The Antenna

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.

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.

Both NeXT and Improv brought innovative solutions to their respective computing questions of the day. NeXT made UNIX palatable to those scared of the terminal, debuted Display Postscript on a mega-pixel display, and made development for the system a snap. Improv rethought multi-dimensional data modeling, offered English-like formulas, and made it easy to rearrange data views on a whim. The bones of both remain to this day. NeXT’s operating system, NeXTSTEP / OPENSTEP, morphed into macOS, and by extension iOS. Lotus abandoned Improv fairly quickly, but a quick survey of today’s spreadsheets shows a universal embrace of pivot tables. ↫ Christopher Drum I had never heard of Lotus Improv, so I learned a lot reading this outstanding article by Drum.

NASA engineer and astronaut Christina Koch will serve as the agency’s acting deputy chief engineer beginning on Sunday, Nov. 1, following the retirement of Katherine Van Hooser, who will conclude more than 35 years of distinguished service to the agency on Wednesday, Oct. 21. In her new role, Koch will help lead NASA’s engineering community, […]

Fragments of the spouted cup, known as a "tettina," were unearthed in England over a decade ago. It has recently been restored and put on display for the first time

The feathered residents have attracted lots of attention, as their species is considered an extremely rare sight in the city

Zavodovski Island, a remote, uninhabited volcanic island between South America and Antarctica, lost 63 percent of its chinstrap penguins between 2011 and 2025, according to a new study

Corporal Clarence Watson was among 10 American airmen aboard a B-24H Liberator when it crashed under foggy conditions. The crew was training for Operation Carpetbagger, a top-secret effort to fly deep into Nazi-occupied Europe

Description This infographic illustrates the distances driven by various rovers on the surface of Earth’s Moon and Mars. Of the vehicles shown, the NASA Mars rovers Perseverance and Curiosity are still operational and moving across the surface; the figures shown for those two are distances driven as of Oct. 11, 2026. As of that date, […]

Description Members of NASA’s Perseverance Mars mission team gather in the Mars Yard at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California with a certificate from Guinness World Records marking the rover distance record on the Red Planet. Positioned in front of the team is OPTIMISM (Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments […]

Description Rover tracks and a rocky Martian landscape are shown in this image captured by one of the navigation cameras (navcams) aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover on Oct. 11, 2026, the 2,006th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. During that sol’s drive, spanning 299.6 feet (91.31 meters), the mission passed a major milestone: pushing Perseverance’s total […]

Three NASA-supported small spacecraft, along with many commercial payloads, are shown before being encapsulated in a SpaceX Falcon 9 ahead of launch on Oct. 1, 2026. The ASCENT Propulsion Dual Mode CubeSat, the Supernova Remnants and Proxies for ReIonization Testbed Experiment (SPRITE) CubeSat, and the Small Spacecraft Propulsion and Inspection Capability (SSPICY) mission will demonstrate […]

Description A lunar lander from Voyager Technologies completed nearly three months of environmental testing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California in late September 2026. The tests demonstrate that the spacecraft is prepared to face the harsh conditions of launch, its journey to the Moon, and landing on the surface. Its final trial was […]

Wooden objects usually decompose quickly, but periodic flooding and minerals in the water helped preserve those at a site called Abric Romaní. Archaeologists documented nearly 600 wooden objects—or their imprints—and 13 were clearly shaped by human hands

According to a new survey, high-net-worth 20-somethings are emerging as the most active members of the global art trade, outspending other generations by wide margins. Their habits are changing how the art world works

In Bolotana, a town on the Italian island with about 2,300 residents, women who reach the age of 70 are about three times as likely to live to 100 than women in the United States, according to a new study

Researchers believe that the Hospital of the Holy Innocents, founded in the 11th or 12th century, may have had "little houses with a little yard" for up to 20 people with leprosy. "You’d need to have resources to get in here," one archaeologist says.

Two groups—the Tsimane forager-horticulturists in Bolivia and the Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania—remarkably share more than 1,200 gut microbe species. However, around 60 percent of them are rare or absent in people living in industrialized places, according to researchers

A commercial lander that will be at the forefront of NASA’s efforts to establish a Moon Base, humanity’s first lunar outpost, has passed a series of critical tests at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The tests simulated the extreme temperatures and vacuum of space, as well as the intense shaking and ear-splitting […]

NVIDIA RTX Spark is a new beginning for the PC — a reinvention combining the capabilities of a gaming PC, a creative studio and a personal AI supercomputer into a single superchip. With up to 128GB of unified memory and 1 petaflop of AI compute, RTX Spark delivers the full stack of NVIDIA RTX and […]

NASA’s SpaceX 35th commercial resupply mission lifted off at 6:33 a.m. EDT Tuesday aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, carrying more than 6,300 pounds of supplies and hardware, bound for the International Space Station. Following its successful launch, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft will […]

It's Halloween season — and what better way to celebrate October 13th than to explore the haunting sound of fear? That's exactly what we do in this episode, where host Regina G. Barber and NPR science correspondent Nate Rott dive into the science behind the sound of fear. Along the way, they find out what marmot shrieks, baby cries and horror movie soundtracks have in common — and what all of this tells us about ourselves.

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Companies in France are deploying agentic computing across industries spanning space, financial services, the public sector and scientific research, demonstrating how the country’s ecosystem has moved from ambition to application. France’s progress sits on deliberate groundwork. The AI Action Summit in February 2025 and Choose France Summits in 2025 and 2026 anchored major compute commitments […]

APODScienceAPODAPOD: 2026 October 13 –…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 Desert Stairway to Heaven Explanation: This stairway in Chile brings you only a little bit closer […]

If the thought of extraterrestrial objects crashing into Earth weren’t creepy enough, behold Australia’s Spider Crater.

NASA experiments focused on human and plant health and drug-resistant organisms will travel to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX’s 35th Commercial Resupply Services mission for the agency from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, advancing research that benefits life on Earth and future exploration. This research supports astronaut health during long-duration missions through […]

Many of us are interested in retrocomputing. There’s such a rich history of eras and machines to choose from, and countless niches and nuances to get lost in. Some people make it easy for themselves and are into old computers that are readily available at low prices, like the Commodore 64 or mid-’90s Macs, while others make it a bit harder on themselves by focusing on, say, computers from the former Soviet Union or NEC machines from Japan, which are harder to find and probably require a bigger purse, too. And then there’s people like me. I’m making things incredibly hard on myself, because I am obsessed with a very specific set of computers – just five machines, to be exact. “Surely,” I hear you think, “collecting a mere five specific machines can’t be that hard, no? That’s how many spare Pismos I have in a box in case my primary one needs spare parts!” Sadly for me, the five computers I want to own more than any other are not particularly easy to find, and even when you do find one of them, pricing can easily reach the level of a decent used car. Regular OSNews readers will know: I am infatuated with UNIX workstations, or more specifically, UNIX workstations of the early 2000, and even more specifically, the final five models built by the last commercial UNIX vendors. So far, I’ve managed to get my hands on a mere two of them, but before my time on this earth come to an end, I intend to complete my Holy Quinity of UNIX Workstations. Let’s go down the list, roughly ordered by attainability. HP c8000: PA-RISC/HP-UX The HP c8000 is the absolute pinnacle of HP’s long-running line of workstations based on the PA-RISC architecture. The first PA-RISC workstation was launched in 1986, and HP would continue to improve the architecture and release new workstations all the way up until 2004, when the c8000 would be their last model. For the c8000, HP actually went all-out: it came with two dual-core PA-RISC processors running between 900MHz and 1.1GHz (depending on configuration), a maximum of 24GB of RAM, and a variety of graphics cards to choose from. It was a veritable swan song for the architecture. HP’s commercial UNIX operating system, HP-UX, is even older than PA-RISC, with the first version being released in 1982, and its final version, HP-UX 11i v3 (or 11.31) released in 2007. This final version of HP-UX was updated and supported all the way up until 31 December 2025, but things are actually a bit more complicated than that. The last workstation release of HP-UX for PA-RISC was 11i v1 (released in 2000), while the last workstation release for Itanium workstations was 11i v2 (released in 2005). Do note that HP would provide updates, fixes, and patches to these versions long after the mentioned release dates. Speaking of Itanium, HP’s final Itanium workstation was the zx6000, released in 2002, which can pack up to two single-core 1.5Ghz Itanium 2 processors. There’s a very real case to be made that the zx6000 should also be part of this list, since it’s both a little faster than the c8000 (in its dual 1.5GHz configuration) and runs a newer version of HP-UX. However, since Itanium workstations never really had much of an impact in the market (even HP only ever released two models), and since it lacks the decades of pedigree that comes with PA-RISC, I consider them a mere curiosity. A very cool curiosity that I’d love to own, but a curiosity nonetheless. Anyway, this is one of the two machines I already own. I have a new-in-box (when I bought it a few years ago) HP c8000 with two dual-core 1.0Ghz PA-RISC processors, 8 GB of RAM, and an ATI FireGL X3 AGP graphics card with 256 MB, the fastest the c8000 will take. It’s also got two SCSCI 74 GB hard drives in a striped RAID for better performance, and I added an LTO 4 tape drive so I could create bootable backups that will restore the machine if anything ever goes wrong. It’s running HP-UX 11i v1, with as many of the updates, patches, and fixes I could find – which is one of the major roadblocks for anyone trying to get into HP-UX. Installation media are relatively easy to come by if you know where to look (assuming you know which specific version you need), but any updates, patches, and fixes from roughly later than 2005 are almost impossible to find. Some can be discovered through My HPE Software Center, if you have the patience of an angel and the perseverance of a honey badger (it’s a really terrible website), but most things are all locked away behind expensive support contracts or just gone entirely. I’ve contacted HPE several times in several different ways about the preservation of HP-UX, but they never replied – clearly, they just don’t care about the preservation of their legendary UNIX platform or the enthusiast community buying PA-RISC hardware on eBay for personal use and experimentation. Sad, but par for the course. The c8000 is quite easy to find on eBay, but do be aware that the “cheap” offerings of around €800 are the versions with just one processor. To get the version with two processors, expect to shell out twice as much. Spare parts and upgrades are readily available, too. Sun Ultra 45: SPARC/Solaris The Sun Ultra 45 needs no introduction here on OSNews, as I published an in-depth article about this machine and all the cool things you can do with it late last year. My Ultra 45 was an incredibly generous gift by Adriaan de Groot, who owned this machine as part of his work on porting KDE to Solaris way back in the day. I then ordered various upgrades to the machine to max it out with two UltraSPARC IIIi processors running at 1.6GHz, 8 GB of RAM, and the Sun XVR-2500 with 256MB, the fastest

Amos B. Batto has published an incredibly detailed look at the state of Linux on smartphones. It’s an excellent read you really shouldn’t skip. Five years ago, Linux phones looked like they were poised to become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly that has an iron grip on the mobile phone industry. Sadly, after a brief flash of activity and community engagement with the release of the Purism Librem 5 and the PINE64 PinePhone in 2020, the Linux phone market has generally stagnated. This stagnation occurred partly because of the problems at Purism and PINE64, but also because the available Linux SoC’s weren’t up to the task of running a modern smartphone, and the hardware industry wasn’t providing any good alternatives with good free/open source drivers. In addition, Plasma Mobile and Phosh were still inchoate mobile interfaces at the time, and there wasn’t a good distro option to run these interfaces on Android kernels with a normal integrated mobile SoC. The poor performance of the PinePhone and Librem 5 and the problems with the PinePhone Pro and the Librem 5 refunds sapped people’s enthusiasm and willingness to take a chance on the next Linux phone. Fortunately, all of these conditions are changing, and I believe that there is now the possibility that Linux could finally become a viable alternative to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS in the mobile space, just like desktop Linux has become a viable alternative to Windows and Mac OSX on the PC over the last three decades. This isn’t to say that mobile Linux will fundamentally challenge the business of Google or Apple, but the conditions are ripe for a small market to arise for Linux phones, similar to the way that people can currently buy Linux PCs from a number of small companies, such as TUXEDO, System76, Purism, Slimbook, ThinkPenguin, Ubuntushop.biz, Entroware, Star Labs, Juno, Laptop with Linux, Linux Certified, ArkPC, etc. ↫ Amos B. Batto I’m not quite as optimistic as Batto, and that’s almost exclusively down to how running Android applications through compatibility layers will remain an absolute necessity for anyone trying to use one of these Linux smartphones today. As long as crucial applications and services required to function in a modern society, like banking, messaging, government services, and so on, require the use of an Android application when using a Linux smartphone, I just don’t think any significant number of people will be switching over. What’s needed is something that will force these crucial services to become available on platforms other than Android and iOS, since I don’t think any of them will do so of their own volition. The only way I can see this happening is if the European Union, spurred on by our desire to reduce our dependence on adversarial US companies, mandates that several services marked as crucial must make themselves available on platforms other than Android and iOS. I doubt that will happen, but I honestly don’t see Linux smartphones becoming anything more than a mere curiosity you fiddle with at home, while carrying an Android phone or iPhone as your actual phone.

LineageOS has released its first version based on Android 17 – earlier than expected. We’ve been hard at work rebasing all of our changes and features since Android 17’s release in June. Android 17’s first release mainly contained iterative improvements and some UI/UX refinements, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google’s heavy refactoring over the last several versions, we were able to rebase onto Android 17’s code-base faster than anticipated. Yes you read that right: We’re early this year! ↫ LineageOS’ changelog written by Nolen Johnson This release also includes the latest Android security patches (October 2026), as well as a brand new browser-based USB flash tool to make installation easier. Many of the applications included with LineageOS have also been updated and improved, like its music player, image editor, web browser, and so on. The project also did a full accessibility audit of its installation process and application suite, which has already resulted in severalk accessibility improvements. LineageOS serves as the base for countless custom Android ROMs, so it’s great to see the project do this well.

As AI factories grow from megawatts to gigawatts, building them takes more than advanced computing. Open standards are helping the industry scale AI infrastructure faster, more efficiently and more reliably. At the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit, taking place in the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, NVIDIA announced new partnerships and contributions aimed at […]

Over the years, I learned about many gotchas and strange differences between keyboard handling on Mac and Windows – pertinent especially to web apps, which use the same codebase to cater to both. I thought it might be helpful to someone if I compile them all in one place. ↫ Marcin Wichary I knew most of these, but it’s still nice to have such a reference at hand when needed.

A mathematical mechanism enables AI models to process language at scale, undergirding the current AI revolution. Our columnist asks: Why is attention the key?

The post Is ‘Attention’ the Essence of Intelligence? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

APODScienceAPODAPOD: 2026 October 12 –…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. Jupiter and the Moons Explanation: How many moons can you see? The best answer is five: four […]

The ice reached its third-lowest maximum extent since satellite observations began.

APODScienceAPODAPOD: 2026 October 11 – Ice…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. Ice Fishing for Cosmic Neutrinos Explanation: Scientists are melting holes in the bottom of the world. […]

As part of the agency’s Inspiration Tour flyover, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman will pilot one of three F-5 fighter jets to kick off the New York Jets vs. Cleveland Browns game in East Rutherford, New Jersey, on Sunday, Oct. 11. NASA team members will engage with fans at the agency’s Experience Zone, located at the […]

APODScienceAPODAPOD: 2026 October 10…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. Lunar Farside Explanation: Tidally locked in synchronous rotation, the Moon always presents its familiar nearside to denizens of […]

The healthy and active babies are being cared for by first-time mother Zura, and the public can keep up with their antics through an online cheetah cub cam

"Wetland" is the latest installation of a high-tech traveling exhibition designed by Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen. It recreates the overlooked ecosystem with the help of folklore, soundscapes and video game software

When Pillay learned she had won the award, she was in the same courtroom where the Nuremberg Trials held Nazi war criminals to account. Her legal career has been dedicated to fighting against human rights abuses and mass atrocities

NASA is advancing American leadership in space by taking the next step toward a future where commercial space stations lead the way in low Earth orbit. On Friday, the agency released its final Request for Proposals inviting industry to submit plans for the next generation of commercial space stations. “In alignment with the President’s National […]

Jonathan, an Aldabra giant tortoise, is about 194 years old and the oldest land animal alive today. Discoveries about his genetics could provide clues to extending lifespan in humans

NASA is testing heat shields that can keep astronauts safe as they return from missions to the Moon and Mars in an unusual way: by taking out the trash. When Northrop Grumman 24th cargo resupply mission for NASA undocked from the International Space Station, it carried a fleet of 12 small, experimental capsules designed to […]

Archaeologists in Egypt discovered the signet ring while conducting excavations on the island of Antirhodos, which once housed a lavish Ptolemaic palace

The specimen was long mislabeled, according to a new study. Paleontologists identified it as a previously undescribed genus and species of gavial—a cousin of crocodiles and alligators—which they named after the ancient Egyptian god Horus

The size of the hole in the stratosphere's ozone layer fluctuates every year, but last month's, measuring 10.6 million square miles, was especially large

The settlement, founded by an early Christian saint in the 500s, is "far more than a small island church." It may have played a larger role in the Christianization of Britain than historians once realized

C.H. Waddington’s powerful image of embryonic stem cells specializing on a rolling landscape has captivated biologists since the 1950s. Experimental data is finally confirming, and complicating, his visionary ideas.

The post How Does Life Unfold? A Landscape Metaphor Comes Into Its Own. first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Galaxies warp and multiply as if in a house of mirrors in this image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope released on Sept. 29, 2026. The brilliant golden galaxies seen here are part of a galaxy cluster called MACS J0454.1-0300. The orange galaxies bunched together on one side of the image, however, are not actually […]

The bare-throated bellbird and the red-legged seriema can produce sounds at amplitudes that exceed 120 decibels, which puts them on par with a trumpeting elephant or a chainsaw

ADHD diagnoses are on the rise in the United States, but what if professionals are missing a key part of the disorder? In the 1970s, some clinicians recognized a lot of their ADHD patients had trouble with emotional regulation. But because it was easier to measure behavior rather than emotions, the criteria eventually fell off the radar. Today in the U.S., emotional dysregulation is not a part of the ADHD diagnostic criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Dr. Sasha Hamdani thinks that needs to change. In today’s episode, she talks about her book Too Sensitive, and explains what is going on in the brains of people with Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.

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

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

Wender, P. H. (1971). Minimal Brain Dysfunction in Children. Wiley-Interscience. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4581984/

Barkley, R. A. (2015). Emotional dysregulation is a core component of ADHD. In R. A. Barkley (Ed.), Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment (4th ed., pp. 81–115). Guilford Press. https://www.guilford.com/excerpts/barkley2.pdf?t=1

Shaw, P., Stringaris, A., Nigg, J., & Leibenluft, E. (2014). Emotion dysregulation in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 171(3), 276–293. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2013.13070966

Faraone, S. V., et al. (2019). Emotional dysregulation in adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: Validity, aetiology, and clinical implications. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 107, 132–142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.08.021

Bondü, R., & Esser, G. (2015). Justice and rejection sensitivity in children and adolescents with ADHD symptoms. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 24(2), 185–198. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-014-0560-9

Cleveland Clinic. (2022). Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD): Symptoms & Treatment. Cleveland Clinic Health Library. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24099-rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-rsd

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 9… 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. Stickney Crater Explanation: Stickney […]

Heavy rains since mid-September have caused widespread flooding that has affected millions of people across the country.

In this article. I am going to explain the different steps the I/O manager follows when initializing an I/O operation starting from determining the right target, choosing the right path and finally sending the request to be processed by the right drivers. To make it easier I choose to focus on read requests only since the major steps are common by all types of requests. ↫ Win-Ware A very in-depth look at Windows’ I/O Manager.

At OSNews, we love us a hobby operating system project. I started a small experiment: writing a very basic kernel in Swift, and running on QEMU. The goal is obviously not to replace Linux or any other popular kernel, but just to have fun and understand what is required to make a program run without an operating system underneath it. Actually I made a similar experiment years before with arOS 10 years ago. For the moment, the kernel does only one thing: it prints a message through QEMU and then waits forever, which is enough for a first deep dive. ↫ Carette Antonin This is effectively a “hello world” kernel, as it doesn’t actually do much else at this point. Still, there’s a ton of details in the article for the aspiring kernel developers among you.

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 […]

Media are invited to join NASA for a media teleconference at 4 p.m. EDT, Thursday, Oct. 15, to preview the agency’s contributions to JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission. The mission is scheduled to launch from JAXA’s Tanegashima Space Center in Japan on Monday, Oct. 19 EDT (Tuesday, Oct. 20 JST). […]

Editor’s note: This release was updated Oct. 8, 2026 with the formal name of the summit. NASA is launching two new science and technology initiatives to deepen scientific understanding and accelerate the innovation that will shape America’s future in space. The initiatives are announced in conjunction with the White House Office of Science and Technology […]

Researchers found the structure's remains, as well as fragments of statues, while excavating near the Kapersburg fort, an ancient Roman military fortification on the outskirts of modern-day Frankfurt

The Romantic painter completed "Rome, From Mount Aventine" in the 1830s. It became his most expensive artwork in 2014, and it's expected to sell for another record-breaking sum in December

A new NASA-supported spacecraft will get up close to satellites that are no longer in service, demonstrating technologies that could support future in-space repairs and reduce orbital debris. The Small Spacecraft Propulsion and Inspection Capability (SSPICY) mission launched Oct. 1 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The mission is a technology demonstration where an […]

The SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft is seen moments before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California in this Oct. 8, 2026, photograph. Aboard were NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 members NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev. The four spent […]

Hamilton popularized the term "software engineer" and created computer programs that could anticipate problems. She received a Presidential Medal of Freedom and was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame

The 76-year-old poet, translator and essayist is renowned for her "bold and inventive" approach to blending poetry, prose and everything in between, leading to what the Swedish Academy calls "new forms for contemporary literature"

NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) space telescope is shedding light on brown dwarfs, celestial objects that blur the line between stars and exoplanets. New findings published in The Astrophysical Journal show that these dark and cloudy worlds have chemically rich atmospheres not unlike the giant […]

First discovered in 2007, fast radio bursts are enigmatic, millisecond-long flashes of radio emission from the distant universe. Their origin remains uncertain, particularly since most are seen once and never again. Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have pinpointed the host galaxy of the most distant fast radio burst (FRB) seen to date. Their […]

After more than seven months aboard the International Space Station, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission safely splashed down Thursday in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Los Angeles. The crew members will discuss their science mission during a news conference at 3:30 p.m. EDT, Thursday, Oct. 15, at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. […]

Editor’s note: This release was updated Oct. 8, 2026 with the formal name of the summit. As the Golden Age of deep-space exploration begins, NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy are advancing the development of safe, reliable, next-generation nuclear technologies for space. Together, the agencies will supercharge civil space exploration, unlock bold scientific discovery, […]

The season usually starts in October or November. But some western states, including California, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii, began seeing a rise in flu cases as early as August

Gears of War: E-Day leads the charge on GeForce NOW this week, bringing Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago’s first fight against the Locust Horde to the cloud with GeForce RTX-powered performance. A new way to join the action is also coming: Fire TV users will soon be able to purchase GeForce NOW memberships directly through […]

The volume, "Livre de l’Apocalypse," was a "masterpiece" collaboration of 14 artists and writers. It is one of the heaviest and most expensive books ever made

New research suggests the animals' overlapping calls serve as coordinated group messages and may contain additional information beyond what’s encoded in individual rumbles

A local videographer shot 300 reels of color film during the re-enactment, which shows "soldiers on foot getting remarkably close to horses" and "a rather relaxed attitude towards health and safety." The event sparked an annual tradition that continues to this day

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 8 – 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 Saturn […]

Drought and an ailing aquifer were major topics of conversation when NASA scientists visited with farmers in the Texas High Plains.

Whenever Microsoft starts messing with something like the search function in Windows, a lot of people are going to be holding their breath and expecting the worst. Well, get ready, because they’re redesigning the whole thing. In July, we shared how we are improving the Windows Search Box with less clutter and more control. We introduced a calmer home screen, removed promotional content from web results, and gave you more choice over whether web and Microsoft Store suggestions appear. Today, we’re carrying those investments forward with a new Windows Search experience built on WinUI 3. This modern foundation makes Windows Search faster and more efficient with resources, while delivering an even more streamlined and focused design. ↫ Anshul Rawat at the Windows Blogs The company claims this new version of search is faster and uses less memory, which, if true, are very welcome improvements. It’s also just a single column of results now, and they’re adding inline previews for things like weather and files on your machine, as well as for answers to all kinds of queries you might normally go to an online search engine for. You can now also use search to perform all kinds of tasks in Windows, like turning on dark mode, managing windows, and so on. All of this can be done using relatively natural language, and Microsoft claims they’ve implemented better detection of typing errors and synonyms, which is quite welcome. Weirdly enough, though, it’s not yet integrated into the Start menu, since it’s a preview just for testers, but that’s something they’re working on for future releases. Judging by the videos and screenshots, I’m actually kind of positively surprised. This looks quite decent and nice, and if the promised performance improvements actually materialise, this may actually be an upgrade to search worth looking forward to. Of course, this is still Microsoft, so it’s just as likely they’ll screw up somewhere between now and when this goes live to regular users. Still, I think it looks decent.

Chimera Linux is a relatively new Linux distribution, and quite a unique on at that, as it combines the core tools from FreeBSD, the LLVM toolchain, and the Musl C library instead of the usual suspects. Despite being relatively new, it still has some serious pedigree as the project was started by Nina “q66”, who was part of the Void Linux team. At Void, she maintained the various PowerPC/POWER ports of the distribution until Chimera became her sole focus. Nina published a detailed blog post today about how the Chimera team builds the tooling for their distribution, as well as the goals it’s trying to achieve. It covers everything from a bit of personal history, the rationale behind the project, who it’s catering to, how its tooling works and why, and the infrastructure they’ve built that underpins it all. There’s a lot to process here, with one of the most interesting little details – at least to me, as someone who has two POWER9 machines – the fact that Chimera started with the ppc64le target only. The article is an incredibly interesting look at not just the how of Chimera, but also the why, which makes for some really fascinating reading.

NASA and SpaceX are targeting 6:33 a.m. EDT, Tuesday, Oct. 13, for the next launch to deliver science investigations, supplies, and equipment, including the final set of International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Arrays, to the space station. This is the 35th SpaceX commercial resupply services mission to the orbital complex for NASA. NASA also will […]

NASA and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than Tuesday, Oct. 13 to launch scientific investigations, supplies, and equipment to the International Space Station.

Description This artist’s concept depicts the proposed design for NASA’s PRobe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics (PRIMA), which was selected by the agency in September 2026. The PRIMA observatory is the first in a new class of NASA astrophysics missions, called Probe Explorers, within the agency’s longstanding Explorers Program. By observing far-infrared light, PRIMA will enable scientists to study cosmic […]

Many molecules come in two mirrored forms—like left and right hands—but living organisms generally contain only one. However, chemists couldn't figure out how to make just one version in the lab. Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai share the prize for their work solving the puzzle

At a Microsoft event in San Francisco on Wednesday, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outlined how NVIDIA and Microsoft are co-engineering hardware and software for AI agents to run on Windows PCs. NVIDIA was founded because of Windows, Huang said. Now AI agents are coming to Windows. “If you […]

The legendary director’s on-set chair, annotated scripts and props give a glimpse into the meticulous moviemaking process behind films like "Full Metal Jacket" and "Eyes Wide Shut"

Description NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this view looking back at the floor of Gale Crater, with the crater’s rim visible in the distance, on Sept. 5, 2026, the 5,006th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Just nine days prior, on Aug. 26 (Sol 4,996), Curiosity set a mission milestone by reaching 1 kilometer […]

Description NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured this panorama of sunrise illuminating distant, wind-carved features called yardangs on Aug. 11, 2026, the 4,982nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Scientists are eager to learn more about how the yardang layer formed. Figure A is a crop zooming in on the distant yardangs. Since 2014, Curiosity […]

Radio signals emanating from Beta Pictoris b suggest that this young and massive exoplanet has a strong magnetic field and intense auroral show

A visualization of a dark Moon eclipsing the Sun is marked with handwritten notes in this April 6, 2026, screenshot from an Artemis II crew member’s tablet. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman (in blue) and Victor “Ike” Glover (in green) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) Jeremy Hansen (in red) observed impact flashes and their locations, which […]

In the shadow of a rumored AI proof of one of the biggest problems in their field, three computer scientists rushed to publish their own milestone result.

The post As AI Closed In on ‘Unique Games’ Proof, Researchers Raced to Beat the Machines first appeared on Quanta Magazine

No official cause of her pneumonia has been confirmed, and Russian health officials say that none of the deceased individual's close contacts tested positive for the plague. Pneumonic plague is a rare, deadly form of the disease

The “second-generation” world, predicted from telescope data, could be the first known planet of its kind, and it may shed light on the future of our own solar system

Researchers believe that the vessel's plates and bowls were made in the ancient city of Rhosus, once praised by Roman statesman Cicero for its "fine pottery"

You might have seen the news that Christa Pike, a convicted murderer in Tennessee, did not die from the injections given to her as part of her death penalty sentence last week. After her failed execution, she was hospitalized, where she continues to receive critical medical care, according to her attorneys. Her survival is singular, but her mishandled execution is not. A review of executions carried out between 1890 and 2010 indicated that three out of every hundred executions were botched – and that lethal injection executions, which began in 1982, have a more frequent incidence of complications than any other method. All of this has re-raised the question of how humane lethal injections are as a form of execution. So, today on the show, we speak to anesthesiologist Gail Van Norman, a medical expert who testified about Christa’s case and many other lethal injection executions. She told us how she and other experts predicted much of how Christa's execution would unfold.

Read a perspective piece from one of the seven media witnesses to last week's failed execution.

Interested in more science and criminal justice stories? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 7 –… 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. Supernova Remnant Pa […]

Satellite records show Arctic sea ice covering less of the ocean in both winter and summer.

KDE contributor and developer Niccolò Venerandi has published an article about COSMIC, System76’s brand new desktop environment. It’s been almost a year since I’ve last tried COSMIC; though development since then has mostly been centered around stability (going from late alpha to stable releases now!) there have been a fair bit of user-facing changes too which I adore. I thus have to ask myself: should I switch to COSMIC? The answer obviously is no, but that’s just because I got addicted to KDE Plasma, so let’s try to be more objective here. ↫ Niccolò Venerandi Honestly, this is one of the best “reviews” I’ve seen of COSMIC, and paints System76’s hard work in a really positive light. Venerandi spots countless really nice touches he’d love to see adopted by KDE, while also hitting on what I agree is COSMIC’s biggest shortcoming at this point: there’s basically no ecosystem around it. COSMIC uses its own Rust-based toolkit instead of GTK or Qt, but of course, there’s very few other applications that actually use said toolkit. The end result is that if you run COSMIC, you’re going to have to supplement it with countless GTK and Qt application, none of which will inherit all the nice features, touches, and graphics from COSMIC. This isn’t really a complaint about COSMIC itself or the work its developers are putting into it, but more a fact of life for such a new desktop environment using an otherwise unpopular (as of right now) toolkit. This may very well change in the future, but for now, if you choose to run COSMIC, you’re going to have to accept a very inconsistent and messy desktop. This won’t matter to everyone, but it sure does matter to me, and it’s the one reason why at this point I have zero interest in running COSMIC. I really hope this changes in the future – competition is good – but it’s going to be a long road.

Researchers argue that the tenth-century coins provide new evidence of a bustling English community located next to the Vatican that was permitted to use its own currency

Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison led the effort to build the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. His work birthed the field of neutrino astronomy

After delivering more than 11,000 pounds of supplies, science experiments, and other cargo to the International Space Station for NASA, Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus XL spacecraft is scheduled to depart Friday, Oct. 9, as part of the company’s Commercial Resupply Services-24 mission, or Northrop Grumman CRS-24. Watch NASA’s live coverage of undocking and departure beginning at 12:30 […]

Your challenge is to tell us the location of the satellite image and why it is interesting.

As an astronaut traverses the lunar South Pole, tribocharging from walking on the lunar surface and plasma charging from the ambient plasma generate electric charge on the spacesuit. This problem is severely compounded when entering lunar shadows and Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs). In these dark zones, the spacesuit can buildup a substantial negative potential due […]

NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland is seeking Phase 1 proposals for the design and construction of the Aerospace Power Systems Laboratory. The principal purpose of this procurement is to deliver a laboratory facility to support the testing and development of power systems, with associated site work, infrastructure, and systems. The laboratory will provide modern […]

Diligent sleuthing by astronomers uncovered a surprising chemical clue that indicates the white dwarf star HS 0209+0832 may host a second-generation planet. This artist’s concept released on Oct. 5, 2026, depicts that possible explanation. The white dwarf is the “dead” core of a star that burned through all of its nuclear fuel and lost its outer […]

The experimental technology is still in the early stage and was fully tested in just two participants. But it could one day help people with motor problems communicate with more nuance or help them control robotic prosthetic limbs

A newly released panorama captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover offers the most detailed view yet of distant, wind-carved Martian cliffs, highlighting features the mission’s scientists have long been waiting to see up close. The scene was snapped at 8:30 a.m. local Mars time, showing striking blue hues in the foreground as bright morning light illuminates […]

Forensic research has identified deliberate and fatal wounds on skulls from simple grave sites near First Dynasty royal tombs in Upper Egypt

Indigenous communities near present-day Milwaukee likely hand-carved the white-oak vessel before shaping it with fire between roughly 992 and 1049 C.E.

Atlantic hurricane season runs from June through November, and the last time one passed by without an intense cyclone was more than 100 years ago. While the ongoing "super" El Niño seems to be suppressing storms in the Atlantic, the Pacific Ocean is being overactive

Telecom operators are increasingly building their AI strategies on open models — and the reasons go beyond mere cost.  Open models give telcos the ability to trust, control and customize AI across their most critical workloads — from autonomous networks to customer care.  NVIDIA’s latest State of AI in Telecommunications report reflects this shift, with […]

A cauldron of cosmic creation is being revealed in a new image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. 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. Stars, the engines of elemental creation, have life cycles that begin […]

At a recent memorial ceremony, officials honored 28 Continental soldiers and at least 38 British soldiers who were buried in Wilmington, Delaware, nearly 250 years ago

We’re all aware – and wary – of doomscrolling. Lots of screen time can be bad for us. But what if that’s not always the case? We spoke with the author of a study that found a positive relationship between screen time and brain development in young people. This episode, we sort through what to actually worry about when it comes to screen time – and what guidelines already exist that can empower you and the kids in your life.

Interested in learning more about how screen time affects your brain? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org .

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

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APODScienceAPODAPOD: 2026 October 6 – 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. ESA, CAS, SMILE, UVI A Complete Auroral Oval from SMILE Explanation: Have you ever seen a […]

Dissolved organic matter and suspended sediment mingle in the southernmost extent of James Bay.

Written by Michelle Minitti, MAHLI Deputy Principal Investigator Earth planning date: Friday, Oct. 1, 2026 The majority of Curiosity plans involve mosaics from Mastcam and ChemCam, chemistry analyses from ChemCam and APXS, images from MAHLI and MARDI, and systematic measurements from REMS, RAD, and DAN. It is only when we stop to drill that we […]

Written by Alex Jones, Ph.D. candidate at Imperial College London Sept. 29, 2026 After spending the last six months exploring “Lac de Charmes,” a region of ancient rock beyond Jezero crater’s western rim, Perseverance has stumbled upon a vast field of light-toned rocks peppering the Martian surface.  Light-colored rocks are a strange sight on Mars, […]

Speaking of Windows and performance, how about that RAM crisis? Microsoft is feeling the squeeze too, and is apparently doing work up and down the Windows stack to improve its memory consumption. Microsoft’s Windows chief Pavan Davuluri has admitted that the rising cost of memory is pushing the company to make Windows 11 use less RAM. Microsoft is working on the Windows memory manager, memory compression, WinUI 3 and WebView2, and has made “memory optimization for 8GB and above” an official priority for the rest of 2026. ↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest This might be the only positive consequence of the RAM crisis.

NASA and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than 8:05 a.m. EDT, Wednesday, Oct. 7, for the undocking of the agency’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission from the International Space Station, pending weather conditions. An Oct. 7 undock puts NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev […]

To this day, Windows retains full support for the old MS-DOS 8.3 filename limitation, and it does this by creating 8.3 aliases for files with longer names. Apparently, this has a measurable effect on performance, so naturally, people are going to turn it off to make their Windows installations perform better. According to the user, this resulted in noticeably smoother scrolling in Tile view. They subsequently repeated the process on several folders they regularly use and reported that searching through files became much faster. The user also claimed that external hard drives became faster and that browsing an Android directory over USB or FTP behaved more like a regular Windows folder, including when copying large numbers of music files. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin You can disable this legacy feature in Windows per volume or globally, but Microsoft is warning users not to do so. Even in 2026, applications and registry entries may depend on 8.3 filenames being available, so removing them can lead to unexpected outcomes. It’s just one of those things you wouldn’t expect to still be around or have a measurable impact in the days of fast SSDs, but there’s enough credibly evidence out there to suggest that yes, it actually does negatively affect performance. If you’re doing a lot of file operations in Windows, it might be worthwhile to do some testing of your own to see if you can speed things up. Or, you know, you can just not use a house of cards disguised as a serious operating system.

Apple’s macOS has a Full Disk Access permission, designed to allow backup applications full access to, well, the disk, so they can perform their job properly. Apple posted a notice on its website that it’s going to further restrict this permission, because some applications were abusing this permission to gain access to users’ messages, emails, and so on, which it obviously isn’t intended for. What kind of applications, you may ask? Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action. Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy. ↫ Announcement from Apple This was prompted by a story a few weeks ago, where Facebook’s Muse “AI” tool was apparently reading people’s private messages and other data, and even sent messages on users’ behalf, without informing its users. It’s incredibly naive to think Facebook software in 2026 would not do creepy things, so I’m honestly not at all surprised. It makes sense in Apple’s worldview to further restrict permissions in response, but I’m sure more experienced macOS users are not going to like this.

The KDE project recently brought back its classic Oxygen and Air themes, but what if you prefer something… A little older? A modern recreation of the classic KDE 3 desktop experience for KDE Plasma 6, built entirely using Qt 6 and Qt Quick, with full support for Wayland and fractional scaling. ↫ Klassik GitHub page Neat.

Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel received the 2026 award for their contributions to a revolutionary technique in neuroscience called optogenetics, which allows researchers to examine precise connections between neuronal activity and behavioral outcomes in live animals

The show in Copenhagen explores the relationship between fashion and influence in ancient Rome

NASA astronaut and mission specialist of the agency’s Artemis II mission, Christina Koch, leads the fans in singing the Eagles Fight Song from the field at an NFL game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Los Angeles Rams at Lincoln Financial Field on Sunday, Oct. 4, 2026, in Philadelphia. NASA’s engagement at NFL games is […]

The fossil belonged to a category of dinosaurs called microraptors, which were bird-like but not ancestors of modern-day avians. A new study found that this group of ancient predators evolved similar anatomical adaptations to birds, but developed them in a different order

NASA is leveraging its expertise and enhancing its test facilities to help address a rare but persistent aviation hazard: icing that occurs when aircraft encounter unusually large, very cold water droplets in clouds.   The problem, known as “supercooled large droplet icing,” occurs when aircraft fly through clouds containing unusually large drops of water that are […]

New analysis of archival Hubble data points to the possibility of “dead” white dwarf stars hosting second-generation planetary systems.

Mathematicians are facing the sudden shift with grief, anger, and a desperate search for fresh ideas: “If we don’t adapt, there’s just no more math in 50 years.”

The post Is AI the End of Math As We Know It? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Posing pit bulls, stoic galgos and frisbee-chasing Aussies feature among the annual competition’s prize winners

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among American women — yet the gaps in care are wide. A majority of women over age 40 skip the recommended annual screening. Radiologists are reading more mammograms with fewer colleagues. And when a diagnosis arrives, the tests that inform treatment can take weeks to return results.  […]

Archaeologists have discovered a previously unknown settlement on the banks of the Danube River

The artifact was found in 2023 during a metal detecting survey. Experts have been analyzing it since and recently confirmed its authenticity

We’re easing you into Halloween season with an episode about bats. There’s a silent serial killer decimating little brown bats as they hibernate. White nose syndrome has driven populations across the U.S. to almost the brink of extinction over the last decade. But recently, conservation biologist Giorgia Auteri and her team noticed several genetic mutations in the survivors. These mutations could explain how natural selection has shifted the existing population – and inform conservation efforts in the future.

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

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 5 – M104:… 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. M104: The […]

A bright lens of anorthosite, a rock type prevalent on the lunar surface, is cradled within sheared rocks in the country’s south.

Written by Lucy Thompson, Senior Research Scientist, University of New Brunswick, Canada Earth planning date: Friday, Sept. 25, 2026 Before we landed, the area of Gale crater that we planned to explore was divided up into rectangular parcels with designated names. The names were chosen after small towns associated with significant geological features. Our selected […]

“I want to be able to look at a rocket launch and say, ‘I touched a piece of this.’” That’s how Richard Spolzino describes the thing he’s chasing. Not a title, not a specific mission, not even NASA itself, just the ability to point at something real and know his work made it possible. At […]

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 4 –… 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. Supernumerary Rainbows over […]

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 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. Selfie at Vera […]

I like squirrels. Apparently, there’s a SquirrelOS. It’s a small hobby OS learning project from five years ago, developed by Immanuel Daviel A. Garcia. A simple DOS like OS made in Assembly and C with a ported version of Stephen Brennan’s Shell. ↫ SquirrelOS GitHub page Why do I like squirrels? I don’t know man, they’re just cute.

The tech giant aims to use the near-constant sunlight available in low-Earth orbit to power data centers. The experimental satellite, launched October 1, holds four computer chips that can run Google’s Gemini A.I. for 15 minutes at a time

As part of NASA’s ongoing Inspiration Tour, NASA astronaut Christina Koch will highlight America’s strengths in space exploration and aeronautics innovation at the Philadelphia Eagles vs. Los Angeles Rams game in Philadelphia on Sunday, Oct. 4. A self-proclaimed Philadelphia sports fan, Koch is an explorer and engineer who spent a total of 338 days in […]

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission is ending, with the crew scheduled to return in early October. NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev will head home from the International Space Station after supporting research that benefits life on Earth and prepares humans for missions […]

The engineering development unit for NASA’s DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) probe is photographed prior to a major thermal evaluation. The DAVINCI team put the yoga ball-sized vessel into a ceramic-lined chamber with heat-scorched walls and ratcheted up the temperature to 869 F, or 465 C, over the course […]

Lee esta nota de prensa en inglés aquí. La NASA busca líderes para uno de los puestos más prestigiosos de la Tierra en el ámbito de los vuelos espaciales tripulados: director de vuelo en el control de misión del Centro Espacial Johnson de la agencia, en Houston. Esta función es fundamental para reforzar el liderazgo […]

Groundbreaking tests at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, are paving the way for new wind tunnel capabilities for designing the aircraft technologies of the future.  In a first-of-its-kind test in NASA Langley’s Transonic Dynamics Tunnel, researchers used unsteady Pressure Sensitive Paint to study how air flows around a standard wind tunnel model known […]

So-called hairworks were popularized during the Victorian era as a means of grieving the deceased

NASA is seeking leaders for one of the most esteemed positions on Earth for human spaceflight: flight director in mission control at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. This role is critical to advancing American leadership in space exploration, as NASA paves the way for a sustained human presence on the Moon. Applications for […]

Scientists assumed that energy flows in only one direction in a turbulent system. What they didn’t know, until they looked closely at brine shrimp, was that a simple factor can reverse the flow.

The post Sea Monkeys Show Scientists How To Rewrite a Rule of Turbulence first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Scientists suspect this musical trait arose independently in humans and indris, which split from a common ancestor some 74 million years ago. Today, the lemurs make loud, haunting calls to communicate with one another in the dense forests of eastern Madagascar

You don't need to worry about the critters coming after you, since they're only a fraction of an inch across. They join the roughly 1,400 known species of ocean-dwelling spiders

The 3D-printed piece was created by students and faculty at Indiana University Indianapolis and had been installed on September 16

Local AI is becoming more useful by the token. As AI agents move from experiments into everyday development, increasingly capable open models are shrinking to fit on more devices, giving builders more to run locally.  Coming this month, NVIDIA DGX Spark will be available with 64GB of unified memory from top manufacturer partners — Acer, […]

The show, on view in Florence and coming to D.C. next year, examines the history and impact of destroyed sculptures throughout time and across cultures

Being more social has a ton of benefits: lower stress, decreased inflammation – even living a longer life! Recently, some scientists have added lowering your blood sugar to the list. To figure it out, researchers had people break bread both in duos and alone. And they think the results could tell us something about the roots of our social nature. Consider it another reason to prioritize our social lives.

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What does it take to image hundreds of nebulas? Today’s image contains the entire Sharpless Catalog of H II Regions, totaling 313 objects. Zoom in and explore!

After days of torrential rain, the river rose to record-breaking levels in parts of Nepal and India.

Join Us for Movie Night with NASA NASA’s mission is to pioneer the future in space exploration and scientific discovery. NASA+ documentaries allow you to come along for the ride. It’s free. It’s on demand. And no subscription is required. Grab some popcorn and come along for the journey. Other Worlds: Europa Cosmic Dawn Planetary […]

GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast, running on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, is available now in the OpenAI API and to eligible ChatGPT Work and Codex users.  Accelerated by inference optimizations through OpenAI’s models that tap into the capabilities of the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture, Ultrafast offers up to 8x faster token generation than the Astra Standard mode. For developers, […]

From a sneezing moose to a real-life angry bird, this year's competition received a whopping more than 10,000 entries from 112 countries

The team has been working hard behind the scenes laying a strong foundation for the Thunderbird iOS app. Rather than leveraging existing code, we are building natively from scratch. This fresh start allows us to take everything we’ve learned from Thunderbird Desktop and Android to ensure a fast, reliable, and modern experience on your iPhone […]

The post Thunderbird for iOS: A First Look at the Native iPhone Email App in Development appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

NASA selected 16 companies to provide Enterprise Logistics Support Services under new agreements that will standardize requirements, improve reporting, and streamline the management of costs and resources. The $1.4 billion blanket purchase agreements will support equipment and property management, transportation, disposal, product support, flight hardware support operations, equipment maintenance and repair, export control, move operations, […]

In this Oct. 1, 2026, photo, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft launch from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The spacecraft is carrying NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov to the International Space Station for a […]

A Meteor Shower and the Moon Near the Pleiades See Saturn at opposition, catch the Orionid meteor shower, and watch the Moon pass close to the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters. Skywatching Highlights Transcript Saturn takes center stage, a meteor shower lights up the sky, and the Moon visits the Seven Sisters. That’s […]

Calder’s final work, “Mountains and Clouds,” was removed from the Hart Senate Office Building in 2014 over fears about its structural integrity

Four crew members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission launched at 11:10 a.m. EDT Thursday from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida for a science expedition aboard the International Space Station. “Crew-13 is another demonstration of America’s unmatched capability in human spaceflight and the strength of our commercial partnerships,” said […]

They were among 30 whales transferred from the facility over the summer. It had faced multiple allegations of animal neglect and cruelty before closing in 2024

Archaeologists discovered 48 prehistoric arrows during a recent three-week expedition in the mountains of Jotunheimen

In the early history of our solar system, scientists theorize that a Mars-sized object called Theia smashed into the infant Earth, vaporizing massive amounts of rock and blasting it into space. Some of that material coalesced into the Moon, where NASA’s Artemis program is returning humans, preparing for Mars, and shaping the future of space […]

Maggie Miller explains why our intuition about three dimensions breaks down in four, and how she visualizes 4D spaces as a reel of three-dimensional snapshots.

The post What Does the Fourth Dimension Actually Look Like? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Spooky season is streaming in. Alongside falling leaves, pumpkin spice and everything nice, 25 new games are joining GeForce NOW throughout October, including six ready to play this week. From a new CONTROL Resonant reward for Performance and Ultimate members to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered joining the cloud, this GFN Thursday is […]

AI factories are built by the megawatt, even by the gigawatt. Each megawatt factory costs roughly $60 million, and AI factory operators will only commit capital on that scale with a clear view of the return on investment. Three key things shape AI factory returns: Earning capacity: What the factory could earn in a year […]

The brown bear, who now weighs between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds after fattening up on salmon, earned his nickname as a cub. When he was little, he enjoyed riding on his mom's back as she swam across a river

The black-and-white photograph of a long-lost artifact depicts four serekhs, symbols of Egyptian rulers, and two of them, a recent study suggests, are hers

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 October 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. Harvest Moon with […]

Surrounded by wetlands, Manitoba’s northernmost farmland near The Pas turns from green to brown over the 2026 growing season.

Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Earth planning date: Friday, Sept. 18, 2026 Curiosity surprised us at the beginning of the week with a change in rock texture — instead of the finely layered bedrock blocks we’ve been seeing in our recent sulfate unit workspaces, suddenly we were looking […]

Google launched its Googlebooks platform a week ago, and a lot of people were wondering what this meant for Chrome OS and Chromebooks. Since Googlebooks and its Android-based Googlebook OS lack the management frameworks markets like schools require, Chromebooks will continue to be available for now, until such time Googlebooks catch up in that regard. However, in a support document, Google states that update support for all Chromebook devices will end in 2034: ChromeOS devices will continue to receive regular updates and security patches through mid-2034. For qualifying devices purchased today whose 10-year support lifecycle extends beyond 2034, Google is committed to supporting your transition to Googlebook OS, with many devices offering direct migration paths. ↫ Google support document Google promised 10 years of updates for all Chromebooks, and it’s now breaking that promise for anyone buying a Chromebook between now and whenever the last Chromebook rolls off the production line. Sadly, we live in a world where corporations are free to make and break whatever promises they want virtually free of consequences, and as society we’re so used to it that anti-consumer behaviour like this barely elicits a shrug. Google does state that “many newer commercial Chromebook models will be capable of upgrading to Googlebook OS”, but that, too, is just another promise – and a vague, one at that – so who knows how many devices will actually be capable of upgrading out in the real world. On top of that, we have no idea if Googlebooks will just be yet another in a long line of quickly abandoned Google tablet/laptop projects, further adding to the uncertainty. Stuff like this should not be legal.

In June 2008 Apple announced Mac OS X Snow Leopard, proudly boasting that it would have “no new features”. Instead of piling on new things, Snow Leopard aimed to build on the success of its predecessor, Leopard, opting to focus on under-the-hood performance and stability improvements throughout the system. 18 years later, Apple is taking a similar approach with macOS 27. Golden Gate aims to fix the missteps of last year’s Tahoe, promising an expansive set of improvements and “a more responsive and delightful experience”. Does it hold up? Here are just some of the bugs I’ve encountered in my daily use over the past couple of weeks. ↫ Chester at SquareOrbits I’m getting some real Windows 11 vibes from this long list of bugs and issues, further underlining my perception that Apple completely lost the plot when it comes to Mac OS X (in the past) and MacOS (today). These are not the kind of things you’d find in the heydays of Mac OS X, back when I was a devout user, and makes me glad I abandoned ship long, long ago (around the time of the Intel transition). I don’t see stuff like this in GNOME or KDE, and while not nearly as bad as Windows 11, the cracks are obvious. I am by no means an expert at how Apple is run and how it organises itself, but as a layperson I do wonder if the company is simply trying to do too much – too many different platforms, too many different crucial components it all develops internally, too many different markets to please. Things are going to fall through the cracks when you try to keep this many plates spinning.

A brand new Tcl/Tk release, in the form of Tcl/Tk 9.1. The new features in Tcl are a bit difficult for me to properly parse as a non-developer, but Tk’s improvements are easy to understand: it brings supports for screen readers, initial supports for bidirectional and RTL scripts, improved listbox selection colours, and more. It also happens to drop support for Windows XP appearances, if that’s something that matters to you.

Microsoft has announced WSL containers for developers who aren’t already using Docker, Podman, or Rancher on their Windows workstations. WSL containers is now generally available! Check out this blog post to learn more about this overall feature enabling seamless access to Linux containers on Windows via the new “wslc.exe” command. This new Linux container platform comes with multiple architectures changes compared to WSL, which we’ll detail in this post. ↫ Pierre Boulay at the Microsoft Dev Blogs If you already have WSL installed, you can run wsl -update to get this new container feature, or you can download it straight from GitHub.

Galaxies, vast collections of billions of stars, gas, and dust held together by gravity, are scattered across the immensity of space. But every so often, a coincidence occurs: Two galaxies line up from our point of view on Earth (or from a space telescope) and appear to overlap in the sky. These rare overlapping galaxies […]

Editor’s note: This release was updated on Sept. 30, 2026, to correct the name of the DISCO payload. NASA selected three new scientific investigations and their payload suites to advance our knowledge of the Moon and help pave the way for building humanity’s first lunar outpost, Moon Base. The suite of science instruments and technologies […]

NASA has awarded Modulate Space Corporation a contract to develop key elements of a 5G communications system for use on the lunar surface with built-in Wi-Fi 6, for NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. This accelerated effort is organized into two primary work areas that together will develop a scalable, standards-based communications capability designed to […]

Two aerospace companies are competing to create the lunar lander NASA uses when it returns humans to the moon's surface. But to reach our lunar companion, a spacecraft will first have to get to Earth orbit

The sketch of a young girl, in the red chalk characteristic of Manet’s 1860s life studies, is thought to be linked to several of the artist’s paintings

NASA, CSA (Canadian Space Agency), and the German Aerospace Center signed a joint statement of intent to begin coordinated, preparatory work toward an Earth-based demonstrator to learn how to grow crops on the Moon.

Enceladus is covered in ice, but that layer might hide a subsurface ocean. Researchers have long wondered if the salty body of water has the right conditions to host life, and now, a team suggests that an Earthly, heat-loving organism could thrive there

We're already working on building PureOS Dawn Alpha images, and we're eager to get Dawn into your hands to test! As always, stability and reliability are paramount, so this month brings even more improvements on both fronts.

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

This long-duration image shows star trails above Earth and the blue lights of fishing boats and the yellow lights of Indonesian cities stretching below the International Space Station as it orbited 258 miles above the Banda Sea on Sept. 20, 2026. Image credit: NASA/Anil Menon

October 1st, 2026 will be ten years and 3 quarters worth of warrant canaries published by Purism.

The post Over a Decade of Warrant Canaries appeared first on Purism.

Bringing together the world’s brightest minds and the latest accelerated computing technology leads to powerful breakthroughs that help tackle some of the biggest research problems. To foster such innovation, the NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program provides grants, mentors and technical support to doctoral students doing outstanding research relevant to NVIDIA technologies. The program, in its 26th […]

Building on nearly a decade of co-engineering, CoreWeave has built NVIDIA compute, networking and software into a cloud purpose-built for AI that’s still returning on investment across multiple generations of deployment. Now, CoreWeave is bringing the next generation of NVIDIA infrastructure to production. At CoreWeave Fully Connected, running this week in San Francisco, CoreWeave announced […]

Unexpected patterns traveling across the human brain may be reorganizing its activity in real time.

The post Surprisingly Complex Waves Reveal the Brain’s Inner Workings first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The creature has been identified as a smooth dogfish, a harmless species found throughout the western Atlantic Ocean. It wasn't the only animal caught in the chaos brought by the storm system

Numerous leafy shoots are now sprouting around the base of the tree’s stump, which is located near Hadrian’s Wall in northern England

Recent excavations at the Bath Assembly Rooms in England revealed Roman-era coins, roof tiles, pottery, glassware, a network of ditches and a fragment of a military helmet

If you, like us, clicked on the cute cat photos posted everywhere recently, announcing the discovery of the first new cat species in more than a century, you might have wondered how rare it is to find a new species. Turns out, it’s not! We live in an era of “unprecedented” discovery, says John Wiens, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. And scientists say we’re still just scratching at the surface of how much life exists on Earth.

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

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

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 September 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. Arp 78: Peculiar […]

Hurricanes Polo and Nolo sent destructive effects ashore amid an active season in the northeastern and central Pacific.

NASA’s 2027 Human Lander Challenge is seeking ideas from college and university students to help address one of the most critical needs for sustained lunar exploration: reliable communications. As NASA prepares for long-term human presence on the Moon through the Artemis and Moon Base programs, communications systems will be just as important as spacecraft and […]

NASA has awarded a contract to Omitron Inc. for the acquisition of orbital safety analysis services, which provide for critical protection of NASA spaceflight assets and astronaut lives. This indefinite-delivery contract is valued at approximately $23.5 million over a five-year period of performance and entails conjunction assessment screening services for all NASA uncrewed spacecraft, support […]

NASA will participate in the 77th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Antalya, Türkiye, from Monday, Oct. 5, to Friday, Oct. 9, highlighting America’s leadership in human exploration to the Moon and Mars, advancing responsible exploration under the Artemis Accords, world-changing science, and support for the commercial space sector.  The IAC, organized by the International Astronautical […]

Not all researchers are convinced that the brain changes detected via MRI are robust enough to become a diagnostic tool. But the findings could help researchers better understand the mechanisms that drive the neurodegenerative disease

In accordance with a contract on-ramp clause, NASA has added Blue Origin’s New Glenn 9×4 launch service to the NASA Launch Services (NLS) II contract. The New Glenn 9×4 launch service will be available to NASA’s Launch Services Program Office to use for future missions. The NLS II contracts are multiple-award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts with an […]

Nearly a year into a $40 million restoration of the Villa Silvestri Rivaldi, conservators are rediscovering and reviving 16th-century art

NASA will provide live coverage of prelaunch, launch, and docking activities for the agency’s SpaceX Crew‑13 mission to the International Space Station. Live coverage will stream through a variety of platforms. Learn where to watch online: https://www.nasa.gov/live Crew‑13 is scheduled to launch at 11:10 a.m. EDT, Thursday, Oct. 1, from Space Launch Complex 40 at […]

Experts at the company don't know what the newfound system does, so its potential utility in biology—if any—remains unclear. But the work marks a major advancement because the A.I. made this discovery mostly on its own

The two vessels, one of them a signed 1855 jar, are the latest to be reinstituted to Drake’s family, who are on a mission to acquire the works of their ancestor

Ahead of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission launch, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft are vertical at the launch pad of Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida in this Sept. 27, 2026, photo. NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey […]

Following a successful inaugural year of ingenuity and career building, NASA ORBIT (Opportunities in Research, Business, Innovation, and Technology) has officially returned for a second season to bring university and college student innovation to the forefront of Earth technology development and deep-space exploration. Registration for the 2026–2027 challenge is open through Monday, Nov. 16, 2026, […]

NSTGRO Homepage Omar AlyousefUniversity Of MemphisPolycatenated Architected Materials (PAM) for Origami-Inspired Space Docking Ports Cade ArmstrongUniversity Of Texas at AustinIntelligent Multi-Agent Constellations for Cooperative Cislunar Operations Laurel BarnettHarvard UniversityPhotonic SNSPD Readout and Feed Forward System for Improved Optical Communication Capabilities Katie BarcakWilliam Marsh Rice UniversityCompact magnetic heat switch for thermal management of long duration low […]

The tiny diamondback terrapin was brought to a wildlife center on September 17. At the time, the creature weighed about as much as a nickel

The wreckage could belong to the “Warren Sawyer,” a three-masted cargo schooner that foundered more than 140 years ago

Inflammation is all over our feeds. Influencers claim it’s the reason you're bloated or fatigued, the source of digestive problems and the cause of more serious illnesses like Alzheimer's or cardiovascular disease. But how much of that is scientifically backed, and how viable are the solutions you see on social media? Short Wave talks to immunologist Shruti Naik to separate the health from the hype.

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

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 September 29 –… 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. Sh2-188: The Shrimp […]

Scientists captured rare observations of an ephemeral pileus cloud hovering over a smoke-infused cloud that rose above a wildfire in Montana.

Written by Athanasios (Thanos) Klidaras, Ph.D. candidate at Purdue University  Sept. 21, 2026 After a long hiatus, the Perseverance rover updates page is back. A lot has happened on Mars in the meantime, and with regular updates now resuming, there is plenty to catch up on — Perseverance has been busy. The rover has spent […]

The Ghoul Located within the constellation Perseus lies a star called Algol, also known as ‘Demon Star’ or ‘The Ghoul’. You can spot this star during the autumn months, along with Cassiopeia and Andromeda in the northeastern sky, beginning after 9 PM. In Greek mythology, this star represents the ‘blinking eye’ of the gorgon Medusa. […]

A new exhibition at the Museum at FIT in New York City showcases more than 170 objects that trace the often-unexpected relationship between dolls and fashion

The ancestors of the giant isopod Bathynomus jamesi—a seafloor-dwelling creature that resembles a huge pill bug—acquired the snippet of DNA from bacteria more than 16 million years ago, according to a new study. The gene helps the animal slow its metabolism

The latest excavation at Aristotle’s gymnasium in ancient Mieza has revealed ornate, mosaic-covered halls where researchers believe Alexander the Great learned his formative lessons

On Monday, NASA and Boeing provided an update on the company’s Starliner spacecraft, including adding additional crew missions and certifying a new rocket for crew transportation to low Earth orbit. “We are living through the most exciting era of space exploration since Apollo,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “As this domain continues to open, there […]

On Sept. 30, 1946, five National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics (NACA) engineers arrived at Muroc Army Airfield in California’s high desert to achieve supersonic flight for the first time. In less than two years, NACA flew the X-1 aircraft faster than the speed of sound, marking an important milestone in aviation history. Fast forward 80 […]

Over the last few days and weeks or so, a few of the people I follow and interact with on Fedi have been talking about centralising information, tools, applications, and expertise from the Motif (and Xt, Xlib, and X11) ecosystem. There’s a ton of information, resources, and actively maintained applications out there, but it’s all spread out and sometimes difficult to find, and so Thomas Adam – one of the core developers of FVWM, among other things, as well as creator of CoW (FVWM for Wayland, more or less) – has created an effort to centralise all of this. Motif Central brings together information about Motif, Xt, Xlib and X11: how they fit together, how to program with them, and where to find the manuals, examples and historical material that explain them. Begin with the X programming stack, build your first Motif application, or explore the programming resources. The history pages describe the libraries’ origins, while the archive guide helps you navigate older documentation. ↫ MotifCentral There’s been a whole flurry of activity around Motif lately, including the updated and maintained fork we talked about a few weeks ago. The people loosely collaborating on MotifCentral also submitted patches to CDE to make sure it works on the new Motif fork, with the CDE developers setting up a build pipeline for easier testing. Making sure CDE, the classic Motif desktop environment, works well with the maintained Motif fork quite a few people seem to be rallying around is a worthwhile effort. We’re still quite far from a complete(-ish) modern Motif ecosystem, but it’s very heartwarming to see just how many people are actually still interested in it. My perhaps misguided hope is that we can somehow get to a modernised Motif/CDE desktop environment and applications, making it possible to more easily run a modern Motif environment on Linux and the BSDs. One may dream.

Windows 11 received its September update on the 8th of this month, and within days Microsoft had acknowledged or investigated problems involving Remote Desktop, USB audio, Linux and WSL-based apps like Claude Cowork, and enterprise domain issues. Windows Latest also found File History failures, Explorer.exe crashes, and AMD GPU instability, with an emergency update following on September 14 that still did not fix everything. This got us curious, and we looked back across the nine monthly updates released from January through September 2026 and, rather unsurprisingly, Windows 10 update history isn’t infected with nearly as many bugs as that of Windows 11. ↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest Of course, Windows 10 also isn’t getting nearly as much attention from Microsoft, but that’s kind of the whole point, isn’t it? Whenever Microsoft touches something, especially over the last 5 years or so, it’s one cascade of failures after the other, eroding trust in Windows’ updates even more (if that’s even possible). In that light, why would you want to use Windows 11 and all the headaches that come with it, when Windows 10 is right there, still being supported, albeit without the latest bells and whistles that only seem to break Windows 11 anyway? If you really do need or want to use Windows, consider switching back to Windows 10 whenever the usual Windows reinstallation time draws near. You won’t lose much, but will gain quite a bit in the process. Of course, this won’t be a responsible or usable choice forever, but at this point in time, I definitely think it’s the optimal choice for quite a few people.

A commercial mission to boost NASA’s Swift observatory concluded without raising the spacecraft’s orbit, but the agency and industry vendor gained valuable experience that will benefit future in-space servicing programs.

Marking a significant expansion in the number of signatories to the Artemis Accords, NASA welcomed Albania, Croatia, Côte d’Ivoire, and San Marino, bringing total participation to 76 countries.  “Our momentum reflects a growing commitment to peaceful, responsible exploration and a shared understanding that the future in space will be shaped by those willing to lead,” […]

Editor’s Note: This advisory was updated on Sept. 28, 2026, with ticketing information for the public. The four astronauts of NASA’s Artemis II mission will participate in an event hosted by industry and community partners at the University of Houston to discuss their mission around the Moon aboard the Orion spacecraft. It will be the […]

Four crew members are set to launch to the International Space Station as part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission to perform research, technology demonstrations, and maintenance aboard the orbiting laboratory.

Most of the frozen water has vanished because glaciers have been flowing faster into the ocean, rather than because of surface melting of ice sheets, according to a new study. Researchers estimate the ice loss has raised the global sea level by more than one inch

After a long hiatus, the problem, which was likely inspired by juggling, has finally been resolved by a group of young mathematicians.

The post Mathematicians Harness Randomness To Crack a 55-Year-Old Conjecture first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The newly described species, found in Northern California's Lassen Volcanic National Park, can still reproduce at 145 degrees Fahrenheit and move around at 147 degrees, according to a new study

Kristie Foster paved her road to becoming a NASA civil servant with literal miles of dedication. Her work at the agency’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, supports NASA’s mission to return American astronauts to the Moon, build a Moon Base for an enduring presence on the lunar surface, and ensure American leadership […]

Leaves turn yellow in the fall because Chlorophyll breaks down, revealing the yellow pigment that was there all along. But why red? Red is a different story altogether. Leaves have to make a new pigment to turn red. Why would a dying leaf go an extra mile to do that? Scientists don’t really know. NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce reports on the leading hypotheses out there.

Read more of Nell's reporting on this topic .

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 September 28 –… 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. AnnotatedOriginal Cosmic Latte: […]

The idea of humans and robots working side-by-side in space was once the stuff of science fiction, but with NASA launching increasingly complex missions deeper into space, human-robot collaboration could become reality. Advanced robotic systems are critical for human spaceflight because they can enhance a crew’s performance and productivity while reducing risk and expanding the […]

A new map of the terrain beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet links hundreds of valleys that previous maps missed or left fragmented.

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 September 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. BeforeAfter Andromeda Before […]

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 September 26 –… 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. Mirrored Meteor and […]

One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan (myself included) must show up and try to explain the concept of screens. Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we’ll tell you, and one can drag them, we’ll say, and other Amiga users rally in agreement, while non-Amiga users probably still don’t get what’s so great about screens. Until now, when this text has been written, in the hope of converting unsuspecting normies into full-blown Amiga screen lovers. ↫ Carl Svensson A deeply technical look at not just how the Amiga managed to achieve this stunning functionality way back in the ’80s on machines with 7MHz and less RAM than a keyfob, but also how this functionality can be useful. I’ve always found the concept of screens on the Amiga quite interesting, and Svensson’s article does a great job at demystifying the whole concept. Of course, expect a lot of lovely Amiga OS screenshots.

It’s time for an overview of another month of Redox OS progress, and over the month of August – they’re a bit late, don’t believe the publication date – they’ve implemented multicore support for ARM, and considerably improved the I/O performance for the NVMe driver, RedoxFS, and RAMFS by implementing a ring buffer communication API. There’s also initial support for NUMA-based memory management, QEMU is now working on Redox, and much more. Of course, there’s also the usual long list of improvements to the kernel, relibc, drivers, and more.

Can you run an operating system with a graphical user interface and applications on the Atari Jaguar? Well, you can. A long time running idea and work-in-progress, I’d like to finally announce the current version of JagOS ‘Spot’ for the Atari Jaguar, running from the RetroHQ GameDrive. I’m slow at releasing things and try not to announce in-progress stuff due to lack of free time but would like to push this along. Maybe it’ll motivate me to work on it more if the interest is there or just release it as-is if not. The idea is based on the unreleased Atari Jaguar Painter Computer prototype, that a merged Falcon with Jaguar chipset-based computer would have found its way into consumer hands after the Falcon030. ↫ Clint Thompson The screenshots and YouTube video are quite impressive, but as it’s not actually released, it’s difficult to really say anything more about this project for now. I hope there’s enough interest to get this project’s code out there so it can be further improved and expanded.

During a news conference at 3 p.m. EDT on Monday, Sept. 28, NASA and Boeing leadership will discuss Starliner’s development and plans for regular crew flights to and from the International Space Station. Learn where to watch online: https://www.nasa.gov/live The briefing participants include: Media already credentialed for Crew-13 may participate in person at NASA’s Kennedy […]

Geophysical surveys provide new evidence for a theory that the Egyptian pharaoh was interred in the outer rooms of an existing burial complex. Researchers are trying to get approval to investigate for themselves

Two olive ridley turtles were found laying eggs on beaches in Southern California in September. In the Pacific Ocean, these reptiles normally nest farther south, often in Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama

The Republic of San Marino became the 76th signatory to the Artemis Accords during a ceremony in the city of Rimini on Friday with NASA and U.S. Department of State officials present.   “San Marino joins a growing coalition of like-minded nations committed to the peaceful, transparent, and responsible exploration of space,” said NASA Deputy Administrator […]

Spacecraft propulsion traditionally relies on volatile fuels and separate, bulky systems for different types of maneuvering in space. NASA is working to change that paradigm. Engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, recently completed a rigorous series of environmental and physical tests on a new small satellite designed to make spaceflight safer […]

Recently uncovered documents about the timing of Geli Raubal’s death cast new doubt on the Nazi leader’s alibi, which had been considered reasonably sound for nearly a century

The new discoveries emphasize that scientists have a lot left to learn about insect diversity, even in areas with many observations

So far, the technology has been tested only in pigs. If it's successful in humans, it could one day power tools that monitor your health or deliver drugs or electrical currents inside the body

2026-2027 DWU: Middle School Design Challenge Overview The 2026-2027 challenge theme is, “Fueling Flight Design Challenge: New Energy Systems.”  As more and more aircraft are a part of the US’ National Airspace System (NAS), NASA and partners at the FAA, at universities, and in the aviation industry are searching for ways to increase safety, make […]

2026-2027 DWU: High School Engineering Challenge Challenge Materials Overview The 2026-2027 challenge theme is, “Fueling Flight Design Challenge: New Energy Systems.” As more and more aircraft are a part of the US’ National Airspace System (NAS), NASA and partners at the FAA, at universities, and in the aviation industry are searching for ways to increase safety, […]

A chaotic secret hides within this seemingly serene image of spiral galaxy NGC 4698 taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and released on Sept. 18, 2026. As a spiral galaxy like our own Milky Way galaxy, NGC 4698 has spiral arms that curl around within a thin disk of stars, gas, and dust. These arms […]

While conducting excavations at a hospital on the Île de la Cité, in the Seine River, researchers discovered part of a wall that may have once protected Lutetia, the Gallic precursor to France’s capital

For more information, contact Donald S. Parker, Kennedy Space Center, donald.s.parker@nasa.gov Download the PDF version Improper casting and forging processes in the manufacture of aluminum alloy 2219 can lead to microstructural defects that result in a sub-optimal response to anodic surface treatments and an increase in corrosion susceptibility. This Technical Bulletin communicates the risks of […]

The biggest breakthrough in modern theoretical physics is the discovery that gravity can collapse the dimensions of space. Physicists don’t yet understand the implications.

The post Gravity Seems Holographic. What Does That Mean for Reality? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

The flying mammals likely arose 65 million years ago in Europe, before spreading to Africa and then the rest of the world, according to the new research

The antiquities were seized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by investigators from the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg Jr.

The world is bracing for the worst effects of a Super El Niño. Or a Godzilla El Niño. But what does that really even mean?

For millennia El Niño has shaped weather across the globe, fueling flooding in parts of the U.S., droughts and wildfires in Australia and Indonesia, and disrupting fisheries across the Pacific.

Scientists have long wondered if human activities — chiefly the burning of fossil fuels — are making El Niños stronger. Now, on the eve of the strongest El Niño on record, a team of researchers think they have an answer.

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

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Qualcomm, yesterday, promising Linux support for the new Snapdragon X2 processors: Linux on Snapdragon X2 Series is moving from early bring-up toward a more complete upstream developer experience. Core support is landing, Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU work is progressing, and real laptops with Snapdragon X2 Series processors are already beginning to boot Linux. ↫ Qualcomm’s promises from 2026 Interesting, but I feel like I’ve heard these exact words before. Qualcomm, two years ago, promising Linux support for the then-new Snapdragon X processors: It’s been our priority not only to support Linux on our premium-tier SoCs, but to support it pronto. In fact, within one or two days of publicly announcing each generation of Snapdragon 8, we’ve posted the initial patchset for Linux kernel support. Snapdragon X Elite was no exception: we announced on October 23 of last year and posted the patchset the next day. That was the result of a lot of pre-announcement work to get everything up and running on Linux and Debian. ↫ Qualcomm’s empty promises from 2024 These promises were not at all kept. Two years later, Linux support for Snapdragon X laptops is still spotty, broken, and limited, confined to just a few bespoke Ubuntu builds, which don’t even offer full support either. It’s a complete mess, effectively unusable, and highlights once again that big technology companies are compulsive liars. I have little faith in these new promises, but who knows – maybe this time it’ll be different. Probably not, though.

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 September 25 –… 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. Globular Cluster Omega […]

Several ingredients came together off the Pacific coast of Mexico to generate one of the strongest storms the eastern Pacific basin has ever seen.

Côte d’Ivoire signed the Artemis Accords on Thursday, becoming the 75th signatory and marking a major milestone for this growing coalition. With the signing ceremony in the nation’s largest city, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire joined other like-minded nations and committed to the peaceful, transparent, and responsible exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond. “The United States […]

Four crew members from three space agencies will launch to the International Space Station no earlier than spring 2027 for a long-duration science expedition as part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-14 mission. NASA astronauts Kayla Barron and Chris Birch will serve as spacecraft commander and pilot, with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Makoto Suwa, and Roscosmos cosmonaut […]

In a new study, more than 80 participants rated the pleasantness of vocalizations made by 123 European bird species. Researchers then looked at the acoustic qualities of the most—and least—liked songs

The NSSC provides travel reimbursement services for all authorized Agency travel including: domestic, foreign, local, ETDY, and Change of Station (COS). References Federal Travel Regulations (FTR) Traveler Extended TDY and Taxes Domestic Per Diem Rates Foreign Per Diem Rates Change of Station NSSC Travel now has another way that a transferee Traveler may submit his […]

NASA announced the winners of the Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table Thursday, with the top $300,000 prize being awarded to Chinyere Ukeje of Philadelphia, Pa. for the Adaptive Nourishment Infrastructure (ANI) food system concept. This competition challenged solvers to explore innovative solutions for integrated space food systems that would provide safe, nutritious meals […]

New excavations in the Nile Delta offer eye-opening clues about military and residential life in the New Kingdom era

Carbon-capture technology repurposed for breweries spreads and finds new applications

In this Aug. 27, 2026, image, an Alta-X drone flies an advanced guidance and navigation system known as the Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) experiment near NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston developed SPLICE, which successfully completed simulated lunar descent and […]

Like tendrils on a vine, lava spreads out from the northern crater of Krasheninnikov, a volcano pair on the Pacific coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. On July 30, 2025, an 8.8-magnitude earthquake had struck in the nearby ocean, apparently jolting one of the two volcanoes awake. A few days later, for the first time in […]

An upcoming exhibition at Tate Modern will feature more than 60 artworks created by Monet between the 1870s and 1920s. These pieces reveal how he documented changing light and weather conditions

When COVID-19 emerged, scientists had a crucial advantage: Decades of prior research on coronaviruses meant they understood the virus’ key proteins well enough to design vaccines in record time. The next pandemic may not offer the same head start.  To help improve the odds, NVIDIA has joined a coalition of global research organizations, including Google […]

The predicted number, which includes deaths since June, likely represents an underestimate of total deaths. The heat could linger beyond February, and the climate swing could bring about other life-threatening conditions, including flooding, wildfire and infectious diseases

During NASA’s SpaceX Crew‑13 mission aboard the International Space Station, astronauts will support a series of biomedical and human performance investigations, including a new collaborative effort to study how spaceflight affects blood flow and clotting. NASA also is testing crew members’ manual piloting skills, evaluating methods to counter vision and brain changes, gathering essential health […]

A warped Manhattan is waiting in the cloud this week. Remedy Entertainment’s CONTROL Resonant brings Dylan Faden’s extraordinary abilities and a paranatural crisis to GeForce NOW at launch. With the release comes the final days of the CONTROL Resonant Ultimate Membership Bundle. Purchase a 12-month GeForce NOW Ultimate membership through Sunday, Sept. 27, and receive […]

Together, the 943 silver denarii span nearly 300 years of Roman history, from 148 B.C.E. to 124 or 125 C.E.

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 September 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. OriginalAnnotated The Ghosts […]

A low-lying cloud layer brought autumn ambience to western Washington and Oregon, while mountainous areas near the coast remained above the pall.