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Apple will unveil its overhauled UI experience at today’s WWDC event. The new UI will be available on all Apple devices, including iPhones, iPads, and Mac devices, and it will take most of its cues from visionOS. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has now provided us with new details about Apple’s new UI. The new interface is called Liquid Glass and has “sheen and see-through visuals of a glassy surface.” The name represents Apple’s approach to designing the new interface. The new UI also brings “transparency and shine effects in all of Apple’s tool bars, in-app interfaces and controls.” However, Gurman notes that the Liquid Glass interface will lay the groundwork for Apple’s future products, especially the 20th anniversary iPhone. It was already reported that Apple plans to unveil at least two new devices in 2027, which coincides with the iPhone’s 20th anniversary. The first model would be the long-awaited foldable iPhone. However, the second model, the 20th anniversary iPhone, is a glass-centric model that aligns with Apple’s new UI concept. According to Gurman, the 20th anniversary iPhone has curved glass sides and edges. It also features “extraordinarily slim bezels” and “no cutout section in the screen.” The phone is reportedly called “Glasswing,” which refers to the type of butterfly with transparent wings. Apple’s upcoming iOS 26 is the biggest overhaul to iPhone UI since the launch of iOS 7 in 2013. The new UI also hits iPadOS 26, tvOS 26, visionOS 26, watchOS 26, macOS 26. As a side note, the new “26” on the name of Apple’s operating system represents the year 2026. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Linus Torvalds, head and founder of the Linux kernel, has announced the closure of the merge window where major new features are added to the kernel, and the beginning of the Linux 6.16 release candidates, beginning with release candidate 1 (Linux 6.16-rc1). Linux 6.15 was released two weeks ago and in the time since, developers have had the opportunity to try and get their new kernel features into the Linux 6.16 kernel. Over the next two months, we will get seven or eight release candidates where developers will stabilize new and existing features. This means that the stable version of Linux 6.16 will arrive around the end of July. Torvalds said that the merge window seemed pretty normal this time, but did say he had a feeling that there were more “late straggler” pull requests than is typical. Despite this, everything seems to be fine and the schedule will be going forward as planned. Key areas of development Torvalds explained that around half of the changes in the first release candidate were driver updates, with the bulk of those being made up with by GPU and networking drivers. For end users these are the most important changes because when your favorite distribution of Linux ships a new release with this kernel, it will support more graphics cards and networking equipment like Wi-Fi cards. The non-driver updates in this version are split between architecture-specific updates, documentation and tooling (perf tool and selftests), and core changes to filesystems, core kernel, memory management, and networking. Torvalds said the core changes include some of the “most important” changes, though they’re not necessarily major changes. Fixes to the core ensure a more stable Linux kernel for end users, plus better performance. The merge window saw developers submit thousands of non-merge commits and merges. The non-merge commits were around 13,000 while the merge commits nearly reached 1,000. There were 1,783 unique authors submitting code during this window. Next steps Over the coming weeks, Linux developers, including individuals or representatives of companies, will submit bug fixes for new and existing features. This release candidate cycle will run until around the end of July and then the final version will become available. End users shouldn’t go out and download Linux 6.16 when it’s released, instead just wait for your Linux distribution to update to it, as distribution-specific changes get made. Neowin will be following these releases and reporting on any interested changes that are noted. Source: LKML Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

ExplainingComputers (1.11M subscribers) June 8, 2025 Video length: 18m 49s ReactOS is FOSS that can natively run Windows applications and drivers. The latest version, 0.4.15, was released in March 2025. So I thought we’d take a closer look . . . 00:00 Titles & Intro 00:48 Getting ReactOS 03:56 Live CD Boot 07:31 VirtualBox Install 13:54 Windows Applications 17:37 Wrap Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

The Outer Worlds 2 launches this October. Obsidian Entertainment and Xbox Game Studios have announced a release date for the upcoming action-RPG game The Outer Worlds 2: 29 October, 2025. The sequel to Obsidian’s 2019 sci-fi game, which notably featured anti-capitalist messaging, will also be Microsoft’s first US$80 video game. Watch a new trailer for the game below: This week’s Xbox Games Showcase gave us tons of The Outer Worlds 2-related news. During the presentation, Obsidian Entertainment dropped a new trailer to confirm that the sci-fi RPG is launching this October. The showcase was followed by a The Outer Worlds 2 Direct, which teased more details for the upcoming game. In the Direct, Obsidian confirmed The Outer Worlds 2’s setting: Arcadia, a new space colony that’s being torn apart by corporate ambition, rifts, and three different clashing factions. The game’s factions, companions, and even radio stations will react to the player’s actions, as the game features expanded RPG systems, new flaws, and more science gadgets. Here’s how the new trailer’s YouTube description describes the game: As a daring and most likely good-looking Earth Directorate agent, you must uncover the source of devastating rifts threatening to destroy all of humanity. Your investigation leads to Arcadia, home of skip drive technology, where the fate of the colony, and ultimately the entire galaxy, rests on your decisions—your strengths, your flaws, your crew, and the factions you choose to trust. The Outer Worlds 2 will be Microsoft’s first US$80 video game After Nintendo ripped the band-aid off video game price hikes with the US$80 Mario Kart World, it looks like Microsoft is now following suit. According to an official Xbox post, The Outer Worlds 2’s Standard Edition will cost US$79.99. Its Premium Edition, which adds five-day early access, two future expansions, cosmetics, gear, a digital artbook, and a soundtrack, will cost US$99.99. Given that The Outer Worlds 2 is getting a price hike this year, it’s likely that the rest of Xbox Game Studios’ first-party titles–including Call of Duty: Black Ops 7–are looking at US$80 price tags too. Source

In the latest monthly news roundup from the Linux Mint team, the developers announced a feature that users have wanted for a long, long time. The famously user-friendly distribution is finally getting proper, integrated support for fingerprint login. For a distro that has built its reputation on providing a comfortable, "it just works" experience for people new to Linux, the absence of this convenient security feature has been a noticeable gap, especially on modern laptops. The new feature will arrive in Linux Mint 22.2, powered by Fingwit, a brand new XApp built by the Mint developers. It handles detecting your fingerprint reader and recording your prints. Once configured, you can use your fingerprint for the login screen, the screensaver, authenticating sudo commands, and any other administrative actions that pop up a password dialog (pkexec). What makes this particularly interesting is how it deals with situations where a fingerprint just will not work. Fingwit uses fprintd for the backend work, but the Mint devs say its custom authentication module is clever enough to detect tricky cases. For instance, if your home directory is encrypted, you absolutely need your password to decrypt it at login. Just using a fingerprint would lead to a crashed session. Fingwit sees this coming and dynamically prompts for your password instead. The Mint team says Fingwit will be able to run "in any desktop environment and on any Linux distribution." A significant driver for this development has been the team's ongoing work with Framework. Testing the company's hardware has pushed the Mint team to better support the features packed into modern laptops. This partnership is also the reason Mint 22.1 got power profiles and why Mint 22.2 will ship with a newer HWE (hardware enablement) kernel. The team also announced a slew of other changes for the upcoming release. As part of this work, core applications like gnome-calendar, simple-scan (the document scanner), and baobab (the disk usage analyzer) will be upgraded to their newer libAdwaita versions. To solve the long-standing frustration of libAdwaita apps ignoring system themes, the developers have patched the library. Taking it a step further, they have forked it entirely into a new project called libAdapta. On a final, critical note, the team also had a serious warning for users of older versions. The Linux Mint 20.x series, which includes versions 20, 20.1, 20.2, and 20.3, officially reached its End of Life in April 2024. Your system will continue to function, but it will no longer receive any security updates from the official repositories, leaving it vulnerable. The team laid out two options. The recommended path is a fresh installation of a newer release (22.1), which provides support until 2029 and is the cleanest way forward. Alternatively, you can attempt a long and complicated in-place upgrade, which is a multi-step process from 20.x to 21.3. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Last month Microsoft announced a big update for Windows hardware drivers. The company declared that it was killing Windows Device metadata and the Windows Metadata and Internet Services (WMIS). For those wondering what it is, device metadata, as the name suggests, is the collection of additional, user-facing information that an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) provides about a hardware device. The feature was introduced with Windows 7 and can include stuff like icons, logos, descriptive texts, among other things, that help the Windows UI display details about such devices in places like Task Manager or Device Manager. This was a huge deal back in the day when Windows 7 debuted. The company called the feature "Device Stage" and Microsoft described it as a "new visual interface" that essentially worked like a "multi-function version of Autoplay where it displays all the applications, services, and information related to your device." It is often considered synonymous with the Windows "Devices and Printers" Control Panel applet. Neowin did an in-depth overview of the feature when it first launched which you can find in its dedicated article here. The Windows OS was able to obtain the device experience metadata from the WMIS, but now that the feature is being deprecated, Microsoft has begun removing information about Device Stage from its official support documents. Neowin noticed while browsing that a support article regarding automatic Windows hardware drivers was updated for Windows 11 and 10 sometime last year after the release of Windows 11 24H2. Previously, this article was geared for Windows 7 and was much longer. It also contained information about Device Stage, which, as mentioned above, was a headlining feature on Windows 7. In the said article, the section "If Windows can't find information about your device in Device Stage" has been deleted. You can find the archived version of the support page here. Aside from shortening the amount of information on the page, Microsoft has also added some more details on it. The company has now tried to define what the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter is, how updating drivers through Device Manager works, as well as a thorough and detailed troubleshooting section for common hardware driver errors on Windows, including one for USB-C. You can find all the new details on the updated support page here on Microsoft's website. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

This week's news recap is here, bringing you the latest stories from the Microsoft world, including useful PowerToys modules, fresh Windows 11 preview builds, AI video generation in Bing, Office updates, gaming news, and more. Quick links: Windows 10 and 11 Windows Insider Program Updates are available Gaming news Windows 11 and Windows 10 Here, we talk about everything happening around Microsoft's latest operating system in the Stable channel and preview builds: new features, removed features, controversies, bugs, interesting findings, and more. And, of course, you may find a word or two about older versions. This week's Windows 11 section kicks off with some stats. StatCounter published its monthly report, showing that Windows 11 slowed its climb a little bit in May 2025. On the gaming side, however, things are much better, with Windows 11 occupying the majority of PCs on Steam. Now, here are some Windows updates you might have missed. Windows 11 versions 23H2 and 22H2 received KB5062170, a small emergency patch that resolved errors when installing recent updates. The patch is available only through the Microsoft Update Catalog, and the company recommends installing it only if your system experiences the 0xc0000098 code when installing the May 2025 security update. Finally, Microsoft released a new Defender update for Windows 11 and 10 installations, fresh recovery updates, and a script for recovering the inetpub folder, which showed up unannounced on systems in April. As Windows 10 is getting closer to the end of support, more companies are urging users to switch. AMD, Dell, and ASUS all urge users to prepare for the "mandatory Windows 11 upgrade," while other companies shamelessly poach Windows 10 users, luring them to Linux. To finish this week's Windows section, here is an ancient CD-burning app that made a surprising 64-bit comeback and now works on modern operating systems, including Windows 11. Windows Insider Program Here is what Microsoft released for Windows Insiders this week: Builds Canary Channel Build 27871 This week's Canary build introduced Start menu improvements (more Phone Link features), small taskbar tweaks, and a long list of various fixes to improve different parts of the operating system. Dev Channel Build 26200.5622 (KB5058512) This build brought new Click to Do features, a dedicated Settings section for Quick Machine recovery, improved Windows Widgets, a new spec card for the Settings app, and a few fixes here and there. Build 26200.5622 also contains a new "Your Device Info" card on the Settings Home page, which makes it easier to find your computer's specs with fewer clicks. Beta Channel Build 26120.4230 (KB5058506) This one is almost identical to build 26200.5622 from the Dev Channel. Release Preview Channel Nothing in the Release Preview Channel this week Besides new builds, Microsoft announced a new update for the Windows Photos app, which is now available to Windows Insiders in all channels. The update introduces AI-powered light controls (Relight), which let you place and control up to three light sources on your photo, and AI-powered search with natural language support. Updates are available This section covers software, firmware, and other notable updates (released and coming soon) from Microsoft and third parties, delivering new features, security fixes, improvements, patches, and more. Microsoft announced a batch of new features for the Microsoft Store. The app is getting an improved Home page with personalized recommendations based on your recent activities, region, and deals. Search now considers additional information when ranking apps in the results, and a Copilot button lets you ask AI about a certain app. Microsoft also brags about significant performance improvements under the hood. This week, we had plenty of various Office updates. Microsoft 365, for one, is getting significant changes to its update channels beginning July 2025. Rollback support will be expanded to two months, the Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel (Preview) is being deprecated, and the Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel will be supported for eight months instead of the current 14. Microsoft also announced the general availability of the new Message Trace in the Exchange Admin Center in Exchange Online, some big updates for the new Outlook for Windows in the June 2025 update, and acknowledged a few issues with Outlook after a recent Calendar feature upgrade. Teams is also getting a "major" change for third-party app settings, and Word is getting SharePoint eSignature support. Bing received a surprising update this week. OpenAI's Sora video generator is now available for free in Bing Video Creator. Now, you do not have to pay for an OpenAI subscription to generate short videos using AI. Way to boost Bing stats, Microsoft! PowerToys Run, a useful and convenient launcher for Windows 10 and 11, recently received three new third-party modules that let you test your internet speed, download videos from hundreds of websites, and check out word definitions, usage, synonyms, and more. Microsoft announced some long-requested changes for Microsoft Edge, but only for those living in the EEA region. Windows will no longer annoy you with setting Edge as your default browser, and Windows Widgets will respect your default browser. Also, Microsoft will let you uninstall the Microsoft Store app, and Windows Search will be able to use other search providers. Speaking of browsers, Microsoft published a blog post that explained why Edge is a faster and smarter alternative to Chrome. If you are picking between the two, the article might help you make the choice (Google has an answer to that with its own article explaining that Chrome is now faster than ever). Also, the company released Edge 138 in the Beta Channel, bringing some important changes and new features, such as a new (sort of new) media control center, AI-powered history search, and more. Here are other updates and releases you may find interesting: Microsoft expanded LinkedIn's CEO role to manage Office apps. Microsoft announced the general availability of two new reasoning AI agents: Research and Analyst. Microsoft and Crowdstrike announced a partnership on threat actor naming. Microsoft will invest $400 million in Switzerland to bolster cloud and AI infrastructure. The annual Build conference is moving away from Seattle. Here are the latest drivers and firmware updates released this week: Intel 32.0.101.6876 non-WHQL with support for four new games and a single fix for intermittent display artifacts. Nvidia 576.66 Hotfix with patches for FC 25 crashes, video bugs in browsers, and more. In addition to that, Nvidia released a new version of the Nvidia App, which introduced a light theme (and automatic theme switching), support for more games, and some bug fixes. AMD Software Pro Edition 25 Q2 with support for Windows Server 2025, new Ryzen processors, and a few fixes. AMD Radeon Software 25.6.1 with the RX 9060 XT support and FSR 4 support for more games. On the gaming side Learn about upcoming game releases, Xbox rumors, new hardware, software updates, freebies, deals, discounts, and more. Hello Games continues relentlessly improving No Man's Sky. The game's latest update, "Beacon," was announced this week. It offers space explorers overhauled settlements, player overseer duties, and much more. The update is now available on all supported platforms, including Nintendo Switch 2. The Witcher 4 from CD Projekt RED might be a few years away. Still, at the State of Unreal 2025 keynote, the developers revealed a tech demo showcasing the capabilities of Unreal Engine 5 on the base PlayStation 5, which managed to pull it off at a solid 60 FPS. Nvidia announced new games that are now available in the GeForce NOW cloud streaming service (you have to own them to play them). The latest drop is a massive one: 25 new games, including FBC: Firebreak, Dune: Awakening, 7 Days to Die, DREADZONE, and more. Game Pass is also getting new games, and the first drop in June is also a pretty big one. You will soon get access to Kingdom: Two Crowns, EA Sports FC 25, FBC: Firebreak, Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time, The Alters, and more. Some games are leaving the service, so check out the full list here. Xbox Games Showcase 2025 is happening today. With the show kicking off in just a few hours, check out our recap of what to expect at the show and how to watch it. On the hardware side, we have a new Xbox Storage Expansion Card from Seagate. At a whopping $429.99 price tag, the new card offers an immense amount of space for your games, doubling that of the previously biggest expansion card. Now, you can get an Xbox Storage Expansion Card with 4TB. By the way, it costs as much as the 1TB Xbox Series S. Deals and freebies If you are looking for some new games at lower prices, check out this week's Weekend PC Game Deals, which covers multiple specials and discounts, including some freebies, such as Deathloop from the Epic Games Store. Other gaming news includes the following: Ubisoft is skipping its Forward game showcase for the first time since 2020. Valve released a new beta version of Steam for Linux to address sluggish update installations. Elden Ring Nighteign received its first update with reduced difficulty for solo runs. The Expanse TV show is getting a narrative-driven sci-fi action RPG. Black Myth: Wukong is coming to Xbox in August. Atomic Heart is getting a sequel and an MMO RPG spin-off. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

Google Play Store is the main venue for Android users to download applications. While Google has strict rules and policies for verifying apps, some malicious apps somehow slip through anyway. Meanwhile, when it comes to crypto wallet apps, both Google app auditors and Play Store users need to be even more cautious. Cyble Research and Intelligence Labs has identified at least 20 crypto phishing applications on the Google Play Store that impersonate legitimate and popular crypto wallet apps and try to steal users' crypto credentials. By impersonation, these malicious apps trick users into downloading them and then start to capture the user's actual login data. "What makes this campaign particularly dangerous is the use of seemingly legitimate applications, hosted under previously benign or compromised developer accounts, combined with a large-scale phishing infrastructure linked to over 50 domains. This extends the campaign's reach and lowers the likelihood of immediate detection by traditional defenses." Cyble writes. Some of these malicious apps have the same name but come with a different package name. After removing duplicate names, here's the list of 9 newly discovered crypto phishing applications on the Play Store: Pancake Swap Suite Wallet Hyperliquid Raydium BullX Crypto OpenOcean Exchange Meteora Exchange SushiSwap Harvest Finance Blog According to Cyble, these apps prompt users to enter their 12-word mnemonic phrase to access the fake crypto wallet. Also, scammers use accounts that were previously used to distribute legitimate apps to minimize the risk of getting caught by Google. These accounts are more likely to be compromised and then taken over by scammers. If you've downloaded any of these fake crypto wallet apps from the Play Store, make sure to delete them as soon as possible. In 2024, revenue from crypto scams was estimated to be around $9.9 billion. This billion-dollar crypto scam business is expected to grow massively in 2025 thanks to AI. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

A lawsuit filed by educational publishers in 2024 accuses Google of profiting from textbook piracy. At the heart of the complaint are claims that Google's ‘systemic and pervasive advertising’ of infringing copies promotes pirated copies sold by third parties. In its recent motion to dismiss, Google argued that the publishers' vicarious liability claim fails to meet the legal standard. In an opinion and order handed down this week, the judge agreed - but not on everything. In common with many services provided by Google, its search engine is wide open and free of charge at the point of delivery. The quid pro quo is the user’s consumption of Google ads, placed by millions of advertisers for all kinds of products. Given the scale, it’s no surprise that some offer products of dubious origin. The question is who can be held liable beyond the seller, and under what specific circumstances. Textbook Pirates In June 2024, some of the world’s largest publishers came together in a joint lawsuit targeting Google. In a complaint filed at a New York federal court, companies including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, Elsevier, and McGraw Hill bemoaned Google’s ‘systemic and pervasive advertising’ of infringing copies of their copyrighted textbooks. The publishers’ allegations concerning Google Shopping describe ads that use unauthorized images of the publishers’ genuine textbooks, some with visible trademarks, to promote sales of pirated copies. A ‘bait-and-switch’ by Google, the publishers allege. More generally, the publishers claim that Google searches for their textbook titles return piracy-heavy results, making their original products more difficult to find. The publishers claim ‘pirate’ ad takedown notices were sent repeatedly to Google, but to little effect. Notifications identifying specific ‘pirate sellers’ as repeat infringers didn’t lead to Google terminating their accounts “within a reasonable time, if at all.” Google’s Motion to Dismiss In a recent motion to dismiss, Google sought to thin out the publishers’ claims, which include vicarious copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and violation of New York’s deceptive business practices law. In an opinion and order handed down this week, United States District Judge Jennifer L. Rochon analyzes the publishers’ claims and relevant legal precedents. Google believes the publishers’ vicarious copyright infringement claim should be dismissed; the Judge put that to the test. A vicarious copyright infringement claim must contain two elements: • The right and ability to supervise the infringing conduct and • Direct financial interest in the infringing activity Google moved to dismiss based on the publishers’ alleged failure to plead both elements. The Court had no need to go further than the first. Ability to Supervise or Control A finding of vicarious liability in this case turns on Google’s relationship to the pirate textbook sellers (direct infringers), not just the infringement itself. The first element must show that Google had the ability to supervise or control the third parties’ infringing activity yet failed to do so. Google says that because the alleged direct infringement (sales of pirated textbooks) took place on the pirate sellers’ third-party websites, it’s clear that its ability to supervise or control doesn’t extend that far. Citing precedents such as Perfect 10 v. Amazon and Perfect 10 v. Visa, Judge Rochon agrees with Google. In these cases, the ability to terminate an advertising or payment processing relationship, which might indirectly reduce infringement on third-party websites, was not considered to be the ‘direct control’ over infringing activity required for a claim of vicarious liability. In cases including Napster, the opposite was true due to the infringement taking place on a system under Napster’s control, where it had the right to terminate access. Indirect Effect is Insufficient The Court accepts that the removal of infringing ads and the termination of accounts may have an indirect effect by reducing traffic to the pirate sellers’ websites. However, that doesn’t mean that Google has any control over the websites where the infringement takes place, or that any measures applied to search would change that. “The fact that ‘search engines [can] effectively cause a website to disappear by removing it from their search results’ is not enough to give rise to vicarious liability,” the order reads. “Plaintiffs have not adequately pleaded that Google has sufficient ability to control or supervise the Pirate Sellers’ infringement, and therefore, Plaintiffs’ vicarious copyright infringement claim fails to state a claim.” Court Denies Request to Dismiss Trademark Claim Google’s request to dismiss the publishers’ trademark claim was rejected. The publishers’ claim under 15 U.S.C. § 1114(1)(b) relates to “advertisements intended to be used in commerce upon or in connection with the sale, offering for sale, distribution, or advertising of goods or services” when such use is likely to “cause confusion or deceive.” The plaintiffs claim that Google included unauthorized reproductions of their trademarks in the pirate sellers’ ads, having acquired the images containing the marks from the sellers themselves. Google denied that, insisting that it only displayed images where the marks were already applied. The Court found that the publishers had sufficiently pleaded their direct trademark infringement claim, so this element of Google’s motion to dismiss was denied. The case will continue with the trademark claim intact, alongside a contributory copyright infringement claim that was not included in Google’s motion to dismiss. Judge Rochon’s opinion and order is available here (pdf) Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of May): 2,377 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

A novel suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution. The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien civilizations exist, he said, some should surely have had enough time to expand throughout the cosmos. So where are they? Many answers to Fermi’s “paradox” have been proposed: Maybe alien civilizations burn out or destroy themselves before they can become interstellar wanderers. But perhaps the simplest answer is that such civilizations don’t appear in the first place: Intelligent life is extremely unlikely, and we pose the question only because we are the supremely rare exception. A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics—the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If they’re right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread. In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter—living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function. This hypothesis, formulated by the mineralogist Robert Hazen and the astrobiologist Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, along with a team of others, has provoked intense debate. Some researchers have welcomed the idea as part of a grand narrative about fundamental laws of nature. They argue that the basic laws of physics are not “complete” in the sense of supplying all we need to comprehend natural phenomena; rather, evolution—biological or otherwise—introduces functions and novelties that could not even in principle be predicted from physics alone. “I’m so glad they’ve done what they’ve done,” said Stuart Kauffman, an emeritus complexity theorist at the University of Pennsylvania. “They’ve made these questions legitimate.” Michael Wong, an astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC. Photograph: Katherine Cain/Carnegie Science Others argue that extending evolutionary ideas about function to non-living systems is an overreach. The quantitative value that measures information in this new approach is not only relative—it changes depending on context—it’s impossible to calculate. For this and other reasons, critics have charged that the new theory cannot be tested, and therefore is of little use. The work taps into an expanding debate about how biological evolution fits within the normal framework of science. The theory of Darwinian evolution by natural selection helps us to understand how living things have changed in the past. But unlike most scientific theories, it can’t predict much about what is to come. Might embedding it within a meta-law of increasing complexity let us glimpse what the future holds? Making Meaning The story begins in 2003, when the biologist Jack Szostak published a short article in Nature proposing the concept of functional information. Szostak—who six years later would get a Nobel Prize for unrelated work—wanted to quantify the amount of information or complexity that biological molecules like proteins or DNA strands embody. Classical information theory, developed by the telecommunications researcher Claude Shannon in the 1940s and later elaborated by the Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, offers one answer. Per Kolmogorov, the complexity of a string of symbols (such as binary 1s and 0s) depends on how concisely one can specify that sequence uniquely. For example, consider DNA, which is a chain of four different building blocks called nucleotides. Α strand composed only of one nucleotide, repeating again and again, has much less complexity—and, by extension, encodes less information—than one composed of all four nucleotides in which the sequence seems random (as is more typical in the genome). Jack Szostak proposed a way to quantify information in biological systems. Photograph: HHMI But Szostak pointed out that Kolmogorov’s measure of complexity neglects an issue crucial to biology: how biological molecules function. In biology, sometimes many different molecules can do the same job. Consider RNA molecules, some of which have biochemical functions that can easily be defined and measured. (Like DNA, RNA is made up of sequences of nucleotides.) In particular, short strands of RNA called aptamers securely bind to other molecules. Let’s say you want to find an RNA aptamer that binds to a particular target molecule. Can lots of aptamers do it, or just one? If only a single aptamer can do the job, then it’s unique, just as a long, seemingly random sequence of letters is unique. Szostak said that this aptamer would have a lot of what he called “functional information.” If many different aptamers can perform the same task, the functional information is much smaller. So we can calculate the functional information of a molecule by asking how many other molecules of the same size can do the same task just as well. Szostak went on to show that in a case like this, functional information can be measured experimentally. He made a bunch of RNA aptamers and used chemical methods to identify and isolate the ones that would bind to a chosen target molecule. He then mutated the winners a little to seek even better binders and repeated the process. The better an aptamer gets at binding, the less likely it is that another RNA molecule chosen at random will do just as well: The functional information of the winners in each round should rise. Szostak found that the functional information of the best-performing aptamers got ever closer to the maximum value predicted theoretically. Selected for Function Hazen came across Szostak’s idea while thinking about the origin of life—an issue that drew him in as a mineralogist, because chemical reactions taking place on minerals have long been suspected to have played a key role in getting life started. “I concluded that talking about life versus nonlife is a false dichotomy,” Hazen said. “I felt there had to be some kind of continuum—there has to be something that’s driving this process from simpler to more complex systems.” Functional information, he thought, promised a way to get at the “increasing complexity of all kinds of evolving systems.” In 2007 Hazen collaborated with Szostak to write a computer simulation involving algorithms that evolve via mutations. Their function, in this case, was not to bind to a target molecule, but to carry out computations. Again they found that the functional information increased spontaneously over time as the system evolved. There the idea languished for years. Hazen could not see how to take it any further until Wong accepted a fellowship at the Carnegie Institution in 2021. Wong had a background in planetary atmospheres, but he and Hazen discovered they were thinking about the same questions. “From the very first moment that we sat down and talked about ideas, it was unbelievable,” Hazen said. Robert Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC. Photograph: Courtesy of Robert Hazen “I had got disillusioned with the state of the art of looking for life on other worlds,” Wong said. “I thought it was too narrowly constrained to life as we know it here on Earth, but life elsewhere may take a completely different evolutionary trajectory. So how do we abstract far enough away from life on Earth that we’d be able to notice life elsewhere even if it had different chemical specifics, but not so far that we’d be including all kinds of self-organizing structures like hurricanes?” The pair soon realized that they needed expertise from a whole other set of disciplines. “We needed people who came at this problem from very different points of view, so that we all had checks and balances on each other’s prejudices,” Hazen said. “This is not a mineralogical problem; it’s not a physics problem, or a philosophical problem. It’s all of those things.” They suspected that functional information was the key to understanding how complex systems like living organisms arise through evolutionary processes happening over time. “We all assumed the second law of thermodynamics supplies the arrow of time,” Hazen said. “But it seems like there’s a much more idiosyncratic pathway that the universe takes. We think it’s because of selection for function—a very orderly process that leads to ordered states. That’s not part of the second law, although it’s not inconsistent with it either.” Looked at this way, the concept of functional information allowed the team to think about the development of complex systems that don’t seem related to life at all. At first glance, it doesn’t seem a promising idea. In biology, function makes sense. But what does “function” mean for a rock? All it really implies, Hazen said, is that some selective process favors one entity over lots of other potential combinations. A huge number of different minerals can form from silicon, oxygen, aluminum, calcium, and so on. But only a few are found in any given environment. The most stable minerals turn out to be the most common. But sometimes less stable minerals persist because there isn’t enough energy available to convert them to more stable phases. This might seem trivial, like saying that some objects exist while other ones don’t, even if they could in theory. But Hazen and Wong have shown that, even for minerals, functional information has increased over the course of Earth’s history. Minerals evolve toward greater complexity (though not in the Darwinian sense). Hazen and colleagues speculate that complex forms of carbon such as graphene might form in the hydrocarbon-rich environment of Saturn’s moon Titan—another example of an increase in functional information that doesn’t involve life. It’s the same with chemical elements. The first moments after the Big Bang were filled with undifferentiated energy. As things cooled, quarks formed and then condensed into protons and neutrons. These gathered into the nuclei of hydrogen, helium, and lithium atoms. Only once stars formed and nuclear fusion happened within them did more complex elements like carbon and oxygen form. And only when some stars had exhausted their fusion fuel did their collapse and explosion in supernovas create heavier elements such as heavy metals. Steadily, the elements increased in nuclear complexity. Wong said their work implies three main conclusions. First, biology is just one example of evolution. “There is a more universal description that drives the evolution of complex systems.” Second, he said, there might be “an arrow in time that describes this increasing complexity,” similar to the way the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the increase in entropy, is thought to create a preferred direction of time. Finally, Wong said, “information itself might be a vital parameter of the cosmos, similar to mass, charge and energy.” In the work Hazen and Szostak conducted on evolution using artificial-life algorithms, the increase in functional information was not always gradual. Sometimes it would happen in sudden jumps. That echoes what is seen in biological evolution. Biologists have long recognized transitions where the complexity of organisms increases abruptly. One such transition was the appearance of organisms with cellular nuclei (around 1.8 billion to 2.7 billion years ago). Then there was the transition to multicellular organisms (around 2 billion to 1.6 billion years ago), the abrupt diversification of body forms in the Cambrian explosion (540 million years ago), and the appearance of central nervous systems (around 600 million to 520 million years ago). The arrival of humans was arguably another major and rapid evolutionary transition. Evolutionary biologists have tended to view each of these transitions as a contingent event. But within the functional-information framework, it seems possible that such jumps in evolutionary processes (whether biological or not) are inevitable. In these jumps, Wong pictures the evolving objects as accessing an entirely new landscape of possibilities and ways to become organized, as if penetrating to the “next floor up.” Crucially, what matters—the criteria for selection, on which continued evolution depends—also changes, plotting a wholly novel course. On the next floor up, possibilities await that could not have been guessed before you reached it. For example, during the origin of life it might initially have mattered that proto-biological molecules would persist for a long time—that they’d be stable. But once such molecules became organized into groups that could catalyze one another’s formation—what Kauffman has called autocatalytic cycles—the molecules themselves could be short-lived, so long as the cycles persisted. Now it was dynamical, not thermodynamic, stability that mattered. Ricard Solé of the Santa Fe Institute thinks such jumps might be equivalent to phase transitions in physics, such as the freezing of water or the magnetization of iron: They are collective processes with universal features, and they mean that everything changes, everywhere, all at once. In other words, in this view there’s a kind of physics of evolution—and it’s a kind of physics we know about already. The Biosphere Creates Its Own Possibilities The tricky thing about functional information is that, unlike a measure such as size or mass, it is contextual: It depends on what we want the object to do, and what environment it is in. For instance, the functional information for an RNA aptamer binding to a particular molecule will generally be quite different from the information for binding to a different molecule. Yet finding new uses for existing components is precisely what evolution does. Feathers did not evolve for flight, for example. This repurposing reflects how biological evolution is jerry-rigged, making use of what’s available. Kauffman argues that biological evolution is thus constantly creating not just new types of organisms but new possibilities for organisms, ones that not only did not exist at an earlier stage of evolution but could not possibly have existed. From the soup of single-celled organisms that constituted life on Earth 3 billion years ago, no elephant could have suddenly emerged—this required a whole host of preceding, contingent but specific innovations. However, there is no theoretical limit to the number of uses an object has. This means that the appearance of new functions in evolution can’t be predicted—and yet some new functions can dictate the very rules of how the system evolves subsequently. “The biosphere is creating its own possibilities,” Kauffman said. “Not only do we not know what will happen, we don’t even know what can happen.” Photosynthesis was such a profound development; so were eukaryotes, nervous systems and language. As the microbiologist Carl Woese and the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld put it in 2011, “We need an additional set of rules describing the evolution of the original rules. But this upper level of rules itself needs to evolve. Thus, we end up with an infinite hierarchy.” The physicist Paul Davies of Arizona State University agrees that biological evolution “generates its own extended possibility space which cannot be reliably predicted or captured via any deterministic process from prior states. So life evolves partly into the unknown.” Mathematically, a “phase space” is a way of describing all possible configurations of a physical system, whether it’s as comparatively simple as an idealized pendulum or as complicated as all the atoms comprising the Earth. Davies and his co-workers have recently suggested that evolution in an expanding accessible phase space might be formally equivalent to the “incompleteness theorems” devised by the mathematician Kurt Gödel. Gödel showed that any system of axioms in mathematics permits the formulation of statements that can’t be shown to be true or false. We can only decide such statements by adding new axioms. Davies and colleagues say that, as with Gödel’s theorem, the key factor that makes biological evolution open-ended and prevents us from being able to express it in a self-contained and all-encompassing phase space is that it is self-referential: The appearance of new actors in the space feeds back on those already there to create new possibilities for action. This isn’t the case for physical systems, which, even if they have, say, millions of stars in a galaxy, are not self-referential. “An increase in complexity provides the future potential to find new strategies unavailable to simpler organisms,” said Marcus Heisler, a plant developmental biologist at the University of Sydney and co-author of the incompleteness paper. This connection between biological evolution and the issue of noncomputability, Davies said, “goes right to the heart of what makes life so magical.” Is biology special, then, among evolutionary processes in having an open-endedness generated by self-reference? Hazen thinks that in fact once complex cognition is added to the mix—once the components of the system can reason, choose, and run experiments “in their heads”—the potential for macro-micro feedback and open-ended growth is even greater. “Technological applications take us way beyond Darwinism,” he said. A watch gets made faster if the watchmaker is not blind. Back to the Bench If Hazen and colleagues are right that evolution involving any kind of selection inevitably increases functional information—in effect, complexity—does this mean that life itself, and perhaps consciousness and higher intelligence, is inevitable in the universe? That would run counter to what some biologists have thought. The eminent evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr believed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was doomed because the appearance of humanlike intelligence is “utterly improbable.” After all, he said, if intelligence at a level that leads to cultures and civilizations were so adaptively useful in Darwinian evolution, how come it only arose once across the entire tree of life? Mayr’s evolutionary point possibly vanishes in the jump to humanlike complexity and intelligence, whereupon the whole playing field is utterly transformed. Humans attained planetary dominance so rapidly (for better or worse) that the question of when it will happen again becomes moot. But what about the chances of such a jump happening in the first place? If the new “law of increasing functional information” is right, it looks as though life, once it exists, is bound to get more complex by leaps and bounds. It doesn’t have to rely on some highly improbable chance event. What’s more, such an increase in complexity seems to imply the appearance of new causal laws in nature that, while not incompatible with the fundamental laws of physics governing the smallest component parts, effectively take over from them in determining what happens next. Arguably we see this already in biology: Galileo’s (apocryphal) experiment of dropping two masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa no longer has predictive power when the masses are not cannonballs but living birds. Together with the chemist Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow, Sara Walker of Arizona State University has devised an alternative set of ideas to describe how complexity arises, called assembly theory. In place of functional information, assembly theory relies on a number called the assembly index, which measures the minimum number of steps required to make an object from its constituent ingredients. “Laws for living systems must be somewhat different than what we have in physics now,” Walker said, “but that does not mean that there are no laws.” But she doubts that the putative law of functional information can be rigorously tested in the lab. “I am not sure how one could say [the theory] is right or wrong, since there is no way to test it objectively,” she said. “What would the experiment look for? How would it be controlled? I would love to see an example, but I remain skeptical until some metrology is done in this area.” Hazen acknowledges that, for most physical objects, it is impossible to calculate functional information even in principle. Even for a single living cell, he admits, there’s no way of quantifying it. But he argues that this is not a sticking point, because we can still understand it conceptually and get an approximate quantitative sense of it. Similarly, we can’t calculate the exact dynamics of the asteroid belt because the gravitational problem is too complicated—but we can still describe it approximately enough to navigate spacecraft through it. Wong sees a potential application of their ideas in astrobiology. One of the curious aspects of living organisms on Earth is that they tend to make a far smaller subset of organic molecules than they could make given the basic ingredients. That’s because natural selection has picked out some favored compounds. There’s much more glucose in living cells, for example, than you’d expect if molecules were simply being made either randomly or according to their thermodynamic stability. So one potential signature of lifelike entities on other worlds might be similar signs of selection outside what chemical thermodynamics or kinetics alone would generate. (Assembly theory similarly predicts complexity-based biosignatures.) There might be other ways of putting the ideas to the test. Wong said there is more work still to be done on mineral evolution, and they hope to look at nucleosynthesis and computational “artificial life.” Hazen also sees possible applications in oncology, soil science and language evolution. For example, the evolutionary biologist Frédéric Thomas of the University of Montpellier in and colleagues have argued that the selective principles governing the way cancer cells change over time in tumors are not like those of Darwinian evolution, in which the selection criterion is fitness, but more closely resemble the idea of selection for function from Hazen and colleagues. Hazen’s team has been fielding queries from researchers ranging from economists to neuroscientists, who are keen to see if the approach can help. “People are approaching us because they are desperate to find a model to explain their system,” Hazen said. But whether or not functional information turns out to be the right tool for thinking about these questions, many researchers seem to be converging on similar questions about complexity, information, evolution (both biological and cosmic), function and purpose, and the directionality of time. It’s hard not to suspect that something big is afoot. There are echoes of the early days of thermodynamics, which began with humble questions about how machines work and ended up speaking to the arrow of time, the peculiarities of living matter, and the fate of the universe. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. 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