An uncomfortable reality with the spacesuits used for extravehicular activities (EVA) – commonly referred to as spacewalks – is that the astronaut spends hours in them, during which normal bodily functions like urinating and defecating continue. The current EVA record at the ISS is currently a hair under nine hours, necessitating a new approach. A team of researchers have now pitched the idea of an in-suit water recovery system with an article by [Sofia Etlin] and colleagues as published in Frontiers in Space Technologies.

For the current Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) EVA spacesuit the current solution is what is called the MAG: the Maximum Absorbency Garment, which is effectively a fancy adult diaper with sodium polyacrylate as absorbent for up to 2 L of fluids. It replaced the urine collection device (UCD) that was used until female astronauts joined the astronaut corps in the 1970s. Generally astronauts aim to not defecate until they finish their EVA, which leaves urinating and the related activity of rehydrating as the spacesuits only have 0.95 L of water that has to last the duration of the spacewalk.

By filtering the urine and recycling it into potable water, this should both prevent all the disadvantages of diapers and give astronauts much more water to drink during EVAs.  Although the media reporting on this paper have often referenced the stillsuits of Dune, this device is significantly less advanced and quite bulky, with the filtration equipment contained in a backpack and would weigh about 8 kg. The waste water is filtered using a dual forward osmosis – reverse osmosis (FO-RO) system, with the FO used as a pre-filter to prevent membrane fouling common with RO.

Collecting the urine is performed by a UCD that is more reminiscent of pre-MAG systems, with a silicone cup that conforms to the genitals of the male or female astronaut. When urinating, the inner lining of the cup will detect the moisture and activate a vacuum pump to remove the urine and get it to the FO-RO system as quickly as possible. Filtered water would have salts added before being made available for consumption.

Of note is that this is decidedly still a prototype, but considering that similar technology is already used on the ISS to filter waste water, having a miniature version added to new (EVA) spacesuits seems only a matter of time. It should make hours-long trips strapped into a space capsule decidedly less unpleasant, too, beyond the obvious benefits to astronauts in the midst of an EVA.

There’s a good few options for exporting data out of FPGAs, like Ethernet, USB2, or USB3. Many FPGAs have a HDMI (or rather, sparkling DVI) port as well, and [Steve Markgraf] brings us the hsdaoh project — High-Speed Data Acquisition Over HDMI, using USB3 capture cards based on the Macrosilicon MS2130 chipset to get the data from the FPGA right to your PC.

Current FPGA-side implementation is designed for Sipeed Tang chips and the GOWIN toolchain, but it should be portable to an open-source toolchain in the future. Make sure you’re using a USB3 capture card with a MS2130 chipset, load the test code into your FPGA, run the userspace capture side, and you’re ready to add this interface to your FPGA project! It’s well worth it, too – during testing, [Steve] has got data transfer speeds up to 180 MB/s, without the USB3 complexity.

As a test, [Steve] shows us an RX-only SDR project using this interface, with respectable amounts of bandwidth. The presentation goes a fair bit into the low-level details of the protocol, from HDMI fundamentals, to manipulating the MS2130 registers in a way that disables all video conversion; do watch the recording, or at least skim the slides! Oh, and if you don’t own a capture card yet, you really should, as it makes for a wonderful Raspberry Pi hacking companion in times of need.

Automation has been a part of the Internet since long before the appearance of the World Wide Web and the first web browsers, but it’s become a significantly larger part of total traffic the past decade. A recent report by cyber security services company Imperva pins the level of automated traffic (‘bots’) at roughly fifty percent of total traffic, with about 32% of all traffic attributed to ‘bad bots’, meaning automated traffic that crawls and scrapes content to e.g. train large language models (LLMs) and generate automated content as well as perform automated attacks on the countless APIs accessible on the internet.

According to Imperva, this is the fifth year of rising ‘bad bot’ traffic, with the 2023 report noting again a few percent increase. Meanwhile ‘good bot’ traffic also keeps increasing year over year, yet while these are not directly nefarious, many of these bots can throw off analytics and of course generate increased costs for especially smaller websites. Most worrisome are the automated attacks by the bad bots, which ranges from account takeover attempts to exploiting vulnerable web-based APIs. It’s not just Imperva who is making these claims, the idea that automated traffic will soon destroy the WWW has floated around since the late 2010s as the ‘Dead Internet theory‘.

Although the idea that the Internet will ‘die’ is probably overblown, the increase in automated traffic makes it increasingly harder to distinguish human-generated content and human commentators from fake content and accounts. This is worrisome due to how much of today’s opinions are formed and reinforced on e.g. ‘social media’ websites, while more and more comments, images and even videos are manipulated or machine-generated.

We all know the Hollywood trope of picking a lock with a paperclip, and while it certainly is doable, most reputable locks require slightly more sophisticated tools to pick effectively. That’s not to say that wire is off the table for locksports, though, as this cool lock-picking robot demonstrates.

The basics behind [Sparks and Code]’s design are pretty simple. Locks are picked by pushing pins up inside the cylinder until they line up with the shear plane, allowing the cylinder to turn. Normally this is done a pin at a time with a specialized tool and with a slight bit of torque on the cylinder. Here, tough, thin, stiff wires passing through tiny holes in a blade shaped to fit the keyway are used to push all the pins up at once, eliminating the need to keep tension on the cylinder to hold pins in place.

Sounds simple, but in practice, this looks like it was a nightmare. Getting five wires to fit into the keyway and guiding them to each pin wasn’t easy, nor was powering the linear actuators that slide the wires in and out. Applying torque to the lock was a chore too; even though tension isn’t needed to retain picked pins, the cylinder still needs to rotate, which means moving the whole picking assembly. But the biggest problem by far seems to be the fragility of the blade that goes into the keyway. SLA might not be the best choice here; perhaps the blade could be made from two thin pieces of aluminum with channels milled on their faces and then assembled face-to-face.

The robot works, albeit very slowly. This isn’t [Sparks and Code]’s first foray into robot lock picking. His previous version attempted to mimic how a human would pick a lock, so this is really thinking outside the box.