Penguin DIY started with a pair of ordinary true wireless earbuds and finished with two objects that barely read as audio gear. One half is a clear resin plug cast from a mold of his own ear, meant to sit fully inside the canal. The other half is the tip of a pen. Both still pair to a phone over Bluetooth, and both still take a charge from a case he opened and rewired so the original contacts could reach the new shapes.
Throaty Mumbo already spent an hour proving a vinyl record can cough up a SEGA game if you are patient enough and a little mean to the format. His follow-up, posted as Can We Port Video Games to VHS?, asks the meaner question. A cassette is linear. A videotape is also linear, except it also carries a moving picture, two audio tracks, and a deck that can be told to wind forward or back. GCVHS is his attempt to turn that mess into a console.
Living muscle cells, the same kind that pull on bone inside a body, now pull a paper-thin robot through water. Researchers at MIT built a gum-stick-sized aquabot whose two fins beat when light hits them, and they steered it through a simple maze in a petri dish by flashing that light from outside the dish.
Astronomers working with South Africa’s MeerKAT array have recorded radio waves coming from Beta Pictoris b, a gas giant about 63 light-years away, and pinned those waves to the planet rather than the star it orbits. Kevin Ortiz Ceballos, a doctoral researcher at Harvard & Smithsonian, found the signal while sorting through survey data. He walked into the office of his adviser, Harvard astronomer Edo Berger, and said he did not think Berger was going to believe it.
A laptop with an RTX 3050 is running Super Mario Bros. Wonder as a Windows program, and a clip from a developer called Belmante is the clearest look yet at how far that work has come. World 1-1 plays at close to 60 frames a second. Menus, character select, the opening cutscene, and the world map all line up with an earlier Mac build of the same project. Sound comes through the game’s own audio path, routed on Windows through XAudio2.