In addition to today's blog post calling out the need for others to takeover the This Week In Plasma series, KDE developer Nate Graham also published another blog post to highlight the successes of the Plasma desktop over 2025. In particular, the KDE Plasma Wayland transition "nears completion" as i…

Quantum stocks are where AI was five years ago — and the science actually works.

Many Indian cities rank at the bottom of liveability indexes despite big government spending on infrastructure.

Too much turkey and Baileys? Blow away the Christmas cobwebs on one of our rambles. And if that doesn’t work, they all end at a pub for a hair of the dogDistance 7 milesDuration 5 hoursStart/finish Ditchling village car park Continue reading...

The US president has named a proposed new vessel after himself.

By stripping two metabolic enzymes, scientists created a mycoprotein that needs less energy, emits less carbon, and rivals the taste and texture of real meat.

Whether you’re switching from springs to memory foam or just want to sleep cooler this summer, these Sealy mattress deals will have you waking up refreshed—and with cash left in your wallet.

The chair of the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee has written to the environment secretary expressing “deep disappointment” at the government’s response to its waste-crime inquiry.
The post Lords write to environment secretary over “complacent” response to waste crime inquiry …

Millions of Afghans are struggling as international aid cuts sever a lifeline many relied on for food and heating

And more pharma news from the Pharmalot campus via the Pharmalittle newsletter

BCI trends to watch in 2026: Better ways of capturing brain signals, brain implants for mental health, and Chinese competition.

A provisional agreement between the European Parliament and Council will introduce mandatory recycled-content targets, stronger producer responsibility and tighter controls on vehicle exports, aiming to accelerate the transition to a more circular automotive sector. The European Union has reached a …

Fish 4.3 is out today as the newest update to this user-friendly command line shell. Fish 4.0 released at the beginning of this year in porting the codebase from C++ to Rust and now before closing out 2025 they have out Fish 4.3...

Protesting university students in Serbia have collected signatures throughout the country for their request for an early parliamentary election

The health emergency is detailed in the forthcoming CNN Films documentary I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not.

Plus, Bing Crosby’s Ultimate Christmas breaks the record for the biggest streaming week ever for a holiday album.

Another pilot was in critical condition, according to the fire chief in Hammonton, N.J., where the crash took place.

Historically, configuring the correct cgroup driver has been a pain point for users running new
Kubernetes clusters. On Linux systems, there are two different cgroup drivers:
cgroupfs and systemd. In the past, both the kubelet
and CRI implementation (like CRI-O or containerd) needed to be configured…

ETH Zurich scientists have created “MetaGraph,” a revolutionary DNA search engine that functions like Google for genetic data. By compressing global genomic datasets by a factor of 300, it allows researchers to search trillions of DNA and RNA sequences in seconds instead of downloading massive data …

Three young Britons explain why they are building their futures overseas.

In a few days, ESA’s fourth European Service Module will leave the integration halls of Airbus in Bremen, Germany, setting sail across the Atlantic Ocean in the next step of its journey. The module will propel NASA’s Orion spacecraft towards the Moon during Artemis IV, supplying the crew with water,…

US President Donald Trump is expected to push for progress on the faltering Gaza ceasefire when he meets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, with talks also set to cover Israel’s security concerns over Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran.

French actress Brigitte Bardot, whose death at the age of 91 was announced on Sunday, became a global symbol of glamour and desire during the on-screen career of her youth. Here are a few of the most memorable moments from that career, from the iconic image of a bikini-clad Bardot in "... And God Cr…

A new CPU Manager Static Policy Option called prefer-align-cpus-by-uncorecache was introduced in Kubernetes v1.32 as an alpha feature, and has graduated to beta in Kubernetes v1.34.
This CPU Manager Policy Option is designed to optimize performance for specific workloads running on processors with a…

Researchers have discovered a way to store information using a rare class of materials called ferroaxials, which rely on swirling electric dipoles instead of magnetism or charge. These vortex-like states are naturally stable and resistant to outside interference, but until now were almost impossible…

LG has revealed a new lineup of gaming monitors just ahead of CES. The UltraGear evo displays offer 5K visuals. Many incorporate on-device AI upscaling, taking some of the burden away from the GPU. 
LG says the tech will let consumers skip out on some card upgrades. This could end up being extremely…

Researchers have found a way to make “dark excitons”—normally invisible quantum states of light—shine dramatically brighter by trapping them inside a tiny gold-nanotube optical cavity. This breakthrough boosts their emission 300,000-fold and allows scientists to switch and tune them with unprecedent…

A pro-Russian hacker group has come forward as the perpetrator of a DDoS attack on the French national postal service La Poste that took place on December 22, according to Reuters. The distributed denial-of-service attack took central computer systems at La Poste entirely offline and caused major di…

IAR and SiFive, Inc. have announced support for SiFive's Automotive IP portfolio within IAR's development toolchain. With the latest release of the IAR Embedded Workbench for RISC-V, IAR has broadened its coverage beyond the E6-A series to now include the SiFive Essential E7-A and S7-A product famil…

Volunteering has declined along with religion — it needs a revival

One person is dead and another is fighting for life after two helicopters collided in midair in southern New Jersey.

Turkish authorities have apprehended a suspected member of the extremist Islamic State group planning attacks on New Year's celebrations

The U.S. National Science Foundation today announced two major advancements in America's AI infrastructure: the launch of the Integrated Data Systems and Services (NSF IDSS) program to build out...

Donald Trump says he and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky are “getting a lot closer” to an agreement to end the war in Ukraine.

Launched in March, NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope has completed its first infrared map of the entire sky in 102 colors. This map will enable 3D distance measurements to other galaxies and allow astronomers to measure the influence of Cosmic Inflation on the large-scale structure of the Universe.

In a new paper, a team of researchers explores how non-human species (in this case, fireflies) could inform new approaches in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

A team of scientists have created a porous material that keeps windows almost 100 percent transparent while blocking 10 times as much heat as regular glass windows.

After breaking his leg on a mountain bike trail, my husband was airlifted to hospital. I felt relief – then reality hitRead more in the kindness of strangers seriesFor our long-service leave, my husband and I decided to travel around Tasmania with our camper trailer. We were coming all the way from …

Fed-up fans are questioning additional ‘restoration’ costs for new stadiums as well as a lack of transparencyGig-goers who bought tickets for Gorillaz at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in June next year have been refunded some of their booking fee by the ticket seller Gigantic after the Guardian queried …

At least three people killed across state since atmospheric river storms began earlier this weekMudslides buried cars and homes up to their windows in a California mountain town as a powerful storm system brought the wettest Christmas in decades to the southern part of the state.As much as 12in of r…

Dying is a process and in a person’s final hours and days, Nickie and her Threshold Choir are there to accompany people on their way and bring comfort. Through specially composed songs, akin to lullabies, the choir cultivates an environment of love and safety around those on their deathbed.  For the…

Sarah Boston on the women who fought for and ultimately won recognition of the skill and value of their workIn her long read article (‘Pretty birds and silly moos’: the women behind the Sex Discrimination Act, 18 December), Susanna Rustin details some of the women who campaigned to make illegal the …

Taipei condemns exercise that Chinese army calls ‘a stern warning against “Taiwan independence” separatist forces and external interference forces’China has launched live-fire military drills around Taiwan, in what it calls a warning to “separatist” forces in Taiwan and “external interference” by fo…

From Jackson Lamb’s mac in Slow Horses to the queen-bee wardrobe of Wild Cherry, Guardian writers choose the outfits that shaped storylines and revealed personalities in 2025• Don’t get Fashion Statement delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereNever mind the catwalk shows, the viral glossy advertising …

River Wandle, south London: I can see the water from my bedroom window, the pollution has gone and it’s bursting with lifeMost mornings now, I peek out of my bedroom window and immediately feel happy. Right outside, the River Wandle is awake and bursting with life. The grey heron swoops down and swi…

Wake up to the top stories and what they mean – free to your inbox every weekday morning at 7amScroll less, understand more: sign up to receive our news email each weekday for clarity on the top stories in the UK and across the world.Explore all our newsletters: whether you love film, football, fash…

And other biotech news, brought to you by The Readout newsletter

What might 2026 hold for the fields of public health, both domestically and abroad? Quite a lot.

The Trump administration has shown strong interest in furthering psychedelics as therapy, and cannabis too.

Federal agencies that used to set up guardrails for health technology have transformed into cheerleaders for new risky technologies like AI.

A proposal to deregulate AI products used in health care would shift the burden of vetting those tools onto health systems.

Democratic-led states and D.C. have sued HHS, calling an RFK Jr. declaration that rejected gender-affirming care an overreach of its authority.

In this edition of STAT Health Tech: A look back at the big changes in health tech, and AstraZeneca joins wearables study with Lilly, Novo.

If this rule is enacted, “any kind of care could be subject to similar treatment,” experts write.

Several pharmaceutical companies that struck drug pricing deals with the White House said they're exempt from the Medicare demonstrations.

Germany’s new ZB MED is “about ensuring that a single fragile pipeline doesn’t bottleneck good science,” experts write.

STAT examines how U.S. vaccine policy is set to change next year.

The health sector is working to navigate what could be the most significant changes to the U.S. vaccine program in decades.

This is the web edition of STAT's D.C. Diagnosis newsletter.

On or off Broadway, public health lives or dies at the level of ordinary, everyday interactions.

And more health news from Morning Rounds

Walter Koroshetz, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, will soon be leaving his role, STAT has learned. His departure in the coming days means nearly half…

The choice that one person makes not to vaccinate has real costs — financial and otherwise — for their neighbors.

STAT's 10th anniversary year saw unprecedented changes in science and public health.

The European Parliament has approved an agreement with member states to narrow the scope of EU sustainability reporting and supply-chain due diligence rules.
The post MEPs back scaling back of EU sustainability reporting and due diligence rules appeared first on Circular Online.

North Somerset Council and Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm are aiming to repurpose up to 4,000 Christmas trees this winter, expanding a long-running partnership designed to reduce seasonal waste and support environmental and community initiatives. Thousands of Christmas trees are set to be given a second life i…

The European Union is planning stricter controls on plastic imports...
The post EU plans tighter checks on plastic imports to support recycling industry appeared first on Circular Online.

Coventry City Council has incurred £900,000 in fines after non-recyclable waste was placed in recycling bins, contributing to a wider overspend in its city services budget, according to a council finance report. Coventry City Council’s city services department recorded a £1.5m overspend in the three…

Stats show continued progress away from landfill in Northern Ireland, but little movement in recycling rates
The post Northern Ireland recycling rate stagnates as Energy from Waste expands, Daera figures show appeared first on Circular Online.

More than half of people say they recycle less over Christmas.
The post Recycling rates drop at Christmas as households struggle with festive waste, survey suggests appeared first on Circular Online.

The Salvation Army Trading Company has suspended the collection of donated textiles from household waste and recycling centres, citing rising donation volumes, increasing costs and wider economic pressures affecting the used clothing sector. The Salvation Army Trading Company (SATCoL) has suspended …

A 30-year-old man has been given a suspended prison sentence after admitting to operating an illegal waste site on rural land in Northumberland, following a long-running investigation by the Environment Agency. A Northumberland man who dumped waste illegally on his land has been sentenced at court a…

University College London has been awarded more than £44,000 through the National Cup Recycling Scheme’s Beyond the Bin fund to investigate why paper cups continue to be missed by mainstream recycling systems. University College London (UCL) has been named the winner of the National Cup Recycling Sc…

Parliamentarians, councils and industry representatives have met at Westminster to discuss the growing number of fires linked to discarded lithium-ion batteries, amid calls for stronger regulation and government support. A cross-sector group of parliamentarians, local government representatives and …

Partnership between the British Beauty Council and MYGroup aims to capture cosmetic packaging not handled by kerbside collections.
The post UK beauty brands invited to join nationwide take-back scheme for hard-to-recycle packaging appeared first on Circular Online.

A new technique developed at the University of Helsinki uses fatty acids, hydrogen peroxide and visible light to dissolve and recover silver from waste, offering a safer alternative to conventional cyanide-based recycling. Researchers in Finland have demonstrated a new method for recycling silver th…

A man has been arrested and four vehicles seized after hundreds of tonnes of waste was discovered on wooded land in Bromley.
The post Man arrested after hundreds of tonnes of waste dumped in Bromley appeared first on Circular Online.

Scientists say a new chemical recycling method could convert everyday plastic waste into key ingredients used in cancer medicines, potentially reducing reliance on fossil-based materials.
The post Plastic waste could be turned into anti-cancer drugs, researchers say appeared first on Circular Online…

Extended Producer Responsibility frameworks are directing materials towards recycling rather than higher-value reuse and repair, according to a new policy brief from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which calls for stronger fee incentives and clearer regulation to support circular economy goals. Exte…

The Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee has said it is deeply disappointed by the government’s ‘complacent’ response to its waste-crime inquiry.
The post Defra accused of complacency over waste-crime inquiry by Lords appeared first on Circular Online.

It was a very interesting year for Ubuntu Linux. Ahead of the important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out this coming April, Ubuntu Linux this year was expeditiously migrating to new Rust-based system tools like sudo-rs and Rust Coreutils, new performance optimizations continued to be explored for be…

For those using Microsoft's exFAT file-system under Linux for the likes of flash drives and SD cards, a new patch series posted today aims to enhance the read performance. The new patches are shown to improve performance by about 10% while also having lower overhead...

Announced earlier in December but flying under the radar until now is the initial reoease of a QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop. This is a developer environment for the QNX real-time operating system primarily used on embedded systems. With now having this developer desktop option, the hassle of cr…

Ahead of Intel Core Ultra "Panther Lake" laptops expected to be showcased in just over one week at CES in Las Vegas, new Xe3_LPD firmware binaries were upstreamed today to linux-firmware.git in getting ready that production-ready support for Intel Panther Lake on Linux...

When it came to the most viewed AMD Linux/open-source news of 2025 there were a lot of accomplishments for the company this year both on the CPU and graphics side of the house and from consumer to server hardware. Today is a look back at the most popular Intel open-source/Linux news of the year, whi…

HarfBuzz 12.3 was just released for ending out 2025 with some nice performance improvements to this widely-used text shaping engine. HarfBuzz in turn is used by the prominent Linux desktop environments, Java, Flutter, various game engines, and apps like Chrome and Firefox for text shaping needs with…

As part of the various end-of-year benchmarking comparisons on Phoronix and with Linux 6.19 switching older AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards to the AMDGPU driver by default, I planned for a very large AMD Radeon graphics card comparison on the latest open-source Linux driver for ending out 2025. In th…

The Simple DirectMedia Library that is widely-used by many cross-platform games and part of the Steam Runtime now has better support for handling more mouse button events under Wayland...

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.19-rc3 to ship this week's fixes. Linux 6.19-rc3 is coming in light as expected due to the Christmas week with many corporate developers getting paid time off and others taking part in year-end festivities...

Fedora Linux this year continued in punctually shipping the very latest upstream Linux innovations from the freshest Wayland components to Linux kernel features and continuing to leverage other improvements in the open-source world...

Coreboot 25.12 is out today as the latest quarterly feature update to this open-source BIOS/firmware solution...

The Linux 6.19 kernel has been a bit bumpy in the scheduler department but at least one fix is on the way for addressing fallout...

GNOME developer Sophie Herold has shared some interesting end-of-year code stats for the GNOME project. The "GNOME" codebase is up to 6,692,516 lines of code at the end of 2025 with 1,611,526 lines of that being from GNOME apps. Where the data gets interesting is on the programming language breakdow…

Adding to the unfortunate engineering setbacks at Intel this year as part of cost-cutting measures, the Intel IWD software development has been on a hiatus for the past three months. Going from previously seeing monthly releases and almost constant activity to now development ceasing up with no acti…

The mainline Linux kernel already supports several different Mobileye SoCs for that company focused on self-driving tech and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Consulting firm Bootlin has been working on bringing their latest SoC, the Mobileye Eyeq6Lplus, to the mainline Linux kernel...

An exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list this morning is proposing a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the "Modern Standby" functionality found with Microsoft Windows...

Between the DXVK and VKD3D(-Proton) projects there is good support for Direct3D 8 through Direct3D 12 implementations atop the Vulkan API for Linux gaming usage. For those preferring more retro classic gaming, D7VK came about more recently for Direct3D 7 as a DXVK fork. Out today is D7VK 1.1 and bes…

Wine 11.0-rc4 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate in working toward the stable Wine 11.0 release in January...

Male solo artists dominate, though three female solo artists and two groups have also achieved the feat.

Plus, a record seven holiday albums decorate the top 10.