Stem

Midsummer butterflies spotted early in Britain after sunny spring

Scientists fear early emerging insects may fall out of sync with pathogens, predators or availability of food

Midsummer butterflies are on the wing in early May after a sunny spring prompted one of the most advanced seasons for Britain’s Lepidoptera on record.

The Lulworth skipper – usually found in June and July – is flying at Lulworth Cove in Dorset, the chequered skipper emerged in April rather than mid-May in Scotland and the first swallowtail, which is most common in mid-June, was spotted in Norfolk on 1 May.

European and British soils seriously degraded by intensive farming

Experts found 60% of the EU’s agricultural soils had been degraded, with about 40% similarly damaged in the UK

More than 60% of the EU’s agricultural soils are degraded due to intensive agriculture, with similar damage to about 40% of British soils, a report has found.

Experts from the Save Soil initiative said nourishing and restoring agricultural soils could reduce the impact of the climate crisis and provide protection against the worsening extremes of weather, as well as the food shortages and price rises likely to accompany them.

Weatherwatch: How AI could offer faster, affordable weather forecasting

Researchers say AI could give every developing country a vital early warning system of extreme events

Weather forecasting has gradually been getting more and more sophisticated. It has also got far more important as the climate gets more unpredictable and extreme events threaten to cause massive economic damage and loss of life. So an early warning system is vital.

Ever larger computer systems making millions of calculations over many hours are now part of the daily forecasting in most developed countries. Sadly large parts of the world, many very vulnerable to dangerous climate events, do not have the money, personnel or computing power to develop the 10-day forecasting system they need.

Running a Desktop Virtual Machine

This post is about my experience running a Linux desktop virtual machine on a Linux host. I used the VM interactively, often in fullscreen mode, to develop software and run web apps (mostly Slack and Google Docs). My experience wasn't great, as I ran into many challenges.

My previous post on running VMs discussed running bare-bones Linux VMs and getting SSH access to them. I usually do that for testing, where the VMs are light-weight, shortlived, and disposable. It turns out that long-lived desktop VMs have more challenging requirements and come with a whole new set of issues.

[$] A FUSE implementation for famfs

LWN
The famfs filesystem is meant to provide a shared-memory filesystem for large data sets that are accessed for computations by multiple systems. It was developed by John Groves, who led a combined filesystem and memory-management session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) to discuss it. The session was a follow-up to the famfs session at last year's summit, but it was also meant to discuss whether the kernel's direct-access (DAX) mechanism, which is used by famfs, could be replaced in the filesystem by using other kernel features.