Jehan is reorganizing the Align/Distribute tool options. Probably not a final implementation, as the discussion about UX keeps going.
Jasper is adding new text orientation options: 90° clockwise and counterclockwise rotation.
Additionally, Gabriele contributed a new Preferences option to disable the use of the TAB key to switch all dockable windows on and off. This is one of the maddening aspects of using GIMP for new users who press the key by accident and then struggle to figure out why all the docks have suddenly disappeared and how to bring them back.
Personally, I think the proposed patch is more of a workaround. All shortcuts should be configurable; singling one of them out and adding a dedicated switch in Preferences doesn’t seem like a consistent solution to me. Plus, bringing docks back should not be puzzling in the first place. On the flip side, I’m definitely biased here.
All of the above are unmerge patches at the moment.
Martin Owens is enhancing the rendering engine so it can work with floating pixel data and a greater number of color channels (think support for CMYKA).
Mike Kowalski is adding a character viewer to the font dock.
The Blender Foundation has published all the videos from the Blender Conference 2025 on YouTube and Peertube. With over 80 videos in the playlist, there’s something for everyone: architectural visualization, production of animated TV series, simulating real-world camera lenses, recreating historical and cultural legacy, and so much more.
You know how much I love digging into arcane pull requests and showing exciting new features and quality-of-life improvements. So believe me when I tell you that there is nothing more exciting right now than seeing the number of v1.1 release blockers go down. If the trend continues, a release candidate in November would not be entirely unrealistic.
At the same time, the pile of post-1.1 work just keeps growing. 229 out of 256 submitted pull requests are now scheduled for inclusion in version 1.2. Sure, some of them are in Draft, but I can absolutely see the team pulling double code review shifts shortly after the v1.1 release again.
Among other “fun” things, the team recently had to discuss how they should deal with AI-generated patches.
Muse Group also released a technical preview of Audacity 4, the upcoming new release with the user interface completely reimagined and rebuilt with Qt. The important thing is not to expect this version to be production-ready yet. Or the project files to be backward-compatible.
Things like importing/exporting audio, cutting, and applying real-time effects already work. Here is the list of v3 features that are not there yet:
Nyquist, LADSPA, VAMP, and the OpenVINO plugins.
Preferences from Audacity 3 are not carried over.
Envelopes and label tracks.
Spectrogram view and the spectral editing mode.
Most built-in effects, including generators and analyzers.
Opening multiple projects at the same time.
You should also probably expects the mixer to be available in v4. Automation is planned but won’t happen in the first v4 release though.
Notably, some of the missing features from the list above will likely not function exactly as they do in v3 today. My gut feeling is that envelopes and spectral editing are likely to undergo redesign. Martin specifically mentioned envelopes in the video he published several days ahead of the release:
The video focused on the various types of debt that the team inherited from the original team and how they addressed them. That list of debt includes the logo, and it’s a topic of its own.
Over the last 25 years, I witnessed dozens, if not hundreds, of logo proposals, because many people were not happy with the original one. I’ve seen symbolic logos, photorealistic logos, and just about everything in between.
Some contributors were adamant that only they have the right vision for the project’s branding. Others were very much self-aware (“Here’s yet another unsolicited logo redesign to add to the pile“). So it’s very tempting to smirk when you read things like “just deliver a logo people like” in the comments section at The Verge.
All in all, I feel it’s somewhat premature to comment on the new Audacity. There are aspects that I absolutely love. There are things I’m just not too sure about. Like the lack of grid lines above waveform visualization in tracks. Or some of the user interface being bloody enormous, like this built-in compressor plugin window:
So let’s wait for the final version to arrive. The current estimation is sometime in 2026.
We are excited to announce a significant advancement in the security of the
Signal Protocol: the introduction of the Sparse Post Quantum Ratchet (SPQR).
This new ratchet enhances the Signal Protocol’s resilience against future
quantum computing threats while maintaining our existing security guarantees of
forward secrecy and post-compromise security.
New RapidRAW releases now take longer, but the pace is still impressive. This version features several notable enhancements. I’ll take a deeper dive in a separate post, so here is the list of changes:
Auto-culling to help you detect similar photos and discard blurry ones (in the screenshot below).
Collage maker that distributes a selection of photos over a configurable grid.
New color calibration panel hidden by default, for tweaking hue and saturation of primary RGB channels.
Preset importer (says “other common photo editors”, but I don’t see any in the list, just the ones by RapidRAW).
New section in Settings to select which functionality to show in the UI (this is where you enable the color calibration panel).
Sorting by Exif data: a small selection of Exif fields is available (Date taken, ISO, Focus length, etc.).
Major improvement ot local contrast tools.
As usual, downloads and the full list of changes are on GitHub.
At 100% zoom, scrolling the mouse wheel now changes the tool size.
Highlighter colors are now more transparent.
Images on the home page now have drop shadows.
Additional resizing options for tools like Arrow and Rectangle.
Color and width can now be changed for annotations you already added.
Image background got some new presets.
Angle selector on the gradient background tab has been improved.
Tesseract-based OCR is now available.
I’d love to include a screenshot of the OCR feature and some of the other new features. Alas, the Flatpak build hasn’t been updated yet, and my custom build is faulty and doesn’t really work. Sorry about that!
There’s a lot of under-the-hood work happening, but the team recently merged a patch that adds a simplistic MIDI note strumming feature. It’s nowhere as sophisticated as the MIDI Strum filter by Robin Gareus, but it can be enhanced in the future.
On Monday, the Four Horsemen of the Woo-pocalypse joined President Trump to blame autism on acetaminophen use during pregnancy. They couldn’t resist adding antivax misinformation as well.
Week highlights: GIMP is getting an SVG exporter; Ton Roosendaal is stepping down as executive director of Blender Foundation; Kdenlive is planning exciting new features, FreeCAD is launching a bughunt for v1.1.
CmykStudent started working on an SVG exporter plugin. Most of the work has been done: the plugin can export both vector, text, and bitmap layers, as well as layer groups. The merge request currently lists exporting options in the user interface and code cleanup as the missing bits. However, the exporting dialog already allows you to choose how you want to deal with bitmap layers.
The major news is that Ton is stepping down as the executive director of Blender Foundation and moving into a newly introduced advisory board.
Just as in any good organization, the transition was planned well in advance and began years prior, in 2019.
Ton was also recently interviewed by folks from the Bad Decisions Studio, check it out: https://youtu.be/hx3lnDHeqKs
On the same day, the Blender Foundation released its annual 2024 report. Financially, the foundation appears to be in a stronger position than the year before that, and judging by recent sponsorship announcements, the 2025 fiscal year will be even better.
It could be fun to slice the data over the years, but to give you an idea, the budget has grown from €958K in 2019 (the first time they published a report) to €3.1mln in 2024. That makes a solid average increase of ~26.5% year over year.
The team has announced that the feature freeze for v1.1 is now on. Small UI changes are still allowed until October, but it’s basically bugfix time. As of today, there are 44 release blockers in the issue tracker.
The previous time, it took the team nearly 5 months to clean up this dreadful queue, as new blockers kept pouring in. If that’s how things will go this time, the final release is likely to happen in early 2026.
Desert Ruins Palmyra by Ahmad Al-Aliyan, made with Maya, Blender, Zbrush, and more. It’s a large project with 20 renders, including ones that apparently depict a relief of Queen Zenobia.
Facilitating the adoption of software is a long-term endeavour involving several stages. We are proud to present to you few of them that PeerTube has completed!
Emails in your language!
Until now, emails sent by PeerTube platforms were only available in English, regardless of the user’s language. This could cause confusion for non-native English speakers, making it difficult to use PeerTube in a professional context.
This was one of the most popular requests on our community suggestions page: it is now possible to translate emails into all the languages available on PeerTube! Some languages, such as French and Chinese, have already been fully translated, meaning you can now receive emails in these languages from this version onwards! We encourage the community to help us translate emails, as well as other parts of PeerTube, on our translation platform (contributing guide is available at https://docs.joinpeertube.org/support/doc/translation).
Configuring your platform
We have significantly enhanced the user experience and interface to assist administrators in configuring their platform.. The horizontal menu has been replaced with a new side menu for navigating between setting pages, which is more user-friendly.
A new configuration page called Customisation has been added, allowing admins to easily change their platform’s main colors and shapes. For example, it is now possible to replace PeerTube’s orange color with blue or make the buttons more rounded with just a few clicks. These new settings make it much easier to customise a PeerTube platform.
Another configuration page called Logo has also been added. This allows admins to configure the icons and logos displayed on their platform, including the header icon on the web and mobile versions, the favicon, the banner, the image displayed on social media, etc.
This new version also features a wizard to help admins configure their PeerTube platform. Once logged into your admin account, you can easily set up elements such as your platform’s name, description, logo and main color, as well as choosing a preconfiguration based on the type of platform you want to administer, such as private, community or institutional.
If you are caught up in the excitement of using your PeerTube instance during installation and do not feel like using the wizard, you can launch it later by going to your platform’s settings.
Schedule your live streams
Thanks to a contribution (made in live on PeerTube), it is now possible to schedule streams. To do this, simply go to the live stream settings and enter the start date and time in the relevant section.
The scheduled date of the live stream will be displayed on the live stream page, as well as on the page listing a channel’s videos.
And much more!
As always, the new version brings many other features and redesigns, in addition to the new features described above. Among them:
The playlist management page has been redesigned to make it easier to use. It is also possible to choose the order in which playlists are displayed publicly within a channel.
Admins can now configure the default values for the “Licence”, “Visibility” and “Comment Policy” fields when publishing a video.
Users can list active login sessions and revoke them if necessary.
Feel free to share this information and suggest ideas. If you can, please make a donation to Framasoft, the non-profit organisation that develops PeerTube.
In the past, if you broke or lost your phone, your Signal message history was gone. This has been a challenge for people whose most important conversations happen on Signal. Think family photos, sweet messages, important documents, or anything else you don’t want to lose forever. This explains why the most common feature request has been backups; a way for people to get Signal messages back even if their phone is lost or damaged.
After careful design and development, we are now starting to roll out secure backups, an opt-in feature. This first phase is available in the latest beta release for Android. This will let us further test this feature in a limited setting, before it rolls out to iOS and Desktop in the near future.
This blog is co-authored with Dr Adam Urato, Maternal-Foetal Medicine specialist
Image: THINKSTOCK, from BBC.co.uk
You might think that telling women about the potential risks of taking antidepressants during pregnancy would be uncontroversial. You might think that a drug regulator considering the evidence on these risks would be uncontroversial. You would be wrong!
The medical establishment backlash to the recent FDA panel hearing has been extraordinary. The panel, convened by the new FDA chair, respected surgeon, Marty Makary, was set up to hear evidence on the potential risks of antidepressants during pregnancy and childbirth (the discussion can be viewed here). It is true that this was an unusual and, in my view, momentous event. In the past, drug regulators have generally kow-towed to drug company interests and medical establishment views, reassuring the public about the safety of drugs. But that has changed in the US, for now, and the panel included a range of experts, including the authors, who have been critical of the establishment line that antidepressants are safe and effective.
These statements are misleading and the FDA and the public deserve to judge for themselves whether the evidence suggests that using antidepressants in pregnancy is safe and worthwhile. This was the evidence that was put to the FDA in the recent panel.
The main argument of those who are keen to reassure women (including the representative of the establishment view on the panel itself, Dr Roussos-Ross), is that taking antidepressants is necessary because untreated depression presents risks to the mother and baby, and these are greater than the minimal risks associated with the drugs themselves.
There are two problems here. The first is that depression is associated with social deprivation, smoking, obesity and other factors known to be harmful in pregnancy, and these are not always adequately controlled for in studies reporting links between depression and pregnancy complications. The use of antidepressants is also sometimes ignored. For example, a typical study (cited in the Massachusetts General Hospital Center statement) claims depression during pregnancy is associated with low birthweight and pre-term birth (prematurity) but completely fails to examine the possibility that the use of antidepressants may have explained the results. Surely, in a contest between an emotional state and a foreign chemical for the cause of foetal abnormalities, the chemical should be the prime suspect?
One of us, Maternal-Fetal Medicine specialist, Adam Urato, has suggested the best explanatory framework for understanding the effects of antidepressants in pregnancy is the Harmful Chemical Model. In contrast to claims by antidepressant proponents, this suggests that taking antidepressants is ‘not like using insulin in pregnant diabetics’.
The second problem is the often-unspoken assumption that antidepressants have significant benefits in treating depression.
Yet, the way the benefits of antidepressants are presented is completely at odds with the data. At best, antidepressants show a very modest benefit over placebo in terms of reducing symptoms of depression after a few weeks of treatment. As I told the FDA panel, this is not in dispute. Meta-analyses of hundreds of trials consistently show that the average difference between antidepressants and a placebo is around 2 points on the 52-point Hamilton rating scale (the most commonly used depression rating scale). And despite decades of trying, no subgroup has ever been identified that shows a larger response. Trials involving people with anxiety show the same sort of very small difference. This is what the evidence shows, before it is massaged by categorising it into responders and non-responders or other manipulations that make the difference seem more impressive than it really is.
So the whole argument that antidepressants are necessary to prevent the complications of untreated depression is fallacious. Yes, it’s not great to be a depressed mother, and depressed pregnant women deserve compassionate care, but there are other ways to help people with depression, and antidepressants don’t appear to produce significant benefits for most patients in any case.
Moreover, antidepressants do not improve pregnancy outcomes by reducing the risks that are associated with depression (although likely caused by something else – social deprivation or antidepressant use, for example), such as pre-term birth and low birth weight. In study after study mothers taking antidepressants have worse pregnancy outcomes (i.e. more miscarriage, more preterm birth, more postpartum hemorrhage.) In some of these studies the researchers “adjust” or “correct” the data and the associations lose statistical significance, but virtually none of the available studies in almost four decades of research show improved pregnancy outcomes in women taking antidepressants.
So what about the claims that antidepressants are safe in pregnancy or that the risks are minimal?
In the early noughties one of us (Prof Moncrieff) reviewed a paper on the links between congenital abnormalities and paroxetine. There was evidence of a small increased risk of cardiac malformations in the babies of mothers who had taken paroxetine during pregnancy. She recommended that the paper advised against using this antidepressant in pregnancy because although the effect was small, and uncontrolled confounding factors may have contributed, this had to be balanced against the lack of significant benefits from taking antidepressants. The editor told the authors of the paper to ignore her.
A couple of years later, the FDA issued an advisory warning about the risk of birth defects, particularly congenital cardiac malformations, associated with paroxetine. The manufacturer changed the labelling of paroxetine to a category D (positive evidence of foetal risk).
Debate has raged since then about whether other antidepressants, or antidepressants as a whole, are associated with congenital abnormalities. First of all, it is important to note that there are many studies that find that women who take an SSRI or an SNRI are more likely to have a baby with a birth defect, especially a heart defect, including carefully conducted studies by researchers from the CDC (the US Centres for Disease Control and prevention). Second, animal models and preclinical research suggests that serotonin plays a key role in embryonic development, including the development of organ systems, and in the structure and function of the placenta. Therefore drugs that disrupt normal serotonin activity, are biologically plausible candidates for producing foetal malformations and other adverse effects on foetal development.
However, as advocates of the drugs rightly point out, women who take antidepressants may be at an increased risk of having a foetal abnormality in the first place, because they are more likely, for example, to have a physical health condition, to be a smoker or to be taking other medication. Adjusting for these factors reduces the strength of the associations between antidepressants and birth defects in some studies.
Yet, in other studies associations persist after adjustment, and are sometimes even strengthened, which just illustrates that the process depends on what you adjust for, exactly, and how.
Some of these studies attempt to control for the presence or severity of depression for example, but it’s not clear that this is a legitimate thing to do, or that it has been done in a way that enables the effects of antidepressants and the effects of having depression or another mental disorder to be distinguished.
‘Confounding’ factors do likely account for some of the association between antidepressants and birth defects, but it is dangerous to assume they account for all of it, given that the link is found so consistently, and the effects of adjustment are so varied. Nevertheless, the increased risk of birth defects is generally low. This is why the efficacy of the drugs is a critical consideration. If they worked amazingly, then a given patient might find a small elevation of risk to be acceptable. But they don’t.
Incidentally, some risks are strongly elevated. A recent CDC analysis using the US birth defect register found that the odds of anencephaly and craniorachischisis was raised 9.14 times in women taking venlafaxine.
Antidepressants have been linked with numerous other adverse effects on pregnancy and subsequent child development. These include miscarriage, premature birth and post-natal haemorrhage. The UK regulator, the MHRA, issued a warning about the risks of post-partum haemorrhage in 2021, pointing out that ‘SSRIs and SNRIs are known to increase bleeding risks due to their effect on platelet function’.
There is also evidence that antidepressants may be implicated in serious pregnancy complications such as pre-eclampsia and placental abruption.
Again, it has been suggested that some of these effects may be due to the effects of depression or other factors that are more frequent in depressed women. One study found that the association between antidepressants and miscarriage, for example, was weaker when the analysis was restricted to depressed women alone than when looking at a population level. However, miscarriage rates were still increased in antidepressant users compared to non-users to a small, but statistically significant extent. A study looking at pre-term birth found the rate of prematurity was still substantially elevated in women who took SSRIs (at 24.4%) compared with the rate in women with a mood disorder who did not take antidepressants (7.9%).
Although some effects remain uncertain, and are likely to be small, animal research in sheep, as well as rats and mice, confirms that antidepressants, including SSRIs, are associated with negative outcomes including foetal malformations, prematurity, decreased birth weight, and higher rates of infant death.
Some complications are common. Up to a third of babies born to women taking SSRIs during the last weeks of pregnancy show what’s euphemistically called ‘poor neonatal adaptation’. This syndrome is characterised by breathing and feeding problems, increased or decreased muscle tone, constant crying, hypoglycemia, vomiting and temperature instability. When severe it can involve respiratory distress, dehydration and convulsions. It may be a withdrawal syndrome, like those of babies born to mothers addicted to opioids, or it may be a manifestation of the toxicity of the drugs as they are slowly excreted from the baby’s system. Ultrasound studies suggest babies are affected while they are still in the womb, showing heightened motor activity and disrupted sleep. Official literature plays this syndrome down and reassures people that symptoms are ‘transient and resolve spontaneously.’ It can be serious, however, and a small follow-up study detected that babies who had suffered this syndrome had problems with social behaviour two and six years later.
A rare but dangerous complication called persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn is also associated with antidepressant use in pregnancy. This involves a failure of the vessels in the lungs to relax, thus hindering oxygen reaching the lungs. It has a 5-10% death rate and is quite, but not very, rare (occurring in about 2 out of every 1000 live births). The use of antidepressants increases the number of babies who get it by about 3 to 3.5 per 1000 births. A significant proportion (around 13% in one study) of babies exposed to antidepressants during pregnancy will show respiratory distress and need acute delivery room resuscitation.
There is also a body of evidence on the health and development of the children of women who have taken antidepressants during pregnancy. Many studies suggest that these children are more likely than the average child to be diagnosed with autism or to show problems with language and behaviour. Again, this research may be influenced by other factors, such as autistic traits in mothers themselves, but some large, well-adjusted studies suggest a link. For example, a study published in the BMJ found that children exposed to antidepressants during pregnancy had increased rates of autism compared to the children of women who had a diagnosis of a mental disorder but did not take antidepressants. Moreover, animal research provides compelling evidence of a drug-related effect . Studies show that maternal use of SSRIs reduces the social interactions and play of the offspring, along with general activity levels and exploratory behaviour.
In contrast, official advice and media coverage has focused on reassuring the public that benefits of antidepressants outweigh the risks of the drugs in pregnancy. But this has it wrong. First off, benefits in mood appear minimal and benefits in pregnancy outcomes haven’t been shown. But even more importantly, it’s the mother herself who must weigh the risks and decide for herself whether to take the drugs. Dismissing the risks and reassuring women that these drugs are ‘safe’ is a paternalistic approach that obscures the central role of the pregnant woman herself.
Dr. Oz recently advocated “cooperation” with food companies to “make America healthy again.” His call for “cooperation” was really a threat, and his message to poor Americans has been that you don’t deserve healthcare unless you prove yourself “worthy.”
![[ASTRAVALE] Center of Resonant Astrum by Kan Rongrueangkul](https://librearts.org/2025/09/week-recap-21-september-2025/kan-rongrueangkul-center-of-enlightment-page-2.webp)
