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.
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.
Mitsu Makes spent six months on one of the more unusual 3D printer projects in recent memory. The result stands as a working machine with a frame constructed primarily from wood rather than the aluminum or steel common in most DIY and commercial designs. An interest in exploring alternative materials drove the effort. Standard builds lean heavily on rigid metals to maintain alignment under the forces of rapid movement and heating cycles. This project tested whether careful design and added supports could let wood succeed in the same role.
Microsoft used its Build 2026 developer conference to show a different direction for computing hardware. Instead of phones or laptops that run collections of apps, the company presented Project Solara as a platform where AI agents handle tasks directly. The setup targets smaller, purpose-focused gadgets that stay ready in places where pulling out a full device feels awkward or slow.
Waymo recently opened its newest vehicle to select riders in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix. The company calls it the Ojai. This one differs from every earlier Waymo vehicle because engineers designed it from the ground up as a robotaxi instead of starting with a regular passenger car and adding self-driving gear later.
Travelers pack light when they can, but most portable chargers still force an extra decision at the door. Did the right cord make it into the bag? Anker sidestepped that question entirely with its 20,000mAh Travel Essential model, priced at $49.99 (was $70), as the cable sits built into the unit from the start.
Jensen Huang introduced the new reference design during NVIDIA’s GTC event in Taipei on May 31. The package combines a full humanoid body, onboard computing hardware, and a complete set of software tools under the Isaac GR00T name. Research groups now receive one integrated starting point instead of piecing together separate parts from different suppliers.
Photo credit: NASA/MSFC/David Higginbotham/Emmett Given
Astronomers released a composite image of Westerlund 2 that merges X-ray observations from Chandra with infrared data from the James Webb Space Telescope. The result turns a distant star cluster into a scene of gleaming points ringed by neon pink against swaths of warmer dust tones.
