Hackaday Links: October 11, 2026
It in all probability goes with out saying that if you happen to ship 4 people to watch the Moon up shut, they’ll see issues that these of us caught right here on Earth have by no means observed. Luckily for us, they took impeccable notes and introduced loads of cameras, which NASA has shared with the remainder of the category as Artemis II: Sights & Sounds of Science.
Well, technically it’s known as the Artemis II Preliminary Lunar Science Report, however we recognize the house company including a bit of aptitude to it and formatting the findings for public consumption. Arguably probably the most vital observations detailed within the report are the impression flashes on the lunar floor. As you could recall, the trajectory of the Orion spacecraft meant the crew experienced a unique solar eclipse on the sixth day of the mission, giving them an unprecedented close-up view of the darkened Moon. During this time, they had been in a position to see flashes of sunshine with their unaided eyes, which NASA has since confirmed had been small rocky fragments — maybe no various inches extensive — slamming into the lunar floor at unimaginable speeds.
The Artemis II mission was one for the historical past books, for many of us probably the most vital house mission of our lifetimes. But as entry to house turns into cheaper and extra routine, it stands to cause that not all actions in orbit might be fairly so momentous. For instance, college students from the University of Glasgow and Japan’s Kyushu Institute are presently collaborating on a planned mission to distill whisky in space for the first time.
Scheduled to launch in 2028, the CubeSat will carry 10 ml of fluid and spend 5 years in orbit learning how its chemical composition adjustments, with a particular curiosity in how the frequent adjustments skilled because the spacecraft travels across the Earth may affect the maturing course of. While this may not appear terribly fascinating to teetotalers, it presents a chance to achieve extra sensible expertise with orbital manufacturing which can seemingly inform future missions.
Speaking of learning how issues behave — or maybe how they don’t behave, because the case could also be — we’ve got an replace on the controversy round this 12 months’s Nikon Small World in Motion competitors. After a number of specialists within the subject raised the alarm final week, Ning Xu’s profitable video supposedly displaying cilia in airway tissue samples taken from a toddler with main ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) has been disqualified for using generative AI. This shifted all of the earlier winners up a rank, so Nguyen Nam Nhat of Vietnam now takes the highest spot with a video of a roundworm and a single-celled Dileptus.
Xu had beforehand claimed that AI was solely used for post-processing the unique photographs, which might have already put the entry into one thing of a grey space so far as the competitors was involved. But based on researchers conversant in PCD, the buildings proven within the video don’t appear like something they’d ever seen in a affected person, prompting suspicion that the admittedly fascinating visuals had been really the results of an AI hallucination.
Finally, with regards to stunning photographs, we’d prefer to level you to ascii.rest. As you’ve in all probability observed, we recognize minimal internet design round these elements, so this assortment of ASCII animations and artwork instantly caught our eye. Some of the items, like “aurora fjord” proven right here, will be exported as a GIF or video clip. But there’s additionally the choice to embed them in your HTML with a few traces, which additionally provides you the chance to customise and manipulate them in varied methods. If you do something cool with these designs, we’d like to see it.
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