High above the Utah desert a high-altitude balloon released Sierra Space’s compact reentry vehicle carrying a bottle of whiskey and a software-defined radio. Both items reached the ground intact after falls from 35,000 feet and 68,500 feet, and recovery crews located them quickly. Those flights in May formed the first live tests in nearly two years for Sierra Space Ghost, a decelerator built to move cargo from orbit to any point on Earth in roughly ninety minutes.
Tyler Fever of Prop Department already cut a Ford Festiva into the thinnest street-legal car possible. For the follow-up he reversed the idea and produced a version that measures exactly ten feet from one side to the other. Three more of the little 1988 hatchbacks served as donors, each purchased for roughly $250, so the whole starting collection stayed cheap while still supplying enough parts and metal.
James Channel recently got hold of a small box that promised the latest Windows system, complete with a keyboard, mouse, and enough software to turn any living room into a home office. What arrived instead was a Famiclone, one of the countless unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s original Family Computer that flooded markets across Asia and beyond during the late 1980s and 1990s. These machines used a single chip to recreate the hardware that once powered Super Mario Bros., and manufacturers kept producing them long after the patents expired because they were cheap to build and easy to sell to families who could not afford a real computer.
Prime Video unveiled the full trailer for its limited series Blade Runner 2099 at New York Comic Con on Saturday, introducing a Los Angeles rebuilt fifty years after the events of Blade Runner 2049. Replicants have won an uprising that had been building across the films, leaving humans as second-class citizens in a city no longer shaped by their hands. All eight episodes arrive together on the streamer November 25.
MIT engineers have developed a flexible sheet that senses and digitally rebuilds its own three-dimensional form as it bends and twists. The material embeds soft optical fibers in a stretchable silicone base, arranged in a carefully chosen zig-zag pattern that runs throughout the sheet. Each fiber consists of a clear rubber core wrapped in a dark outer layer of the same material dyed black, with one side of the core deliberately roughened during fabrication.