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.
Marshall still builds its portable speakers to look like the cabinets that sit behind guitarists. Emberton III, priced at $99.99 (was $180), keeps the script logo, the metal grille, and a textured sleeve that feels closer to an amp cover than a smooth plastic pebble pulled from a beach bag. Black and brass is the familiar pairing. Cream, brown, sage, midnight blue, black and silver, and a couple of darker finishes sit on the same body. At 6.3 inches wide, 2.7 inches tall, and 3 inches deep, the whole unit weighs 1.5 pounds, light enough to slide into a day bag without rearranging everything else already in there.
Steve Mould sticks a coin-sized vibration motor to a business card, presses the card flat against a ceiling, and lets go. The card stays. A gap remains between the paper and the paint, thin enough that light barely slips through, wide enough that the two surfaces never meet. An eggshell does the same once a motor is fixed to it. So does a half-millimeter aluminum disc, once the motor gets loud enough to matter.
Steven at 3D Printer Academy spent close to a year tearing up his own desktop pinball machine and starting over. The first one, sold as file packs after a spring Kickstarter that drew about 1,500 backers and roughly $120,000, already proved a strange point. A playable pinball table can come off a normal home printer, run with no wires, and live on a desk. Version 2.0, shown in his latest build video and lined up for a new Kickstarter, treats that first machine as a draft with real limits.