Summer travel season brings crowded planes, trains, and walkways in Italy, France, and Spain. The same crowds that create unforgettable experiences at tourist attractions and markets also allow quick-handed thieves to target distracted visitors. A typical daypack exposes wallets, phones, passports, and cameras in ways that professional pickpockets use every day. The Travelon Anti-Theft Classic Backpack, priced at $49 (was $104), addresses this issue with practical barriers.
Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 captured a stunning composite image of galaxy M88, which shows a massive spiral system twisted at an angle, stretching its appearance and displaying an orderly set of arms looping inward with exceptional symmetry. Pink knots represent the formation of new stars, blue clusters outline younger stellar populations, and darker red lanes highlight the disk’s dust. The galaxy’s nucleus is surrounded by older stars that emit a warm light.
Plans for the Freedom Ship call for a vessel stretching one mile in length, wider than many city blocks, and tall enough to carry 30 decks. The goal is to create a self-contained community of up to 80,000 people that roams the oceans without ever needing a home port. A team led by Freedom Cruise Line International CEO Roger Gooch has taken up the concept after earlier attempts stalled. Gooch works with a 12-person leadership group and has brought in the architectural firm Schopfer Associates to refine the design.
Chicago-based maker Thomas McDonagh built Console Pedals around a simple but unusual idea. Guitar effects live inside cartridges shaped like N64 game paks. A compact 3D-printed base unit accepts up to two of those cartridges at once, handles power and audio routing, and lets players swap sounds without touching cables. Battery operation removes one more thing to plug in during a session. The Synth Controller Cartridge sits in that same lineup yet does something different. It reads button presses and stick movements from a connected N64 controller, then turns those actions into real synthesized notes that exit through the base unit’s audio jack. No Nintendo console ever enters the picture. The cartridge supplies the sound engine and controller interface while the base supplies power, mixing options if desired, and a standard quarter-inch output ready for an amp or recording gear.
Cameras positioned on the dunes just outside the new launch pad at Starbase captured something striking during the first flight of the upgraded vehicle on May 22. In normal playback SpaceX’s Starship V3 rocket rises on a column of fire and smoke. At 120 frames per second the same moment stretches into a slow, clear sequence where arcs of disturbance expand through the smoke, race outward across open ground, and keep moving into the air above.