computers

03 May 2026

Slashdot

Carbon Pollution Is Making Food Less Nutritious, Risking the Health of Billions

A new meta-analysis found nutrients in food decreased over the last 40 years, reports the Washington Post. "Many of humanity's most important crops - including wheat, potatoes, beans - contain fewer vitamins and minerals than they did a generation ago." "The invisible culprit behind this damaging phenomenon? Carbon dioxide pollution." Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, have produced potent changes in the way plants grow - from increasing their sugar content to depleting essential nutrients like zinc... "The diets we eat today have less nutritional density than what our grandparents ate, even if we eat exactly the same thing," said Kristie Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington's Center for Health and the Global Environment. People in wealthy countries with strong health care systems will have many tools to cope with the change, experts said. But for the world's poorest and most vulnerable, the consequences could be devastating. One study concluded that by the middle of the century the phenomenon could put more than a billion additional women and children at risk of iron-deficiency anemia - a condition that can cause pregnancy complications, developmental problems and even death. Meanwhile, some 2 billion people across the globe who already suffer from some form of nutrient shortage could see their health problems grow even worse. "The scale of the problem is huge," Ebi said. Plants depend on carbon dioxide to perform photosynthesis - but that doesn't mean they grow better when there's more carbon in the air, scientists say. A sweeping survey of changes among 32 compounds in 43 crops found that nearly every plant that humans eat is harmed by rising CO2 levels... On average, they found, nutrients have already decreased by an average 3.2 percent across all plants since the late 1980s, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader GameboyRMH for sharing the news.

Robots Are Building Clay Homes In Texas Using Dirt From the Ground

A startup south of Austin is using robots to build homes out of clay pulled directly from the ground, reports a local news station: The materials are gathered on site, mixed, and placed on a build plate. From there, a robot lowers from above, picks up the clay with a claw, carries it to the wall and drops it into place. Later, the same robot switches tools, using a hammer attachment to pound the material into shape. "It's kind of trying to replicate how a human might build an adobe house," said software engineer Anastasia Nikoulina... Using machine learning, the system constantly evaluates the wall, adjusting how it builds to create a flat, solid surface... The project is underway at Proto-Town, a ranch between Lockhart and Luling where startups test new technologies, from anti-drone systems to nuclear reactors. The company plans to build their next home on the property, with hopes to do more than 20 homes over the next year.

OSnews

GNOME is good, actually

While I'm normally a KDE user, I do keep close tabs on various other desktop environments, and install and set them up every now and then to see how they're fairing, what improvements they've made, and ultimately, if my preference for KDE is still warranted. This usually means setting up a nice OpenBSD installation for Xfce, Fedora for GNOME, and less often others for some of the more niche desktop environments. Since GNOME 50 was just released, guess who's time in the round is up? Since everybody's already made up their mind about their preferred desktop eons ago, with upsides and downsides debated far past their expiration date, I'm not particularly interested in reviewing desktop environments or Linux distributions. However, after asking around on Fedi, it seemed there was quite a bit of interest in an article detailing how I set up GNOME, what changes I make to the defaults, which extensions I use, what tweaks I apply, and so on. Of course, everything described in this article is highly personal, and I'm not arguing that this is the optimal way to tweak GNOME, that the extensions I use are the best ones, or that any visual modifications I make are better than whatever defaults GNOME uses. No, my goal with this article is twofold: one, to highlight that GNOME is a lot more configurable, extensible, and malleable than common wisdom on the internet would have you believe. It's not KDE or one of those cobbled-together tiling Wayland desktops, but it's definitely not as rigid as you might think. And two, that GNOME is good, actually. Tools of the trade The first thing I do is install a few crucial tools that make it easier to modify and tweak GNOME. I really dislike lists in articles, but I will begrudgingly use one here: After installing all of these tools, the actual tweaking can commence. Visual tweaks I didn't use to like GNOME's Adwaita visual style, but over the years, it started growing on me to the point where I don't actively dislike it anymore. With the arrival of libadwaita, it has also become effectively impossible to theme modern GNOME applications, so even if you do change to something else, many of your applications won't follow along. If consistency is something you care about, you'll stick to Adwaita, but that leaves one problem unresolved: applications that still use GTK3. These applications will follow a much older version of Adwaita, making them stand out like eyesores among all the modern GTK4 stuff. Luckily, since GTK3 applications are still properly themable, this is easily fixed: just install the adw-gtk3 theme, either by hand, or through your distribution's repositories. To enable it, first install the user themes extension through Extension Manager, and then enable the theme in GNOME Tweaks for "Legacy Applications". Any potential GTK3 applications you still use will now integrate nicely with modern libadwaita applications. The one part of GNOME I really do deeply dislike is its icon theme. I can't quite explain why I dislike this icon set so much, but it runs deep, so one of the very first things I do is replace the default GNOME icon set with my personal favourite, Qogir. This is a popular icon set, so it's usually available in your distribution's repositories, but I always install it from its GitHub page. Changing GNOME's icon set is as simple as selecting it in GNOME Tweaks. You can't get much more personal taste than an icon set, and there are dozens of amazing sets to choose from in the Linux world. Changing them out and trying out new ones is stupidly easy, and it's definitely worth looking at a few that might be more pleasing to you than GNOME's (or KDE's) default. Lastly, I open Add Water and enable the amazing GNOME theme for LibreWolf. Add Water basically makes this as easy as flipping a switch, so there's no need to copy any files into your LibreWolf profile or whatever. The application also provides a few more small tweaks to fiddle with, like enabling standard tab widths so tabs don't grow and shrink as you close and open tabs, moving the bookmarks bar below the tab bar, and many more. Extensions Since the release of GNOME 3 in 2011, extensions have been the most capable way to modify GNOME's look, behaviour, and feature set. As far as I can tell, while the extension framework is an official part of the GNOME Shell, the extensions themselves are all third-party and not part of a vanilla GNOME installation. By now, there are over 2800 listed extensions, but that number includes abandoned extensions so it's hard to determine the actual number of currently-maintained ones. Whatever the actual number is, there's bound to be things in there you're going to want to use. Here are the extensions I have installed. Let's just start at the top and work our way down. I guess I'm forced to do another list. There are countless more extensions to choose from, and you're definitely going to find things you never even thought could be useful. Miscellaneous tweaks There's a few other things I modify. In GNOME Tweaks, I make it so that double-clicking a window's titlebar minimises it while right-clicking it lowers it; two features I picked up during my years as a BeOS user that I absolutely refuse to give up. I configure the dock from Dash to Dock so that it always remains on top and never hides itself, no matter the circumstances. In Settings, I disable virtual desktops entirely (I don't like virtual desktops), and I make sure tap-to-click is disabled (if I'm on a laptop). GNOME is good, actually After making all of these changes, I feel quite comfortable using GNOME, at least on my laptop. It's a nice, coherent experience, and offers what is probably the most polished graphical user interface you can find on Linux, even if it isn't the most full-featured. The third-party application ecosystem, through modern

03 May 2026 8:15pm GMT

Slashdot

It's Goodbye Time for Jeeves and Ask.com - Relics of Yesterday's Internet

A 1999 press release bragged "Jeeves" answered 92.3 million questions in just three months. "In the digital wilds of Y2K, we came to him with our most probing questions," remembers the New York Times - whether it was Britney Spears or tamagotchis: We asked, and he answered: Jeeves, the digital butler of information, the online valet who led us into the depths of cyberspace. Now, like so many other relics of yesterday's internet, Jeeves - and his home, Ask.com - are no more. After almost 30 years, the question-and-answer service and former search engine shuttered on Friday. "To you - the millions of users who turned to us for answers in a rapidly changing world - thank you for your endless curiosity, your loyalty, and your trust," the company said in a notice posted on its now-defunct website... Created in Berkeley, Calif., in the days of the dot-com gold rush, Ask Jeeves first appeared on computer screens in 1996.... Their mascot, Jeeves, was modeled on the clever English butler character from the famed P.G. Wodehouse book series. Its search function was simple - type in a question, get an answer. But the quality of its responses was uneven, and the website was quickly eclipsed by Google and Yahoo as the world's go-to search engines. The site was bought by InterActive Corp. for more than $1 billion in 2005, and was given an injection of cash to help it compete as a search engine. It rebranded as Ask.com and as part of the reimagining, the site also ditched the character of Jeeves in 2006. Scrappy but inventive, the site was one of the first to introduce hyperlocal map overlays to its searches and incorporate thumbnails of webpages. "They are doing a lot of clever and interesting things," a Google executive noted of Ask.com at the time. Still, Ask.com struggled to compete and returned in 2010 to its bread and butter: question-and-answer style prompts. Even then, it faltered against newer, crowdsourced iterations like Quora and Google's unyielding march to the internet fore - the platform now dominates search traffic, and the world's general experience of the internet. A statement at Ask.com ends "by thanking its millions of users, and saying, 'Jeeves' spirit endures'," notes this article from Engadget: As sad as it is to see a relic of the early Internet days fade into obscurity, we still have Ask Jeeves to thank for why some users still punch in full questions when querying Google. On top of that, Jeeves was built to provide detailed answers in natural language, which could have arguably acted as a precursor to today's AI chatbots like ChatGPT. "Now, Ask.com joins the Internet graveyard that includes competitors like AltaVista, which shut down in 2013," the article points out. "With Ask.com gone, alongside AIM and AOL dial-up services also sunsetting, we're truly coming to an end of a specific era of the Internet." And the New York Times argues the memory of Jeeves now rests somewhere between Limewire and Beanie Babies... Slashdot reader BrianFagioli calls it "a quiet reminder of how quickly the web moves, and how even widely recognized names can drift into obscurity once the underlying technology leaves them behind."

OSnews

How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?

To assess how small a macOS VM could be, I ran the same VM of macOS 26.4.1 on progressively smaller CPU core and memory allocations, using my virtualiser Viable. The VM's display window was set to a standard 1600 x 1000, and I ran Safari through its paces and performed some lightweight everyday tasks, including Storage analysis in Settings. Starting with 4 virtual cores and 8 GB vRAM, where the VM ran perfectly briskly with around 5 GB of memory used, I stepped down to 3 cores and 6 GB, to discover that memory usage fell to 3.9 GB and everything worked well. With just 2 cores and 4 GB of memory only 3.1 GB of that was used, and the VM continued to handle those lightweight tasks normally. ↫ Howard Oakley This is good news for people interested in the MacBook Neo who may also want to run a macOS virtual machine on it.

03 May 2026 5:46pm GMT

02 May 2026

Ars Technica

Research roundup: 6 cool science stories we almost missed

Crushing soda cans for science, why dolphins swim so fast, how urine helps mushrooms communicate, and more

02 May 2026 2:23pm GMT

Infrasound waves stop kitchen fires, but can they replace sprinklers?

Acoustic fire suppression goes commercial.

02 May 2026 11:30am GMT

01 May 2026

Ars Technica

Study: AI models that consider user's feeling are more likely to make errors

Overtuning can cause models to "prioritize user satisfaction over truthfulness."

01 May 2026 10:23pm GMT

30 Apr 2026

OSnews

Email is crazy

Email is like those creaking old Terminators from the '70s which continue to function without complaining. Designed for a world that doesn't exist anymore, it has optional encryption, no built-in auth, three⁺ retrofitted security layers bolted on top, an unstandardized filtering layer and many more quirks. Yet billions of emails arrive correctly every single day. Email is not elegant but nonetheless it is Lindy. In the new age of agentic AI, we can only expect it to metamorphose into another dimension. ↫ Saurabh "Sam" Khawase The fact that email is as complicated as it is bad enough, but having it be so dominantly controlled by only a few large gatekeepers like Google and Microsoft surely isn't helping either. I feel like email is no longer really a technology individuals can actively partake in at every level; it feels much more like WhatsApp or iMessage or whatever in that we just get to send messages, and that's it. Running your own mail sever isn't only a complex endeavour, it's also a continuous cat-and-mouse game with companies like Google and Microsoft to ensure you don't end up on some shitlist and your emails stop arriving. I settled on Fastmail as my email service, and it works quite well. Still, I would love to be able to just run my own email server, or have some of my far more capable friends run one for a small group of us, but it's such a daunting and unpleasant effort few people seem to have the stomach and perseverance for it.

30 Apr 2026 7:30pm GMT