Jackson Chung

Gemini North Reveals Pa 30 as the Firework a Medieval Sky Once Held

By Jackson Chung October 7, 2026

Photo credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Rodriguez
Eight separate records from Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic observers place a new star in Cassiopeia between August 4-6, 1181. It stayed visible for 185 days, long enough for court astronomers to log it during the Genpei War in Japan and the reign of Henry II in England. One of only five Milky Way supernovae people recorded before telescopes existed, that guest star faded and left no obvious wreck for modern catalogs to claim.

CMOUNTIPHONE2 Turns a Cracked iPhone 13 Into a Canon EF Camera Body

By Jackson Chung October 7, 2026

Evan Monsma spent a few days in Indianapolis turning a broken iPhone 13 into something he calls CMOUNTIPHONE2, a phone that can take Canon EF lenses meant for a full-size DSLR. His earlier attempt had already put cinema glass on a wrecked iPhone. That mount was wood, a modified C-to-CS ring, and a bead of super glue. The glue let go. A heavier lens was always going to finish the job, so this round starts with metal.

AGILINK Robot Hand Learns to Split Silk and Stitch Suzhou Embroidery

By Jackson Chung October 6, 2026

Silk bends, slips, and changes shape the moment a fingertip presses a little too hard. In Suzhou, master embroiderer Fu Xianghong spent a session teaching AGILINK’s OmniHand 3 Ultra the opening moves of a craft that runs back more than 2,500 years: separating a main silk thread into 16 finer strands, threading a needle, stretching fabric across a hoop, and putting in the first stitches. One finger teases the strands apart while the others hold tension so the thread does not collapse. For a twist, opposing fingertips stay in contact and let the silk turn without losing their grip.

256GB Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra for $980 and 5 More October Prime Day Tech Deals (Part 1)

By Jackson Chung October 6, 2026

Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra, priced at $979.99 for Prime Day (was $1,400), still carries the flat sides and a tucked-away S Pen, now inside a body that measures 163.6 by 78.1 by 7.9 millimeters and weighs 214 grams. Outdoor glare has less room to win on the 6.9-inch Dynamic AMOLED panel, which shifts between 1Hz and 120Hz, resolves 3120 by 1440, and is rated to a peak of 2600 nits, with an anti-reflective coat and a privacy setting that narrows the viewing angle so a neighbor on the train sees less of the screen. Four cameras sit in the rear island: a 200-megapixel main sensor opened to f/1.4, a 50-megapixel ultrawide, a 10-megapixel lens at 3x, and a 50-megapixel periscope at 5x opened to f/2.9, covering stills out to a claimed 100x digital reach and 8K video from the main sensor, with a 12-megapixel camera up front. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, built on a 3-nanometer process, pairs with 12GB of memory. A 5,000mAh cell refills at 60 watts on a cable and 25 watts on a Qi2 wireless pad, and the phone carries an IP68 rating for dust and a short dip in water.

Curiosity Marks Five Thousand Martian Days With a Postcard From Chocolatal

By Jackson Chung October 6, 2026

NASA’s Curiosity has spent so long inside Gale Crater that a round number now feels less like a party than a quiet check of the odometer. On August 30, 2026, at 9:56 a.m. local Mars time, the rover reached its 5,000th sol, a Martian day that runs about 39 minutes longer than one on Earth. Parked on a sandy ridge the team calls Chocolatal, in the lower foothills of Mount Sharp, it turned its black-and-white navigation cameras on the slope below and took the first half of what NASA later released as a postcard.

Billet Labs Built a Fanless Gaming PC Until One Fan Made It Work

By Jackson Chung October 6, 2026

Felix at Billet Labs set out to park a real gaming PC in a living room and leave the fans off. A Ryzen 9 9800X3D and an RTX 5080 share a Gigabyte AORUS Pro B850 board, fed by a 600 watt Flex ATX supply, and the pair can pull well past 500 watts once a demanding game settles in. Air coolers handle that load by moving a lot of air. Moving a lot of air makes noise. An earlier attempt had hung the same idea on a cast iron radiator and ended near 100 kilograms, so this version started over on a hand-worked aluminum block that brings the finished machine down to about 15.7 kilograms once the loop holds roughly two liters of water.

Innovative ALBATROSS Robot Spins Like a Maple Seed Then Sails Off Across the Water

By Jackson Chung October 5, 2026

Researchers at the Singapore University of Technology and Design built a small robot that leaves a drone, spins on the way down, and keeps moving once it meets the water. They named it ALBATROSS, short for Airborne Lander with Buoyant AuToROtating Sailing Sensor. Lead author Shane Kyi Hla Win, working with professor Foong Shaohui, describes the machine in Science Robotics as a way to put sensors on a lake or a sheltered stretch of sea without sending a boat out to meet them.

Apple Mac Mini M6 Arrives Fast and Finds a Discount Almost Immediately

By Jackson Chung October 5, 2026

Apple put a new Mac Mini M6 on the market in late September, and by the first week of October the base model was already cheaper. Amazon has the entry version at $779.99, down from the $899 list price, as part of the October Prime Day run. That is the first cut on a machine that only just reached stores, and it lands on the configuration most people will actually see: 16GB of memory, 256GB of storage, and the standard M6 chip.

Old Hubble Spectra Solve a Cold Case With a Second Generation Planet Candidate

By Jackson Chung October 5, 2026

Astronomers filed a strange spectrum of the white dwarf HS 0209+0832 in 1999 and left it there. Hubble had recorded roughly 100 chemical features that no catalog of the time could name. The star itself is the bare core of a low-mass sun that burned through its fuel, shed its outer layers, and settled into a compact remnant. At about 35,800 degrees, with a cooling age near five million years, it is still young as white dwarfs go, and still hot enough to strip gas from anything orbiting close in.

Google Japan’s Gboard Conveyor Belt Version Rolls the Alphabet to a Stationary Hand

By Jackson Chung October 5, 2026

Google Japan marked October 1 with the fifteenth entry in a running series of keyboard proposals from the Gboard team. The date is a small joke on its own. Read as 101, it points at the old full-size layout with a number pad, and the team has used that reading since the company retired its April Fools posts in 2021. This year’s object is called Gboard Conveyor Belt Version, and the name matches the hardware.