tunnel tests, engineers are reimagining the rotorcraft blades that could carry the next generation of Mars flyers.

Coast redwoods, which grow only from central California to southern Oregon, slow photosynthesis when temperatures ramp up, according to a new study. Scientists worry about the towering plants' future amid climate change

As NASA works to build the Moon Base, crewed and robotic lunar rovers will play a crucial role during early development through technology demonstrations, astronaut transport, terrain mapping, scientific investigations, and resource prospecting. Data from these early missions will inform future mobility systems and infrastructure needed for astronauts to live and work on the Moon. […]

An image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope released on Oct. 6, 2026, reveals a cauldron of cosmic creation. Webb has unveiled numerous stars formerly hidden by clouds of dust in a stellar nursery known as NGC 7129, which resides about 3,300 light-years from Earth. Learn more about this region – and tour it in […]

The Republic of Uzbekistan became the 77th signatory of the Artemis Accords during a ceremony in Samarkand on Monday, committing to the practical principles that guide safe, transparent, and responsible civil space exploration. “Uzbekistan joins the Artemis Accords at a pivotal moment,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Matt Anderson. “President Trump has directed NASA to build […]

Sgiath, a 6-year-old Labrador from the Scottish Highlands, received the honor from the International Fund for Animal Welfare. She's believed to be the first pup trained to hunt for the invasive carpet sea squirt, which is threatening marine life along the British coast and elsewhere

The site was first identified as a possible church decades ago, but researchers did not confirm that hunch until they found human remains there this summer. It could offer another clue to the Viking's unexplained 15th-century disappearance

Nebius and Nscale are among global technology partners looking to NVIDIA Vera CPUs to build the next wave of infrastructure. Their momentum reflects rapid advancements in agentic computing.  Agents do more than generate answers: they retrieve information, run software tools, execute code and evaluate results. Each step depends on fast CPU processing.  Vera accelerates that […]

There are hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy we live in. Many of them have their own exoplanets. So why haven’t we found proof of alien life yet? And what’s the probability of us contacting or being contacted anyway? That’s exactly what a famous math formula called the Drake Equation tries to answer. It takes into account a whole variety of factors, including the rate at which stars like the Sun are born, how many of those stars have planets, how many of those planets are hospitable to life and the likelihood of intelligent life on that habitable planet communicating with us. Today on the show, Regina Barber and Seven Rasmussen talk about the equation as it was created back in 1961 – and whether it still matters for astrobiologists today.

Interested in more episodes on space or math? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org – we might answer it in a future episode!

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The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)’s AI Factory Accelerator Programme, now in full operation following a pilot initiative, gives startups access to sovereign compute, technical support and training to support innovation across industries.  Many of these companies are also members of the NVIDIA Inception program for cutting-edge startups — and as of today, access to some […]

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 20 – An… 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. An Anticrepuscular […]

Human activities have become intertwined with how water is distributed across the continents. A new study brings their effects into sharper focus.

Written by Alex Innanen, Atmospheric Scientist at York University Earth planning date: Friday, Oct. 9, 2026 Happy New Mars Year! We mark the start of a new year on Mars at the beginning of the northern hemisphere spring, or the vernal equinox. We then keep track of the seasons by counting degrees of solar longitude […]

Apparently, macOS 27 comes with a small mystery people are trying to figure out. Recently, while troubleshooting a PATH issue, I noticed an entry for /pkg/env/global/bin. At first, I worried that something had gone horribly wrong. Turns out, this is part of macOS 27.0… though no one is sure what it’s for yet. In a post about how macOS’s boot volume structure has been updated, Howard Oakley explains that the pkg directory was added to the Data volume in macOS 26.4, but not added to the root of the Signed System Volume until 27.0. He also notes that this is sort of a big deal. The weird thing is, as far as I can tell, no one seems to know what this new directory is for! It’s odd that Apple would update their filesystem structure, add it to everyone’s PATH, and there not be some explicable reason. ↫ Gavin Anderegg I guess we’ll find out eventually, but this does highlight something that I find extremely unsettling about this. With proprietary software like macOS, you literally are at the mercy of whatever Apple decides to do to “your” operating system. You install an update, and aside from all the documented changes, there’s going to be changes you simply have no idea what they’re for, or why they’re there. Don’t get me wrong, there’s obviously not something nefarious going on in this particular case, but it still feels wild to me that people just willingly accept this. In the open source world, stuff like this simply does not happen. You’re not going to install a bunch of Fedora updates one day and find a mysterious, undocumented folder in your PATH. Such a change will be documented, but even in the unlikely event it’s not, you can just go through the commit history and find out exactly why the new folder is there, and what its intended purpose is or is going to be. Considering the state of the world and the people corporations like Apple really answer to, I would not be comfortable with letting them dictate even something as simple as my PATH.

French authorities say that the Limoges city hall, built in the late 19th century and celebrated as an architectural gem, was the victim of an arson attack amid mass protests in France over the weekend

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's spacecraft is expected to reach the Martian system in August 2027 and return samples from the moon Phobos to Earth in 2031

Rockets vibrate, shake, and flex intensely as they climb into space, and spacecraft packed with delicate scientific instruments must survive those forces. Before any rocket leaves the ground, NASA engineers work to predict how those stresses will affect every part of a spacecraft. To do that, engineers in the Dynamic Environments Group with NASA’s Launch […]

In the cavernous hall of Kraftwerk, a former power station in Berlin, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang sat down to discuss Germany’s AI roadmap, and in particular, the industrial applications of AI. Huang opened by tracing NVIDIA’s longstanding relationship with German industry, beginning with gaming systems, workstations and automotive […]

The rebellion against "Harvie’s Dyke," a pair of stone walls erected in the 1820s, was a triumph for the workers and middle classes of Glasgow, who used riots, boycotts and lawsuits to win back access to the River Clyde

Research teams at NASA’s Glenn Research Center are involved in developing theory and software to predict the noise from aircraft engines. This software helps engineers to design and analyze new and improved aircraft propulsion systems. Copies of our software can be requested from NASA’s Software Catalog. JeNo Development of jet noise prediction codes is multifaceted. […]

Research teams at the NASA Glenn Research Center perform experiments in world-class facilities such as the 9- by 15-Foot Low-Speed Wind Tunnel (9 x15 LSWT), the Aero-Acoustic Propulsion Laboratory (AAPL), the Small Hot Jet Acoustic Rig (SHJAR), the Nozzle Acoustic Test Rig (NATR), the DGEN AeroPropulsion Research Turbofan (DART), and the Acoustical Testing Laboratory (ATL). […]

The four crew members in NASA’s simulated Mars mission have spent the past year living and working in isolation in a confined habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

To measure airflow and sound, research teams at the NASA Glenn Research Center use special instrumentation like particle image velocimetry, hot wire anemometry, Raman spectroscopy, microphones in phased arrays or continuously rotating rakes. The global aviation noise reduction community relies on data from NASA GRC experiments to validate theory and noise prediction software. Rotating Rake […]

NASA’s Curiosity captures the dawn on Mars – as well as elongated ridges formed by wind erosion, or yardangs – in this close-up from a panorama released on Oct. 6, 2026. This is the most detailed view yet of distant, wind-carved Martian cliffs, highlighting features the mission’s scientists have long been waiting to see up […]

Unlike other recent AI proofs, this one has been unpacked by human experts. The implications, one mathematician said, are “staggering.”

The post AI Proved the Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis. What Happens Now? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The phenomenon, which involves the geographic poles, is distinct from when the magnetic poles move. The planet's solid crust and molten mantle occasionally shift and subsequently reorient themselves during what's called true polar wander

At a creative industry event that took place today in Berlin — hosted in collaboration with Adobe, Bertelsmann, NVIDIA and UFA — the latest advancements in intelligent media were on display. Key to the news: the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) is collaborating with NVIDIA to expand its sovereign framework with cloud, open models and integration […]

Animals can now cross a dangerous stretch of Interstate 25 thanks to new infrastructure, including fences, underpasses and a massive overpass, which has led to a 91 percent reduction in wildlife-vehicle collisions

Archaeologists recovered the head of one statue that might have measured nearly 28 feet tall. It could point to a major building site commissioned by the pharaoh

Saunas have gone from a Scandinavian tradition to a global wellness phenomenon. But how long should a person endure heat? Do saunas actually work? And if so, what are their benefits? NPR health reporter Will Stone goes as deep as the science will let him to explore the sauna hype waves and find out what happens to our bodies when we step in them.

Interested in more about thermal physiology? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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In what is quite a major achievement, Wine has been ported and made to work on OpenBSD. We have since tested several dozens of 64-bit Windows software, mostly successfully. See screenshots, livestream recordings for example. Even the Remaster of The Witcher 3 which released just last month runs, and runs well (requires adding in vkd3d-proton; see README; livestream which looks less fluent than it is due to the on-system recording with ffmpeg). ↫ Thomas Frohwein The biggest limitation seems to be the lack of support for WoW64, so 32bit Windows software won’t work. Still, this is a massive milestone for OpenBSD, and makes especially gaming a somewhat viable option on OpenBSD.

What if a regular, normal NetBSD installation is too plebeian for you? This is a quick overview which attempts to synthesize DW Armstrong’s tutorial on NetBSD encryption with the cgdroot page from the NetBSD wiki in a single MBR partition, divided into multiple disklabel slices to preserve MBR entries. ↫ indigoparadox Web Zone What if you need this?

Significant changes in this release include some significant binfmt_misc extensions, some group-scheduling work aimed at improving performance on large systems, the new failfs filesystem that fails all operations, the fchroot() system call, global per-CPU data for BPF programs, the completion of the sched_ext subscheduler feature, working-set tracking for virtual machines, alternative data-stream support in the ntfs3 filesystem, a long list of SMB server improvements, and much more. ↫ “corbet” at LWN.net It’ll make it way to your distribution of choice soon enough.

APODScienceAPODAPOD: 2026 October 19 –…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. Treble Clef: Unusual X-ray Hot Radio Source Explanation: Explanation : What is Treble Clef? This unusual radio […]

Fall color covers the forested slopes of Bieszczady National Park, while patches of polonina, a type of high-mountain meadow, have turned tan.

In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 8087 supports advanced operations such as tangents, square roots, and logarithms, this article focuses on basic arithmetic operations: addition and subtraction. The 8087 provided a spectacular speed improvement over the 8086 processor, speeding up addition by a factor of almost 100, and complicated operations by even more. In this article, I examine the 8087’s microcode and circuitry to explain exactly how floating-point addition and subtraction are implemented, including numerous special cases for infinities and other special values. ↫ Ken Shirriff Shirriff took an actual chisel to the 8087 coprocessor to gain access to the insides for highly detailed photographs, taken with a microscope. They look amazing.

Only a few day ago I linked to a massive collection of original Palm OS development resources, and today we can take a look at what it was like to put all of those resources into practice: the original source code for the Palm OS port of Lemmings. With these resources combined, there’s no excuse to not building any Palm OS applications. I’d really like a modern email client, a Fediverse client, and a slightly more modern browser surely wouldn’t hurt. Get on it!

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 18 –… 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. Sonified: Eagle Nebula […]

NVIDIA RTX Spark laptops are now available, bringing NVIDIA Blackwell RTX graphics, up to 128GB of unified memory and the full NVIDIA AI platform to slim, premium Windows PCs.  Starting at $2,399, laptops from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI bring powerful local AI, content creation and gaming capabilities to a portable device, with […]

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 17… 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. 3D 67P Explanation: Put […]

It’s been two years since my initial post about making GNOME OS an end-user general purpose OS. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve hit a major milestone! TL;DR: We’re launching a new edition called “GNOME OS Preview”, which is built from the latest stable GNOME release. This means that GNOME OS is no longer just a nightly OS for GNOME developers and testers! ↫ Aaron Ardiri A number of changes and improvements have made the move from nightly status to preview status possible. They’ve made GNOME OS handle environments with limited amounts of RAM much better – not a luxury, these days – including the ability to dynamically increase the swap space if needed. In addition, the work to make it much easier to install and test daily Flatpak builds of applications is now part of GNOME OS, as is the effort to make command-line utilities manageable in the same way as Flatpaks. As the blog post notes, there’s still a ton of work left to do before GNOME OS is ready for everyone. They’re going to bet heavily on systemd-homed to enable, among other things, per-user disk encryption, and there’s a new installer coming, as well. They also want to ship GNOME’s preinstalled applications as Flatpaks, integrate delta updates, and much more. It all looks incredibly appealing, even if I am not the target user for something like GNOME OS.

This repository contains approximately 1 GB of historical Palm OS development material, collected over many years of working with the platform. The archive includes a mixture of publicly distributed development resources, personal development material, technical references, and historical artifacts. ↫ Aaron Ardiri An incredible resource for anyone wishing to dive into Palm OS programming and development in this day and age.

"Rembrandt and the Ancients" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will unpack an "underexplored but vital" part of the Dutch master's career, putting his paintings and drawings in conversation with the antecedents that inspired them

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has named Stephen Cash director of the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, effective Monday, Oct. 19. Cash, a veteran NASA engineer and aerospace executive, returns to lead the center where he began his career more than four decades ago. “Marshall contributions to NASA’s missions are historic and it’s […]

An archaeologist has uncovered an ancient fortification linked to Magnus Maximus, a fourth-century ruler who is immortalized in the medieval "Mabinogion" stories as Macsen Wledig

Jackie died in August after receiving weeks of intensive care at the Ojai Raptor Center in California. The necropsy results are surprising, given that Jackie's symptoms were unusual for bird flu and there is no ongoing outbreak among bald eagles

Dedicated to the works of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, the museum is centered around his historic home and studio. The first phase of its yearslong renovation is complete, featuring expanded exhibition spaces

Lab experiments suggest that tiny bits of plastic can react with water inside us to produce highly reactive molecules. They can lead to damaging oxidative stress and inflammation

Shortly after NASA’s Artemis II mission splashed down on April 10, 2026, U.S. Navy divers captured underwater imagery of the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield. In the months after, the agency measured whether the thermal protection system effectively safeguarded the crew and Orion systems as the spacecraft reentered Earth’s atmosphere. This rigorous analysis confirmed that the […]

Larger breeds like Great Danes seem to accumulate changes to chemical tags on their DNA more quickly than tinier breeds, such as chihuahuas. These alterations allow potentially harmful 'jumping genes' to move around their genomes

As the supercooled propellant flowed into the core stage, and NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket roared to life, Allison Mjoen and her family watched with awe and pride. Mjoen, NASA’s operations manager for the agency’s Exploration Ground Systems Program, helped shape the systems and ground operations that will one day send humans back to […]

The roughly two- to four-pound predator lived alongside dinosaurs some 165 million years ago. A fossil found in northern China shows the strange creature had a surprisingly modern throat structure

Moritz Hardt, author of a new book on benchmarks, believes these “standardized tests” for artificial intelligence are fundamentally broken — but not unfixable.

The post He Wants AI Benchmarking To Be a Science, Not a Dark Art first appeared on Quanta Magazine

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features the edge-on, intermediate spiral galaxy NGC 1827, located roughly 37 million light-years away in the constellation Columba, the Dove.

The massive "Portrait of Mai" depicts the first Pacific Islander to visit Britain, a young man who became a quasi-celebrity in the 1770s after joining the expedition of explorer James Cook

While dinosaurs roamed the earth, giant monsters roamed the sea. Mosasaurs were like the deadly T-rexes of the ocean: They grew up to the size of a bus and chased down their smaller prey. A recent study in the journal Current Biology details just how exactly they might have done that. And the answer is fast – way faster than humans can swim – and sneakily.

Interested in more animal or paleontological news? Email us what you want us to talk about at shortwave@npr.org

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 16 –… 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 […]

High-definition images of nighttime lights show where the hurricane knocked out power along the Florida Panhandle and how quickly the lights came back.

OpenVMS isn’t exactly the easiest platform to get into, with even the first major hurdle – licensing! – being a bit of a complex issue. To address this and other issues people new to OpenVMS might run into, VSI, the company currently developing OpenVMS, launched its new VSI How-to Portal. For now, it covers things like licensing, installing and updating OpenVMS for x86, TCP/IP configuration, and setting up SSH. The company plans to expand the portal with more articles based on customer and user feedback, so hopefully more information will appear soon. Most of us are probably not particularly not particularly experienced with OpenVMS, so having a portal like this can really help get you started.

Microsoft’s been claiming for a while now that they’re working on improving performance and responsiveness in Windows, with a particular focus on making more efficient use of memory. This is probably the only positive thing to come out of the RAM crisis Microsoft helped create and is currently still fueling. The company’s now claiming that Windows 11 is “up to 20% more responsive” thanks to these efforts. The result is a Windows experience that’s up to 20% more responsive, with improvements you can feel as soon as you boot into your PC and extending to Start, File Explorer, Search, Snipping Tool, Microsoft 365, Edge and more. A big part of that work is making smarter use of memory and system resources. We’ve improved memory management and efficiency across Windows to help keep more of your PC’s resources focused on what you’re actively doing. That work can make an especially meaningful difference on PCs with 8GB of memory. Windows can now keep up to 2GB more of your active data in memory instead of moving it to slower storage, helping your PC stay responsive as you open more apps or browser tabs. Windows is also making additional memory-saving improvements that reduce background memory use. For example, on PCs with 8GB of memory or less, Widgets load only when you open them, making more than 200 MB of memory available for your apps and other work. It’s one example of the broader work underway to reduce the Windows memory footprint and deliver a fast, responsive experience across the PCs people use every day, an area we’ve made an explicit focus for Windows. ↫ Navjot Virk on the Windows Blogs If, for a moment, we take these claims at face value, they’re simply good news for every Windows 11 user, and legitimately the only good thing to come out of the RAM crisis. These kind of claims are always hard to measure, especially considering just how varied the Windows software and hardware ecosystem is, but I’m sure people good at benchmarking are going to try and find some more definitive answers here. In the same blog post, Microsoft also highlights several other recent improvements it’s made to Windows 11, like the new search experience we talked about recently, a brand new Photos application, some new whiteboard-like application, and several more things. Considering how complex Windows’ versioning scheme and various branches have become, I have no idea when these features and improvements actually make their way to your machine. On a slightly related note, Microsoft also unveiled that it’s bringing Microsoft Defender to Linux, with a particular focus on desktop Linux. Even Microsoft has to face the reality of the rising popularity of Linux on the desktop.

Since 1972, experts have added 27 seconds to Coordinated Universal Time to keep it aligned with Earth's rotation, but it has been an imperfect fix

The landmark institution’s first exhibition pays homage to a historic Renault automobile plant that once operated on the Île Seguin in the Seine River. "The project called for a great deal of perseverance," one official says

NASA is playing an important role in JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) MMX (Martian Moons eXploration) mission, to advance our understanding of Mars’ moons and build on the agency’s long history of exploring the Red Planet. The mission aims to characterize and determine the origin of Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos and deliver a sample […]

Corporal Claude Nuttall recorded his wartime experiences in the diary. Now, after decades of research, a museum curator is telling the soldier's story in a new book

The 18th-century painter was a key practitioner of "capriccio" artworks, which blended scenes of everyday life with bold, out-of-place structures. This work was not known to exist for centuries and could now fetch up to $80,000

A phenomenon rarer than a solar eclipse and more powerful than any single storm system is unfolding this fall, and NASA is tracking it closely. El Niño is a natural climate pattern that emerges roughly every two to seven years marked by warmer-than-normal water temperatures in parts of the equatorial Pacific. NASA scientists are keeping […]

From the International Space Station’s unique position 250 miles above Earth, the Sun is a vital source of energy. Solar power supports the station’s life support systems, daily activities, and hundreds of research investigations that improve life on Earth and prepare humans for deep space exploration. Over the past five years, NASA augmented the station’s […]

A new beginning for Windows PCs starts tomorrow with the launch of NVIDIA RTX Spark — one PC built for creators, gamers and AI agents. All are invited to celebrate with NVIDIA and partners at launch events around the world. Share Your Spark Every PC has a story. What was your first Windows PC, and […]

These crags don't match the rest of the mountain, and scientists don't know how they formed

Rules, a historic restaurant where the likes of Charles Dickens and Madonna have dined, is changing hands for only the fourth time in over 200 years. Visitors can see artifact-covered walls and indulge in rich British cuisine

Registration is open for the 2026 NASA Space Apps Challenge, a two-day global event on Saturday, Nov. 14 and Sunday, Nov. 15, where teams work to create solutions inspired by NASA’s most ambitious exploration goals and making use of the agency’s free and open data. The annual challenge, often called a hackathon, is an intensive, […]

NASA has selected 12 U.S. institutions to receive $12 million to accelerate academic research and technology development in support of the agency’s priorities for exploring the Moon, Mars, and deep space. Through NASA’s Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP) Space Technology Artemis Research (M‑STAR) initiative, selected institutions will each receive up to $1 million […]

If all goes to plan, officials hope to vaccinate up to 100 of the large seabirds on Albatross Island, giving each two doses of the vaccine. Afterward, they plan to keep tabs on the birds using remote cameras and follow-up visits

NVIDIA today released Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, an open 120-billion-parameter model that delivers the fastest task completion and highest accuracy for specialized always-on agents. Joining it are two new edge models: Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B 24GB, optimized to balance intelligence and speed per GB for local agentic workloads, and Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB, optimized […]

NASA’s Artemis II mission sent four astronauts around the Moon and brought them safely back to Earth, laying a foundation for crewed flights to the Moon’s surface. Additional engineering data analysis of the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield confirmed initial data showing the heat shield performed as expected.   In particular, NASA measured whether the thermal protection […]

Customs officers say they found the creatures hidden in the men's clothes after they touched down on separate flights from Cuba, and it's unclear whether the two incidents are related. Wildlife trafficking is the world's fourth-largest form of organized crime

A formation of radio waves looks remarkably like a treble clef in this Oct. 14, 2026, image from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Researchers used Chandra to find that the Treble Clef is likely caused by an outburst from a supermassive black hole, followed by a collision of two galaxy clusters. Read more about this discovery. […]

Evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers explains how fungal networks in soil trade nutrients with plants, help keep carbon underground, and strike bargains without having a brain.

The post How Do Fungi Keep the Planet Healthy? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Graphical user interfaces for DOS were a dime-a-dozen back in the ’90s, but of course faded into irrelevance as time went on. But what if you still run DOS today, and want a maintained graphical shell instead of the rather limited DOS command line? Costa is a small and lightweight application which runs on top of MS-DOS or compatible operating systems. It replaces the DOS-prompt with a clean, user-friendly interface – a so-called GUI (Graphical User Interface). Costa comes packed with a bunch of useful accessories and can be used with or without a mouse. Developed by Jacob Palm, a Danish IT-professional and hobby developer, the first release of Costa came way back in 2004. Over the years – and through several releases – Costa has gradually evolved into what it is today, with new releases still coming out regularly as of 2025. ↫ Costa website Costa comes bundled with a number of useful utilities, a few games, and useful features like a desktop with custom icons, virtual desktop support, a file selector, and much more. The latest release, version 1.8.0, was released in late 2024, and should run on just about any IBM PC-compatible, but a 386 is recommended. It’s been tested with a variety of DOS flavours, including FreeDOS ad DOSBox, so it should run pretty much anywhere.

Ubuntu 26.10 has landed. Ubuntu 26.10 brings significant progress for security, and strengthens the platform with the full adoption of Rust-based coreutils, post-quantum-ready package signing, and expanded TPM-backed full-disk encryption support. Enterprise authentication gains deeper integration with Microsoft Entra ID, including password and multi-factor authentication. Linux kernel 7.3 extends support for the latest hardware, alongside new RISC-V desktop images and optimized amd64v3 installation images. ↫ Ubuntu 26.10 release announcement Of course, it comes with the latest version of GNOME, and the whole family of Ubuntu variants focusing on other desktops have also been updated. While I doubt many people here run Ubuntu, it’s still quite popular, and serves as the base for countless other distributions.

Dial in the next gaming session this GFN Thursday. New NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 controls give GeForce NOW members more choice over how supported games look and perform in the cloud, even without the latest hardware. Then, step into the Shroud as Keen Games’ Enshrouded leaves early access with its 1.0 release, or let the bolts […]

The cemetery site was established in 1872, when the state capital Bismarck was a small frontier community called Edwinton. Most, but not all, of its gravesites were exhumed five years later to make way for a railroad

Much of today’s scientific progress begins with computation.  But turning accelerated computing’s potential into scientific progress — modeling climate systems, designing molecules, simulating materials and more — depends on more than breakthrough technology. Especially for smaller labs, early-career scientists or science-based startups, the hardest part of research can be everything that comes before the science: […]

In 2022, parachutist Luigi Cani dropped 100 million seeds over the Amazon rainforest while skydiving. He did it to raise awareness about deforestation and help regrow the forest. But there has been little scientific follow up to see whether it worked. So, today, we talk to restoration ecologist Pedro Brancalion about the surprising complexity involved in regrowing a forest, and when dropping seeds from the sky – by people or by drones – could work.

If you liked this episode, check out our others on building microforests in cities and scientists’ creative idea to save a keystone tree species that grows very slowly.

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

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The Nordic countries have become the European leader in unicorn startup density, producing the most emerging companies valued at $1 billion or more per capita on the continent. Now, a new chapter for the region is unfolding as countries race to build one of Europe’s most consequential technology ecosystems. The many computing advancements already underway […]

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 15 – 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 Milky […]

During El Niño, a cascade of fires across the tropics begins in equatorial Asia and continues in the central and eastern Amazon.

Forgejo v17.0 is available. Repository funding links are supported. Repositories can be migrated from Bitbucket Data Center. LFS support is revamped. Job summaries from Forgejo Actions jobs are displayed.

These 19 recognized images highlight the diversity across our planet and the value in appreciating and protecting the natural world

NASA will preview two upcoming spacewalks to complete solar array installation and power augmentation of the International Space Station during a news conference at 2 p.m. EDT, Tuesday, Oct. 20, from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. NASA will stream the event through a variety of platforms. Learn where to watch online: https://www.nasa.gov/live NASA participants […]

The ship was likely transporting huge jars of olive oil or wine across the Mediterranean when it sank to the seafloor. One archaeologist "could not believe how much" residue remained inside

Editor’s Note: This article was updated Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026, to reflect a change to the event start time. Students in Florida will hear from NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney as they answer prerecorded STEM questions while aboard the International Space Station. The Earth-to-space call will begin at 12:30 p.m. EDT Friday, Oct. 16, […]

The Dutch Post-Impressionist painted "Chestnut Trees in Blossom" during the highly productive yet tragic final months of his life. It is heading to auction as part of a "legendary" private collection which also includes works from Cézanne and Renoir

Astronomers have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to break down the cause of a remarkable formation of radio waves they have nicknamed the “Treble Clef” because its distinct shape strongly resembles the musical symbol. The researchers discovered the Treble Clef is likely caused by an outburst from a supermassive black hole, followed by a collision […]

Sunlight illuminates the exhaust plumes of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Dragon spacecraft on Oct. 13, 2026. This visual phenomenon is known as a “jellyfish”; it happens near sunrise or sunset when the exhaust plume from the rocket becomes brightly illuminated, creating a glowing shape resembling a jellyfish. The mission lifted off […]

KDE turns 30 today, and they’re celebrating it with a brand new KDE Plasma release: version 6.8 is here. On the accessibility front, 6.8 brings a new dwell clicker function (meaning a click will register if the pointer is held still for a short while) and support for the Bikram Sambat calendar and the Amharic language. I always love it when I see support for new languages and scripts, especially when, as is the case here, it’s a language spoken as a first language by 25 million people. The Plasma remote desktop has also been improved with bi-directional copy/paste, performance and quality improvements, and more, and you can now record microphone and audio while screen recording with Spectacle. In System Monitor, you can now assign processes and tasks to specific processors/cores, which is a great feature for people running intensive tasks but who would still like to, you know, do other things while those tasks are running. KDE 6.8 drops support for X11, focusing entirely on Wayland. Of course, X11 applications will remain usable thanks to Xwayland, and KDE’s applications will continue to support X11 in case you’re using them outside of KDE. This release also further expands the Union theming system, now adding support for styling Qt Widgets. Union is still in beta, so you’ll have to enable it to test it. There’s a ton more, too, but these are some of the highlights. KDE Plasma 6.8 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.

You know the drill by now – a new month, a new Haiku activity report. This past month doesn’t seem to have any big ticket items, but instead contains a long list of smaller but still welcome fixes. Various filesystem drivers saw some work, a few bugs in virtio drivers were fixed, and NVMM execution is now easily interruptible by signals which should improve performance in various emulators like QEMU. Be sure to comb through the complete list to see if there’s anything in there that impacts you.

The ESA – not, not the cool one – a lobby group made up of various videogame and entertainment companies, has asked the US Trade Representative (USTR) to add Anbernic to its list of companies that are supposedly notorious for engaging in and facilitating piracy. If you’re unaware, Anbernic is one of the bigger names in Android and Linux-based handheld gaming devices targeted at the retrocomputing market. While many online sellers do include an SD card full of ROMs alongside emulation hardware of all types, Anbernic itself does not appear to do the same when selling directly from its website. Regardless, the ESA argues that these ROM-laden Anbernic devices selling through “normal retail channels” help to “normalize hardware-based piracy by delivering illicit catalogues through a polished consumer product.” This, the ESA says, meets the threshold for a “superfake,” an ill-defined designation that applies to “high-quality counterfeit trademark goods … on a commercial scale.” ↫ Kyle Orland at Ars Technica There’s a lot of murkiness surrounding whether or not Anbernic sells their devices with preloaded ROMs or not. The number of reports from people who say they did get a ton of ROMs on their Anbernic devices, bought from Anbernic’s own store, is large enough that it’s clearly something they do. However, there’s an equal number of people who say their Anbernic devices were completely free of ROMs, and I’m one of them – I’ve bought like three or so devices from their store over the years, and they never came with any ROMs. My most recent purchase was an RG 35XXPro Linux-based model, and there were no ROMs on it (I replaced the stock operating system with Knulli, which has been a great experience). If Anbernic does indeed ship at least some of their devices with ROMs preinstalled, then it’s their own damn fault if that lands them in legal trouble. It’s not like downloading ROMs is particularly difficult (just do an internet search for your preferred system and something like “ROM pack” and you’ll get the console’s complete library in a single download), so they really have no need to do so. There’s one extra layer here though. Third-party resellers like Amazon offer loads of Anbernic devices preloaded with SD cards full of ROMs, all from third parties not affiliated with Anbernic. And wouldn’t you know it – Amazon is a member of the ESA lobby group. In other words, the problem also lies with lax retailers not properly vetting what they’re offering, but instead of going after places like Amazon, they’re going after Anbernic instead. Amazon is a haven for illegal and counterfeit products, but they’re so wealthy and powerful they just get away with it.

If you’ve ever had your car start sluggishly, or not at all, on a particularly frigid winter morning, you know standard batteries do not like extreme cold. That’s why NASA researchers are working to develop a battery that could function in the brutal cold of the Moon’s South Pole, where nighttime temperatures plunge to minus […]

A collision may have left these galaxies without dark matter. That spells trouble for alternative gravity theories.

The post Triplet of ‘Ghostly’ Galaxies Hints at What Dark Matter Is — and Isn’t first appeared on Quanta Magazine

NASA will provide an update on its plans to return American astronauts to the surface of the Moon by 2028 at 2 p.m. EDT, Friday, Oct. 23, at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Learn where to watch online: https://www.nasa.gov/live Participants in the briefing include: The update will include details about NASA’s Artemis III […]

The bungled heist took place at the Renoir Museum on the French Riviera in September. French authorities made six arrests and believe they prevented another "imminent" theft, possibly at a nearby modern art museum

The 19-line poem was inscribed on a stone slab in the Bir al-Shaghala necropolis. The lament "is a highly literary and original epigram," a scholar says

Police departments across the U.S. are installing Flock cameras, saying the surveillance devices help deter theft and solve crimes, like helping find stolen property and missing people. But as the technology and its use by federal agencies expands, a handful of people have taken matters into their own hands. A hacker collective ripped down a Flock camera and made a copy of the software inside for investigative journalists at 404 Media and Wired. We talk to one of those journalists, Joseph Cox, about what he and his colleagues found, how the data is being used, why some residents are pushing back against the cameras and the future of the technology.

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

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Across industries, the U.K. is putting the full stack to work. The scale of deployment is growing fast, from enterprises transforming their businesses to startups solving some of the planet’s hardest problems. NVIDIA is putting that principle into practice, including through a five-year, $250 million compute commitment to strengthen the U.K.’s agentic safety and security […]

Keeping a city running means making decisions that affect residents every day — from when to repair a road to how to use energy more efficiently. Across the EMEA region, cities and local software, infrastructure and integration partners are using NVIDIA accelerated computing to build physical AI agents and digital twins that help teams make […]

What a cosmic coincidence! In today’s image, Mars joins the Beehive cluster below an auroral curtain and above a horizon of happy little trees near Lansjärv, Sweden.

Though it remained offshore, the storm lashed coastal areas with high winds and flooding—and produced remarkable rippling patterns in the upper atmosphere.

Are you aware of ReFS, Microsoft’s next-generation file system for Windows? I’m sure the average OSNews reader is, but I really wonder how many people are using it out in the wider world, even though Microsoft keeps improving it. Since earlier this year, Windows Server and Windows 11 can boot from ReFS volumes, and it’s used by Windows’ Dev Drive feature as well. What Microsoft doesn’t seem to want, though, is people using ReFS on removable drives. Starting with Windows updates released on and after October 13, 2026, Microsoft is making hardening changes to the Resilient File System (ReFS). This article describes Windows hardening changes for ReFS volumes that are mounted from removable media. ReFS on removable media, such as a USB disk, is not a supported configuration. The changes add auditing and enforcement controls that help administrators identify these volumes and prevent them from being mounted. ↫ Microsoft Knowledge Base article I’m oddly fascinated by this. Apparently, there are enough people out there trying to use ReFS on removable media to warrant the above auditing and enforcement controls, which is fascinating in an of itself. On top of that, using ReFS on removable media is apparently also dangerous enough – which raises the question of why, exactly, it’s so dangerous in the first place. Microsoft doesn’t really explain itself here, other than saying it’s “not a supported configuration”. I wonder if and when Microsoft will move from NTFS to ReFS as the default file system for new Windows installations. It’s been around for quite a while now, and there’s no denying that competing operating systems, especially in the server space, have file systems that are far superior to NTFS (like Btrfs, ZFS, and others), and I’m assuming Microsoft would love to catch up. It’s been a long time since Microsoft changed Windows’ default file system, however, and with the massive number of people using Windows, it’s not something to take lightly. Then again, Apple migrated hundreds of millions of iPhones, iPads, and Macs to a brand new file system without anybody noticing a thing, and as far as I can recall, without any problems.