fidzu : computers

Longtime Slashdot reader sbinning shares a press release: The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced the launch of a new clinical trial to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of psilocybin to treat major depression in Veterans, including those with concurrent PTSD. The new trial comes after a recent executive order on "Accelerating Medical Treatments for Serious Mental Illness," which aims to increase clinical trial participation and accelerate innovative research models and drug approvals for psychedelic drugs. [...] The randomized, controlled trial will enroll Veterans diagnosed with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder, with or without concurrent PTSD, and will compare outcomes between two psilocybin dosage levels. The study will also assess participants' levels of depression before and after treatment, tolerability of side effects, and overall patient-reported depression. [...] In addition to this trial, VA is involved in 20 active clinical trials focused on psychedelic therapies for mental health conditions. All VA research -- including research into psychedelics -- is conducted under strict safety protocols and in full compliance with federal guidelines.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

13 Aug 2026 11:00am GMT

After 13 years of observations and data processing, astronomers have released the largest two-dimensional map of the universe ever assembled, "offering a sweeping new view of nearly 4 billion celestial objects across roughly three-quarters of the sky," reports Space.com. From the report: The new map, created by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Surveys team, contains a staggering 5.6 trillion pixels and combines more than 263,000 telescope exposures collected over more than a decade. The observations span visible and near-infrared wavelengths, providing an enormous portrait of stars, galaxies and other cosmic phenomena across the sky, according to a statement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) NOIRLab. "It's part of the fabric of astronomy research now," David Schlegel, co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said in a statement. "When you're working with astronomical objects today, you often start by pulling up the Legacy Imaging Viewer to see what you're looking at."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

13 Aug 2026 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Two days before tens of thousands of migrants surged into Ceuta, one of Spain's enclaves on Morocco's northern coast, a newspaper there posted a video on TikTok and Instagram showing two young women walking in the city in wet suits, their hair still damp. The posts didn't say so explicitly, but the implication was clear: The women had just swum across the border from Morocco. "Ceuta can't take it anymore," the newspaper, El Faro de Ceuta, declared in the posts. On the other side of the border, the video resonated very differently. Cropped and reposted in Arabic, the video seemed like an invitation. The women were smiling, flashing peace signs and thumbs up and, most of all, walking around freely. The video seemed to legitimize rumors that had percolated for weeks on social media suggesting that a recent ruling by Spain's Supreme Court meant migrants who arrived illegally by sea could stay in the country. As one account on Facebook put it, falsely, "Ceuta is turning into an open gate," when in fact migrants still faced expulsion after a judicial review. The responses to the posts about the swimmers were a critical part of a cascade of disinformation that experts described as one of the starkest instances in which social media contributed directly to a real-world tragedy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

13 Aug 2026 3:30am GMT

Another month started almost two weeks ago, so we've got a new monthly report from Redox, the general purpose operating system written in Rust. The month of July - it seems the report was published with a bit of a delay, regardless of what the date on their site says - brought improvements to the installer, with new options commonly found in most installers, such as a choice of installation method, network-based installation, and more. The Google Summer of Code work on the new CPU scheduler has also been merged, including a number of related performance enhancements. There's improvements to the ARM port, Amlogic Meson UART ARM64 support, and uutils grep and sed have been successfully built on Redox, replacing their their GNU counterparts in the os-test test suite. In addition, a whole slew of demos were ported as well, from Ratatui demos to various Iced demos covering things like reading QR codes and processing Markdown. Of course, this is all topped off with the usual long list of lower-level, smaller changes and improvements to the kernel, drivers, Relibc, and more.

12 Aug 2026 11:15pm GMT

Boy's unusual symptoms could help identify the next case sooner.

12 Aug 2026 10:31pm GMT

"ShieldFont" aims to poison AI training data without making pages unreadable for people.

12 Aug 2026 10:02pm GMT

The data was scraped and exfiltrated from 2,500 users of a compromised AI package.

12 Aug 2026 9:43pm GMT

The OSNews Fundraiser, to celebrate the fact I posted 20000 stories in 21 years, is still underway. The first major incentive was reached, and I, a long-time Linux user, published my experiences using Windows 11 for a month. It wasn't a success. Keep donating if you want to find out what a Linux user thinks of the current state of macOS! ➡️ Donate through Ko-Fi ➡️ Donate through SEPA transfer* ➡️ Buy merch from our store ➡️ Why a fundraiser? €5000 incentive: Make me use Windows 11 for a month (the results were not great)> €10000: Video tour of my office and my computers/devices collection <€15000: Buy a Mac and use macOS for a month (and review it)€20000: I get an OSNews tattoo *Name: Thom Holwerda - IBAN: SE08 8000 0820 1684 4657 8414 - BIC: SWEDSESS Why support OSNews? I want to make sure I can run OSNews for another two decades and another 20000 posts, and I need your help to do so. Since my wife, who has a tough, underpaid job in elderly care, is largely unable to work due to health reasons caused by that very same job, my income has become a lot more crucial for our kids, my wife, and myself. With OSNews readers being more skeptical of subscription-like things like our Patreon than most people, it's exactly these one-time donations that make up the bulk of your support. Thank you.

12 Aug 2026 6:40pm GMT

Raymond Chen explains what, exactly, the file winstart.bat in Windows 95 is used for. In Windows 95, you could create a winstart.bat file in your Windows directory. During startup, the virtual machine manager initializes and creates the so-called "System virtual machine" (the "System VM"), which is the virtual machine that all Windows programs run in. But before running the user-mode kernel in that virtual machine, the virtual machine manager runs the winstart.bat batch file if it exists. ↫ Raymond Chen Chen needs to use several diagrams to really explain what the batch file is used for, but as a very crude summary, it allows you to load TSRs that only apply to Windows programs, while not affecting any additional DOS command prompts you may load later after Windows is already running. While many think it's a Windows 95 feature, it was already present in Windows 3.x. A unique feature that I doubt many people made active use of.

12 Aug 2026 6:24pm GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT