Physical keyboards once shaped how people handled their phones every day. Soft keyboards took over as screens grew larger and every maker chased the same glass rectangle. Minimal Company refused that trade. Its second phone, the MP02, packs a full QWERTY layout into a smaller aluminum body while upgrading the parts that held the first model back.
Back-to-school season always brings the same scramble for supplies that will still work two, three, even four years later. Graphing calculators sit near the top of that list for anyone heading into algebra, geometry, precalculus, statistics, or calculus. Texas Instruments just made the choice clearer with the TI-84 Evo, priced at $86 (was $160), a deliberate step forward from the long-running TI-84 Plus CE that keeps the familiar foundation while fixing the slowdowns and clutter that used to slow kids down.
Astronomers have long known NGC 2392 by several names, yet the latest images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope make the Lion Nebula nickname feel newly earned. Released today, the views combine near-infrared light from NIRCam and mid-infrared light from MIRI to show a planetary nebula roughly 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Gemini. What appears is a glowing, roughly circular structure about 2.6 light-years across, its center dominated by a bright point that looks for all the world like a button nose.
Photo credit: Righto
In late 1972 Butler Lampson sat down at Xerox PARC and wrote a short internal memo titled “Why Alto?” He wanted a machine each researcher could claim as their own. Alan Kay had been dreaming of a portable Dynabook for years. Lampson and Chuck Thacker offered him an interim version that would fit under a desk instead. Bob Taylor gave the project its name, and work began that November. By April 1973 the first unit was running, with a Sesame Street Cookie Monster test pattern appearing on its tall portrait screen.
Nigel Braun, better known as NileRed, first got the idea back in 2019. Air holds water vapor and carbon dioxide. Those two compounds already contain the hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen atoms that make up ethanol. No sugar or yeast, just the stuff floating around us every day. He set out to pull those pieces apart and put them back together as drinkable alcohol.
iFixit recently opened up two pairs of Chinese smartglasses to test a common industry claim. Manufacturers often say devices this small and water-resistant simply cannot offer user-replaceable batteries. The team bought a Quark AI Glasses S1 and a set of Rokid Glasses to see if that held up. Both models pack an internal battery plus a separate external pack that attaches for longer runtime. Both run on a Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 processor with 32 GB of storage and use micro-OLED projectors to put information in front of the wearer’s eyes. Their internal layouts, however, tell two very different stories.
Out near Moab in southeastern Utah, a yellow four-legged machine moves across the open ground of Copper One. It covers the pit, the heap leach pads, and the solvent extraction-electrowinning lines without a human beside it. Boston Dynamics built Spot for places like this. Mariana Minerals put it to work as part of a larger push to run the entire site with continuous data and fewer people walking into harm’s way.
Zack Nelson has a habit of taking brand-new phones and treating them the way most people accidentally treat their everyday carry. This time the victim is Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8, the shorter, wider passport-style foldable that opens into a nearly square tablet. He runs the usual sequence of scratches, grit, open flame, and the dreaded opposite-direction bend. What emerges is another quietly tough Samsung folder that refuses to fold the wrong way for good.
Most encrypted USB drives announce themselves the moment they connect. The operating system sees scrambled data or an unusual volume that immediately suggests something valuable sits behind a lock. Phantom Drive takes a different approach. Ryan Walker of Rootkit Labs built an open-source flash drive that presents itself as an ordinary 8 GB stick. Disk utilities show no extra space, no encrypted headers, and the remaining capacity is completely hidden unless a specific procedure is taken to unlock it.
