Fermi Explorer Mission is a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit in Redmond, Washington with a four-line spec that reads like a dare. Launch a spacecraft toward another star before the end of 2029. Keep design, build, launch, and operations under $15 million. Carry at least one kilogram inside a 10-by-10-by-10-centimeter box. Close at least 99 percent of the present gap to Alpha Centauri inside 80,000 years.
On September 3, OpenAI began rolling out GPT-6 Astra, which the company describes as the most intelligent and aligned model it has ever released. Access begins with a small number of organizations and will gradually spread to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise accounts over the next few days. Developers can refer to it as gpt-6-astra whether utilizing the OpenAI API, Microsoft Azure, or AWS Bedrock.
A regular-looking mouse sits on a desk, clicks as expected, and still moves a cursor. Same object also boots a desktop on a monitor and plays Minecraft. That collision of jobs is the whole point of YouTuber Gadget Industry’s latest build: a Samsung phone’s computer stuffed into a pointing device that never stopped being a pointing device.
Ultimate Ears priced the WONDERBOOM 4 at $99.99 when it shipped a while back, and now, you can snag one for $51.44, which is the number that keeps this little cylinder in every “best cheap portable” argument. You get a squat, fabric-wrapped body about four inches tall that weighs roughly 0.9 pounds. A loop on top takes a carabiner, so it hangs off a pack instead of eating space inside one.
DJI used IFA 2026 in Berlin to put Osmo 360 II on a public stage, a second-generation 360 camera that shoots 8K panoramic video at 60 frames per second and lets you replace a cracked lens instead of retiring the whole body. Global shipping for most markets outside Asia starts September 15. Official U.S. store pages still list only the first Osmo 360.
Plasma Channel packed a year of garage experiments into checked luggage and flew 14,000 kilometers to Namibia to see if 50,000 volts could pull drinkable water out of desert fog. The unit uses electrostatic precipitation: a high-voltage wire ionizes tiny water droplets so they race toward grounded mesh or rods, condense, and drip into a collector. Early two-stake versions ran at lower voltage and 39 watts. Later builds grew to a three-stake, double-stacked layout four times as wide, added solar charging, 3D-printed resin joints for travel, and a timer that cycled two minutes on and three minutes off between 6 and 8 a.m.
Forum regulars who had sold and played the GP32 and GP2X decided those machines left too much on the table, so Craig Rothwell, Fatih Kilic, Michael Mrozek (known as EvilDragon), and Michael Weston started sketching a successor, called Pandora, that mixed a proper Linux desktop with real game controls. Dave Cancilier shaped the clamshell case and keymat.
Sinclair shipped the ZX81 in 1981 with a Z80, an 8K ROM, and one kilobyte of static RAM. After the screen buffer and system variables took their share, a BASIC listing had only a few hundred bytes left to stand in. A black plastic box that slid onto the rear edge connector promised sixteen times that space. For a lot of first-time owners, that pack was the line between a curiosity and a machine you could actually write on.
BLAVOR squeezed a 20,000mAh cell, four built-in cables, a Qi pad, a solar slab, and a pair of lights into an orange ABS-and-PC shell that weighs about 1.7 pounds. You clip the included carabiner to a pack strap and the whole solar charger power bank, priced at $39.94 (was $57), hangs there like extra camp gear instead of another loose brick in the bottom of a bag. Ports sit under silicone flaps, the body is rated IPX5, and the company lists overcharge, over-discharge, over-current, and short-circuit protection so the pack is meant to live in damp weather rather than on a nightstand.
