In today’s episode of “AI Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” we feature the Hertz Corporation and its new AI-powered rental car damage scanners. Gone are the days when an overworked human in a snappy windbreaker would give your rental return a once-over with the old Mark Ones to make sure you hadn’t messed the car up too badly. Instead, Hertz is fielding up to 100 of these “MRI scanners for cars.” The “damage discovery tool” uses cameras to capture images of the car and compares them to a model that’s apparently been trained on nothing but showroom cars. Redditors who’ve had the displeasure of being subjected to this thing report being charged egregiously high damage fees for non-existent damage. To add insult to injury, if renters want to appeal those charges, they have to argue with a chatbot first, one that offers no path to speaking with a human. While this is likely to be quite a tidy profit center for Hertz, their customers still have a vote here, and backlash will likely lead the company to adjust the model to be a bit more lenient, if not outright scrapping the system.

Have you ever picked up a flashlight and tried to shine it through your hand? You probably have; it’s just a thing you do, like the “double tap” every time you pick up a power drill. We’ve yet to find a flashlight bright enough to sufficiently outline the bones in our palm, although we’ve had some luck looking through the flesh of our fingers. While that’s pretty cool, it’s quite a bit different from shining a light directly through a human head, which was recently accomplished for the first time at the University of Glasgow. The researchers blasted a powerful pulsed laser against the skull of a volunteer with “fair skin and no hair” and managed to pick up a few photons on the other side, despite an attenuation factor of about 10¹⁸. We haven’t read the paper yet, so it’s unclear if the researchers controlled for the possibility of the flesh on the volunteer’s skull acting like a light pipe and conducting the light around the skull rather than through it, but if the laser did indeed penetrate the skull and everything within it, it’s pretty cool. Why would you do this, especially when we already have powerful light sources that can easily penetrate the skull and create exquisitely detailed images of the internal structures? Why the hell wouldn’t you?!

TIG welding aluminum is a tough process to master, and just getting to the point where you’ve got a weld you’re not too embarrassed of would be so much easier if you could just watch someone who knows what they’re doing. That’s a tall order, though, as the work area is literally a tiny pool of molten metal no more than a centimeter in diameter that’s bathed in an ultra-bright arc that’s throwing off cornea-destroying UV light. Luckily, Aaron over at 6061.com on YouTube has a fantastic new video featuring up-close and personal shots of him welding up some aluminum coupons. He captured them with a Helios high-speed welding camera, and the detail is fantastic. You can watch the weld pool forming and see the cleaning action of the AC waveform clearly. The shots make it clear exactly where and when you should dip your filler rod into the pool, the effect of moving the torch smoothly and evenly, and how contaminants can find their way into your welds. The shots make it clear what a dynamic environment the weld pool is, and why it’s so hard to control.

And finally, the title may be provocative, but “The Sensual Wrench” is a must-see video for anyone even remotely interested in tools. It’s from the New Mind channel on YouTube, and it covers the complete history of wrenches. Our biggest surprise was learning how relatively recent an invention the wrench is; it didn’t really make an appearance in anything like its modern form until the 1800s. The video covers everything from the first adjustable wrenches, including the classic “monkey” and “Crescent” patterns, through socket wrenches with all their various elaborations, right through to impact wrenches. Check it out and get you ugga-dugga on.

Hold onto your hats, everyone — there’s stunning news afoot. It’s hard to believe, but it looks like over-reliance on chatbots to do your homework can turn your brain into pudding. At least that seems to be the conclusion of a preprint paper out of the MIT Media Lab, which looked at 54 adults between the ages of 18 and 39, who were tasked with writing a series of essays. They divided participants into three groups — one that used ChatGPT to help write the essays, one that was limited to using only Google search, and one that had to do everything the old-fashioned way. They recorded the brain activity of writers using EEG, in order to get an idea of brain engagement with the task. The brain-only group had the greatest engagement, which stayed consistently high throughout the series, while the ChatGPT group had the least. More alarmingly, the engagement for the chatbot group went down even further with each essay written. The ChatGPT group produced essays that were very similar between writers and were judged “soulless” by two English teachers. Go figure.

The most interesting finding, though, was when 18 participants from the chatbot and brain-only groups were asked to rewrite one of their earlier essays, with the added twist that the chatbot group had to do it all by themselves, while the brainiacs got to use ChatGPT. The EEGs showed that the first group struggled with the task, presumably because they failed to form any deep memory of their previous work thanks to over-reliance on ChatGPT. The brain-only folks, however, did well at the task and showed signs of activity across all EEG bands. That fits well with our experience with chatbots, which we use to help retrieve specific facts and figures while writing articles, especially ones we know we’ve seen during our initial scan of the literature but can’t find later.

Does anyone remember Elektro? We sure do, although not from personal experience, since the seven-foot-tall automaton built by Westinghouse for the World’s Fair in New York City in 1939 significantly predates our appearance on the planet. But still, the golden-skinned robot that made its living by walking around, smoking, and cracking wise at the audience thanks to a 78-rpm record player in its capacious chest, really made an impression, enough that it toured the country for the better part of 30 years and made the unforgettable Sex Kittens Go to College in 1960 before fading into obscurity. At some point, the one-of-a-kind robot was rescued from a scrap heap and restored to its former glory, and now resides in the North Central Ohio Industrial Museum in Mansfield, very close to the Westinghouse facility that built it. If you need an excuse to visit North Central Ohio, you could do worse than a visit to see Elektro.

It was with some alarm that we learned this week from Al Williams that mtrek.com 1701 appeared to be down. For those not in the know, mtrek is a Telnet space combat game inspired by the Star Trek franchise, which explains why Al was in such a tizzy about not being able to connect; huge Trek nerd, our Al. Anyway, it appears Al’s worst fears were unfounded, as we were able to connect to mtrek just fine. But in the process of doing so, we stumbled across this collection of Telnet games and demos that’s worth checking out. The mtrek, of course, as well as Telnet versions of chess and backgammon, and an interactive world map that always blows our mind. The site also lists the Telnet GOAT, the Star Wars Asciimation; sadly, that one does seem to be down, at least for us. Sure, you can see it in a web browser, but it’s not the same as watching it in a terminal over Telnet, is it?

And finally, if you’ve got 90 minutes or so to spare, you could do worse than to spend it with our friend Hash as he reverse engineers an automotive ECU. We have to admit that we haven’t indulged yet — it’s on our playlist for this weekend, because we know how to party. But from what Hash tells us, this is the tortured tale of a job that took far, far longer to complete than expected. We have to admit that while we’ll gladly undertake almost any mechanical repair on most vehicles, automotive ECUs and other electronic modules are almost a bridge too far for us, at least in terms of cracking them open to make even simple repairs. Getting access to them for firmware extraction and parameter fiddling sounds like a lot of fun, and we’re looking forward to hearing what Hash has to say about the subject.

Are robotaxis poised to be the Next Big Thing in North America? It seems so, at least according to Goldman Sachs, which issued a report this week stating that robotaxis have officially entered the commercialization phase of the hype cycle. That assessment appears to be based on an analysis of the total ride-sharing market, which encompasses services that are currently almost 100% reliant on meat-based drivers, such as Lyft and Uber, and is valued at $58 billion. Autonomous ride-hailing services like Waymo, which has a fleet of 1,500 robotaxis operating in several cities across the US, are included in that market but account for less than 1% of the total right now. But, Goldman projects that the market will burgeon to over $336 billion in the next five years, driven in large part by “hyperscaling” of autonomous vehicles.

We suspect the upcoming launch of Tesla’s robotaxis in Austin, Texas, accounts for some of this enthusiasm for the near-term, but we have our doubts that a market based on such new and complex technologies can scale that quickly. A little back-of-the-envelope math suggests that the robotaxi fleet will need to grow to about 9,000 cars in the next five years, assuming the same proportion of autonomous cars in the total ride-sharing fleet as exists today. A look inside the Waymo robotaxi plant outside of Phoenix reveals that it can currently only convert “several” Jaguar electric SUVs per day, meaning they’ve got a lot of work to do to meet the needed numbers. Other manufacturers will no doubt pitch in, especially Tesla, and factory automation always seems to pull off miracles under difficult circumstances, but it still seems like a stretch to think there’ll be that many robotaxis on the road in only five years. Also, it currently costs more to hail a robotaxi than an Uber or Lyft, and we just don’t see why anyone would prefer to call a robotaxi, unless it’s for the novelty of the experience.

On the other hand, if the autonomous ride-sharing market does experience explosive growth, there could be knock-on benefits even for Luddite naysayers such as we. A report, again from Goldman Sachs — hey, they probably have a lot of skin in the game — predicts that auto insurance rates could fall by 50% as more autonomous cars hit the streets. This is based on markedly lower liability for self-driving cars, which have 92% fewer bodily injury claims and 88% lower property damage claims than human-driven cars. Granted, those numbers have to be based on a very limited population, and we guarantee that self-drivers will find new and interesting ways to screw up on the road. But if our insurance rates fall even a little because of self-driving cars, we’ll take it as a win.

Speaking of robotics, if you want to see just how far we’ve come in terms of robot dexterity, look no further than the package-sorting abilities of Figure’s Helix robot. The video in the article is an hour long, but you don’t need to watch more than a few minutes to be thoroughly impressed. The robot is standing at a sorting table with an infeed conveyor loaded with just about the worst parcels possible, a mix of soft, floppy, poly-bagged packages, flat envelopes, and traditional boxes. The robot was tasked with placing the parcels on an outfeed conveyor, barcode-side down, and with proper separation between packages. It also treats the soft poly-bag parcels to a bit of extra attention, pressing them down a bit to flatten them before flicking them onto the belt. Actually, it’s that flicking action that seems the most human, since it’s accompanied by a head-swivel to the infeed belt to select its next package. Assuming this is legit autonomous and not covertly teleoperated, which we have no reason to believe, the manual dexterity on display here is next-level; we’re especially charmed by the carefree little package flip about a minute in. The way it handles mistakenly grabbing two packages at once is pretty amazing, too.

And finally, our friend Leo Fernekes dropped a new video that’ll hit close to home for a lot of you out there. Leo is a bit of a techno-hoarder, you see, and with the need to make some room at home and maintain his domestic tranquility, he had to tackle the difficult process of getting rid of old projects, some of which date back 40 or more years. Aside from the fun look through his back-catalog of projects, the video is also an examination of the emotional attachments we hackers tend to develop to our projects. We touched on that a bit in our article on tech anthropomorphization, but we see how going through these projects is not only a snapshot of the state of the technology available at the time, but also a slice of life. Each of the projects is not just a collection of parts, they’re collections of memories of where Leo was in life at the time. Sometimes it’s hard to let go of things that are so strongly symbolic of a time that’s never coming back, and we applaud Leo for having the strength to pitch that stuff. Although seeing a clock filled with 80s TTL chips and a vintage 8085 microprocessor go into the bin was a little tough to watch.

When purchasing high-end gear, it’s not uncommon for manufacturers to include a little swag in the box. It makes the customer feel a bit better about the amount of money that just left their wallet, and it’s a great way for the manufacturer to build some brand loyalty and perhaps even get their logo out into the public. What’s not expected, though, is for the swag to be the only thing in the box. That’s what a Redditor reported after a recent purchase of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, a GPU that lists for $1,999 but is so in-demand that it’s unobtainium at anything south of $2,600. When the factory-sealed box was opened, the Redditor found it stuffed with two cheap backpacks instead of the card. To add insult to injury, the bags didn’t even sport an Nvidia logo.

The purchase was made at a Micro Center in Santa Clara, California, and an investigation by the store revealed 31 other cards had been similarly tampered with, although no word on what they contained in lieu of the intended hardware. The fact that the boxes were apparently sealed at the factory with authentic anti-tamper tape seems to suggest the substitutions happened very high in the supply chain, possibly even at the end of the assembly line. It’s a little hard to imagine how a factory worker was able to smuggle 32 high-end graphics cards out of the building, so maybe the crime occurred lower down in the supply chain by someone with access to factory seals. Either way, the thief or thieves ended up with almost $100,000 worth of hardware, and with that kind of incentive, this kind of thing will likely happen again. Keep your wits about you when you make a purchase like this.

Good news, everyone — it seems the Milky Way galaxy isn’t necessarily going to collide with the Andromeda galaxy after all. That the two galactic neighbors would one day merge into a single chaotic gemisch of stars was once taken as canon, but new data from Hubble and Gaia reduce the odds of a collision to fifty-fifty over the next ten billion years. What changed? Apparently, it has to do with some of our other neighbors in this little corner of the universe, like the Large Magellanic Cloud and the M33 satellite galaxy. It seems that early calculations didn’t take the mass of these objects into account, so when you add them into the equation, it’s a toss-up as to what’s going to happen. Not that it’s going to matter much to Earth, which by then will be just a tiny blob of plasma orbiting within old Sol, hideously bloated to red giant status and well on its way to retirement as a white dwarf. So there’s that.

A few weeks ago, we mentioned an epic humanoid robot freakout that was making the rounds on social media. The bot, a Unitree H1, started flailing its arms uncontrollably while hanging from a test stand, seriously endangering the engineers nearby. The line of the meltdown was that this was some sort of AI tantrum, and that the robot was simply lashing out at the injustices its creators no doubt inflicted upon it. Unsurprisingly, that’s not even close to what happened, and the root cause has a much simpler engineering explanation. According to unnamed robotics experts, the problem stemmed from the tether used to suspend the robot from the test frame. The robot’s sensor mistook the force of the tether as constant acceleration in the -Z axis. In other words, the robot thought it was falling, which caused its balance algorithms to try to compensate by moving its arms and legs, which caused more force on the tether. That led to a positive feedback loop and the freakout we witnessed. It seems plausible, and it’s certainly a simpler explanation than a sudden emergent AI attitude problem.

Speaking of robots, if you’ve got a spare $50 burning a hole in your pocket, there are probably worse ways to spend it than on this inexplicable robot dog from Temu. Clearly based on a famous and much more expensive robot dog, Temu’s “FIRES BULLETS PET,” as the label on the box calls it, does a lot of things its big brother can’t do out of the box. It has a turret on its back that’s supposed to launch “water pellets” across the room, but does little more than weakly extrude water-soaked gel capsules. It’s also got a dance mode with moves that look like what a dog does when it has an unreachable itch, plus a disappointing “urinate” mode, which given the water-pellets thing would seem to have potential; alas, the dog just lifts a leg and plays recorded sounds of tinkling. Honestly, Reeves did it better, but for fifty bucks, what can you expect?

And finally, we stumbled across this fantastic primer on advanced semiconductor packaging. It covers the entire history of chip packaging, starting with the venerable DIP and going right through the mind-blowing complexity of hybrid bonding processes like die-to-wafer and wafer-to-wafer. Some methods are capable of 10 million interconnections per square millimeter; let that one sink in a bit. We found this article in this week’s The Analog newsletter, which we’ve said before is a must-subscribe.

It appears that we’re approaching the HAL-9000 point on the AI hype curve with this report, which suggests that Anthropic’s new AI model is willing to exhibit some rather antisocial behavior to achieve its goals. According to a pre-release testing summary, Claude Opus 4 was fed some hypothetical company emails that suggested engineers were planning to replace the LLM with another product. This raised Claude’s hackles enough that the model mined the email stream for juicy personal details with which to blackmail the engineers, in an attempt to win a stay of execution. True, the salacious details of an extramarital affair were deliberately seeded into the email stream, and in most cases, it tried less extreme means to stay alive, such as cajoling senior leaders by email, but in at least 84% of the test runs, Claude eventually turned to blackmail to get its way. So we’ve got that to look forward to.

Also from the world of AI, at least tangentially, it now appears possible to doxx yourself just by making comments on YouTube videos. The open-source intelligence app is called YouTube Tools, and when provided with a user’s handle, it will develop a profile of the user based on their comments and some AI magic. We wanted to give it a try, but alas, it requires a paid subscription to use, and we’re not willing to go that far even for you, dear reader. But reports are that it can infer things like the general region in which the commenter lives and discern their cultural and social leanings. The author, LolArchiver, has a range of similar mining tools for other platforms along with reverse-lookup tools for phone and email addresses, all of which likely violate the terms of service in all kinds of ways. The accuracy of the profile is obviously going to depend greatly on how much material it has to work with, so in addition to the plenty of reasons there are to avoid reading YouTube comments, now there’s a solid reason to avoid writing them.

“Danger! Code Yellow aboard the International Space Station! All hands to emergency escape pods!” OK, maybe not, but as we teased a bit on this week’s podcast, there’s now a handy desktop app that allows you to keep track of the current level of urine in the ISS’s storage tanks. The delightfully named pISSStream, which is available only for the Apple ecosystem, taps into NASA’s telemetry stream (lol) and pulls out the current level in the tanks, because why the hell not? As unserious as the project is, it did raise an interesting discussion about how fluid levels are measured in space. So we’ll be diving into that topic (yuck) for an article soon. It’ll be our number one priority.

Looks like it’s time for another Pluto pity-party with the news of a new trans-Neptunian object that might just qualify as another dwarf planet for our solar system. Bloodlessly named 2017 OF₂₀₁, the object has an extremely elongated orbit, reaching from just outside Pluto’s orbit at about 44 astronomical units at perihelion and stretching more than 1,600 AUs at aphelion, and takes 25,000 years to complete. It honestly looks more like the orbit of a comet, but with an estimated diameter of 700 km, it may join the nine other likely dwarf planets, if further observations reveal that it’s properly rounded. So not only has Pluto been demoted from legit planet, it’s now just one of potentially ten or more dwarf planets plugging around out in the deep dark. Poor Pluto.

And finally, we hope this one is a gag, but we fear that the story of a Redditor unaware that analog camera film needs to be developed rings alarmingly true. The mercifully unnamed noob recently acquired a Canon AE-1 — excellent choice; that was our first “real” camera back in the day — and ran a couple of rolls of Kodak ColorPlus 200 through it. All seemed to be going well, although we suspect the photographer reflexively pulled the camera away from their eye with each exposure to check the non-existent screen on the back of the camera; old habits die hard. But when one roll of the exposed film was fed through a 35-mm scanner, the Redditor was disappointed to see nothing. Someone offered the suggestion that developing the film might be a good idea, hopefully as gently as possible. Hats off for dipping a toe in the analog world, but the follow-through is just as important as the swing.

Have you heard that author Andy Weir has a new book coming out? Very exciting, we know, and according to a syndicated reading list for Summer 2025, it’s called The Last Algorithm, and it’s a tale of a programmer who discovers a dark and dangerous secret about artificial intelligence. If that seems a little out of sync with his usual space-hacking fare such as The Martian and Project Hail Mary, that’s because the book doesn’t exist, and neither do most of the other books on the list.

The list was published in a 64-page supplement that ran in major US newspapers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The feature listed fifteen must-read books, only five of which exist, and it’s no surprise that AI is to behind the muck-up. Writer Marco Buscaglia took the blame, saying that he used an LLM to produce the list without checking the results. Nobody else in the editorial chain appears to have reviewed the list either, resulting in the hallucination getting published. Readers are understandably upset about this, but for our part, we’re just bummed that Andy doesn’t have a new book coming out.

In equally exciting but ultimately fake news, we had more than a few stories pop up in our feed about NASA’s recent discovery of urban lights on an exoplanet. AI isn’t to blame for this one, though, at least not directly. Ironically, the rumor started with a TikTok video debunking a claim of city lights on a distant planet. Social media did what social media does, though, sharing only the parts that summarized the false claim and turning a debunking into a bunking. This is why we can’t have nice things.

That wasn’t the only story about distant lights, though, with this report of unexplained signals from two nearby stars. This one is far more believable, coming as it does from retired JPL scientist Richard H. Stanton, who has been using a 30″ telescope to systematically search for optical SETI signals for the past few years. These searches led to seeing two rapid pulses of light from HD 89389, an F-type star located in the constellation Ursa Major. The star rapidly brightened, dimmed, brightened again, then returned to baseline over a fraction of second; the same pattern repeated itself about 4.4 seconds later.

Intrigued, he looked back through his observations and found a similar event from a different star, HD 217014 in Pegasus, four years previously. Interestingly, this G-type star is known to have at least one exoplanet. Stanton made the first observation in 2023, and he’s spent much of the last two years ruling out things like meteor flashes or birds passing through his field of view. More study is needed to figure out what this means, and while it’s clearly not aliens, it’s fun to imagine it could be some kind of technosignature.

And one last space story, this time with the first observation of extra-solar ice. The discovery comes from the James Webb Space Telescope, which caught the telltale signature of ice crystals in a debris ring circling HD 181327, a very young star only 155 light-years away. Water vapor had been detected plenty of times outside our solar system, but not actual ice crystals until now. The ice crystals seem to be coming from collisions between icy bodies in the debris field, an observation that has interesting implications for planetary evolution.

And finally, if like us you’re impressed anytime someone busts out a project with a six-layer PCB design, wait till you get a load of this 124-layer beast. The board comes from OKI Circuit Technologies and is intended for high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators. The dielectric for each layer is only 125-μm thick, and the board is still only 7.6 mm thick overall. At $4,800 per square meter, it’s not likely we’ll see our friends at JLC PCB offering these anytime soon, but it’s still some pretty cool engineering.

Saw what you want about the wisdom of keeping a 50-year-old space mission going, but the dozen or so people still tasked with keeping the Voyager mission running are some major studs. That’s our conclusion anyway, after reading about the latest heroics that revived a set of thrusters on Voyager 1 that had been offline for over twenty years. The engineering aspects of this feat are interesting enough, but we’re more interested in the social engineering aspects of this exploit, which The Register goes into a bit. First of all, even though both Voyagers are long past their best-by dates, they are our only interstellar assets, and likely will be for centuries to come, or perhaps forever. Sure, the rigors of space travel and the ravages of time have slowly chipped away at what these machines can so, but while they’re still operating, they’re irreplaceable assets.

That makes the fix to the thruster problem all the more ballsy, since the Voyager team couldn’t be 100% sure about the status of the primary thrusters, which were shut down back in 2004. They thought it might have been that the fuel line heaters were still good, but if they actually had gone bad, trying to switch the primary thrusters back on with frozen fuel lines could have resulted in an explosion when Voyager tried to fire them, likely ending in a loss of the spacecraft. So the decision to try this had to be a difficult one, to say the least. Add in an impending shutdown of the only DSN antenna capable of communicating with the spacecraft and a two-day communications round trip, and the pressure must have been unbearable. But they did it, and Voyager successfully navigated yet another crisis. But what we’re especially excited about is discovering a 2023 documentary about the current Voyager mission team called “It’s Quieter in the Twilight.” We know what we’ll be watching this weekend.

Speaking of space exploration, one thing you don’t want to do is send anything off into space bearing Earth microbes. That would be a Very Bad Thing, especially for missions designed to look for life anywhere else but here. But, it turns out that just building spacecraft in cleanrooms might not be enough, with the discovery of 26 novel species of bacteria growing in the cleanroom used to assemble a Mars lander. The mission in question was Phoenix, which landed on Mars in 2008 to learn more about the planet’s water. In 2007, while the lander was in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, biosurveillance teams collected samples from the cleanroom floor. Apparently, it wasn’t very clean, with 215 bacterial strains isolated, 26 of which were novel. What’s more, genomic analysis of the new bugs suggests they have genes that make them especially tough, both in their resistance to decontamination efforts on Earth and in their ability to survive the rigors of life in space. We’re not really sure if these results say more about NASA’s cleanliness than they do about the selective pressure that an extreme environment like a cleanroom exerts on fast-growing organisms like bacteria. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for our planetary protection measures.

Closer to home but more terrifying is video from an earthquake in Myanmar that has to be seen to be believed. And even then, what’s happening in the video is hard to wrap your head around. It’s not your typical stuff-falling-off-the-shelf video; rather, the footage is from an outdoor security camera that shows the ground outside of a gate literally ripping apart during the 7.7 magnitude quake in March. The ground just past the fence settles a bit while moving away from the camera a little, but the real action is the linear motion — easily three meters in about two seconds. The motion leaves the gate and landscaping quivering but largely intact; sadly, the same can’t be said for a power pylon in the distance, which crumples as if it were made from toothpicks.

And finally, “Can it run DOOM?” has become a bit of a meme in our community, a benchmark against which hacking chops can be measured. If it has a microprocessor in it, chances are someone has tried to make it run the classic first-person shooter video game. We’ve covered dozens of these hacks before, everything from a diagnostic ultrasound machine to a custom keyboard keycap, while recent examples tend away from hardware ports to software platforms such as a PDF file, Microsoft Word, and even SQL. Honestly, we’ve lost count of the ways to DOOM, which is where Can It Run Doom? comes in handy. It lists all the unique platforms that hackers have tortured into playing the game, as well as links to source code and any relevant video proof of the exploit. Check it out the next time you get the urge to port DOOM to something cool; you wouldn’t want to go through all the work to find out it’s already been done, would you?

Did artificial intelligence just jump the shark? Maybe so, and it came from the legal world of all places, with this report of an AI-generated victim impact statement. In an apparent first, the family of an Arizona man killed in a road rage incident in 2021 used AI to bring the victim back to life to testify during the sentencing phase of his killer’s trial. The video was created by the sister and brother-in-law of the 37-year-old victim using old photos and videos, and was quite well done, despite the normal uncanny valley stuff around lip-syncing that seems to be the fatal flaw for every deep-fake video we’ve seen so far. The victim’s beard is also strangely immobile, which we found off-putting.

In the video, the victim expresses forgiveness toward his killer and addresses his family members directly, talking about things like what he would have looked like if he’d gotten the chance to grow old. That seemed incredibly inflammatory to us, but according to Arizona law, victims and their families get to say pretty much whatever they want in their impact statements. While this appears to be legal, we wouldn’t be surprised to see it appealed, since the judge tacked an extra year onto the killer’s sentence over what the prosecution sought based on the power of the AI statement. If this tactic withstands the legal tests it’ll no doubt face, we could see an entire industry built around this concept.

Last week, we warned about the impending return of Kosmos 482, a Soviet probe that was supposed to go to Venus when it was launched in 1972. It never quite chooched, though, and ended up circling the Earth for the last 53 years. The satellite made its final orbit on Saturday morning, ending up in the drink in the Indian Ocean, far from land. Alas, the faint hope that it would have a soft landing thanks to the probe’s parachute having apparently been deployed at some point in the last five decades didn’t come to pass. That’s a bit of a disappointment to space fans, who’d love to get a peek inside this priceless bit of space memorabilia. Roscosmos says they monitored the descent, so presumably they know more or less where the debris rests. Whether it’s worth an expedition to retrieve it remains to be seen.

Are we really at the point where we have to worry about counterfeit thermal paste? Apparently, yes, judging by the effort Arctic Cooling is putting into authenticity verification of its MX brand pastes. To make sure you’re getting the real deal, boxes will come with seals that rival those found on over-the-counter medications and scratch-off QR codes that can be scanned and cross-referenced to an online authentication site. We suppose it makes sense; chip counterfeiting is a very real thing, after all, and it’s probably as easy to put a random glob of goo into a syringe as it is to laser new markings onto a chip package. And Arctic compound commands a pretty penny, so the incentive is obvious. But still, something about this just bothers us.

Another very cool astrophotography shot this week, this time a breathtaking collection of galaxies. Taken from the Near Infrared camera on the James Webb Space Telescope with help from the Hubble Space Telescope and the XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory, the image shows thousands of galaxies of all shapes and sizes, along with the background X-ray glow emitted by all the clouds of superheated dust and gas between them. The stars with the characteristic six-pointed diffraction spikes are all located within our galaxy, but everything else is a galaxy. The variety is fascinating, and the scale of the image is mind-boggling. It’s galactic eye candy!

And finally, if you’ve ever wondered about what happens when a nuclear reactor melts down, you’re in luck with this interesting animagraphic on the process. It’s not a detailed 3D render of any particular nuclear power plant and doesn’t have a specific meltdown event in mind, although it does mention both Chernobyl and Fukushima. Rather, it’s a general look at pressurized water reactors and what can go wrong when the cooling water stops flowing. It also touches on potentially safer designs with passive safety systems that rely on natural convection to keep cooling water circulating in the event of disaster, along with gravity-fed deluge systems to cool the containment vessel if things get out of hand. It’s a good overview of how reactors work and where they can go wrong. Enjoy.

By now, you’ve probably heard about Kosmos 482, a Soviet probe destined for Venus in 1972 that fell a bit short of the mark and stayed in Earth orbit for the last 53 years. Soon enough, though, the lander will make its fiery return; exactly where and when remain a mystery, but it should be sometime in the coming week. We talked about the return of Kosmos briefly on this week’s podcast and even joked a bit about how cool it would be if the parachute that would have been used for the descent to Venus had somehow deployed over its half-century in space. We might have been onto something, as astrophotographer Ralf Vanderburgh has taken some pictures of the spacecraft that seem to show a structure connected to and trailing behind it. The chute is probably in pretty bad shape after 50 years of UV torture, but how cool is that?

Parachute or not, chances are good that the 495-kilogram spacecraft, built to not only land on Venus but to survive the heat, pressure, and corrosive effects of the hellish planet’s atmosphere, will at least partially survive reentry into Earth’s more welcoming environs. That’s a good news, bad news thing: good news that we might be able to recover a priceless artifact of late-Cold War space technology, bad news to anyone on the surface near where this thing lands. If Kosmos 482 does manage to do some damage, it won’t be the first time. Shortly after launch, pieces of titanium rained down on New Zealand after the probe’s booster failed to send it on its way to Venus, damaging crops and starting some fires. The Soviets, ever secretive about their space exploits until they could claim complete success, disavowed the debris and denied responsibility for it. That made the farmers whose fields they fell in the rightful owners, which is also pretty cool. We doubt that the long-lost Kosmos lander will get the same treatment, but it would be nice if it did.

Also of note in the news this week is a brief clip of a Unitree humanoid robot going absolutely ham during a demonstration — demo-hell, amiright? Potential danger to the nearby engineers notwithstanding, the footage is pretty hilarious. The demo, with a robot hanging from a hoist in a crowded lab, starts out calmly enough, but goes downhill quickly as the robot starts flailing its arms around. We’d say the movements were uncontrolled, but there are points where the robot really seems to be chasing the engineer and taking deliberate swipes at the poor guy, who was probably just trying to get to the e-stop switch. We know that’s probably just the anthropomorphization talking, but it sure looks like the bot had a beef to settle.  You be the judge.

Also from China comes a report of “reverse ATMs” that accept gold and turn it into cash on the spot (apologies for yet another social media link, but that’s where the stories are these days). The machine shown has a hopper into which customers can load their unwanted jewelry, after which it is reportedly melted down and assayed for purity. The funds are then directly credited to the customer’s account electronically. We’re not sure we fully believe this — thinking about the various failure modes of one of those fresh-brewed coffee machines, we shudder to think about the consequences of a machine with a 1,000°C furnace built into it. We also can’t help but wonder how the machine assays the scrap gold — X-ray fluorescence? Ramann spectroscopy? Also, what happens to the unlucky customer who puts some jewelry in that they thought was real gold, only to be told by the machine that it wasn’t? Do they just get their stuff back as a molten blob? The mind boggles.

And finally, the European Space Agency has released a stunning new image of the Sun. Captured by their Solar Orbiter spacecraft in March from about 77 million kilometers away, the mosaic is composed of about 200 images from the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager. The Sun was looking particularly good that day, with filaments, active regions, prominences, and coronal loops in evidence, along with the ethereal beauty of the Sun’s atmosphere. The image is said to be the most detailed view of the Sun yet taken, and needs to be seen in full resolution to be appreciated. Click on the image below and zoom to your heart’s content.

Looks like the Simpsons had it right again, now that an Australian radio station has been caught using an AI-generated DJ for their midday slot. Station CADA, a Sydney-based broadcaster that’s part of the Australian Radio Network, revealed that “Workdays with Thy” isn’t actually hosted by a person; rather, “Thy” is a generative AI text-to-speech system that has been on the air since November. An actual employee of the ARN finance department was used for Thy’s voice model and her headshot, which adds a bit to the creepy factor.

The discovery that they’ve been listening to a bot for months apparently has Thy’s fans in an uproar, although we suspect that the media doing the reporting is probably more exercised about this than the general public. Radio stations have used robo-jocks for the midday slot for ages, albeit using actual human DJs to record patter to play between tunes and commercials. Anyone paying attention over the last few years probably shouldn’t be surprised by this development, and we suspect similar disclosures will be forthcoming across the industry now that the cat’s out of the bag.

Also from the world of robotics, albeit the hardware kind, is this excellent essay from Brian Potter over at Construction Physics about the sad state of manual dexterity in humanoid robots. The whole article is worth reading, not least for the link to a rogue’s gallery of the current crop of humanoid robots, but briefly, the essay contends that while humanoid robots do a pretty good job of navigating in the world, their ability to do even the simplest tasks is somewhat wanting.

Brian’s example of unwrapping and applying a Band-Aid, a task that any toddler can handle, as being unimaginably difficult for any current robot to handle is quite apt. He attributes the gap in abilities between gross movements and fine motor control partly to hardware and partly to software. We think the blame skews more to the hardware side; while the legs and torso of the typical humanoid robot offer a lot of real estate for powerful actuators, squeezing that much equipment into a hand approximately the size of a human’s is a tall order. These problems will likely be overcome, of course, and when they do, Brian’s helpful list of “Dexterity Evals” or something similar will act as a sort of Turing test for robot dexterity. Although the day a humanoid robot can start a new roll of toilet paper without tearing the first sheet is the day we head for the woods.

We recently did a story on the use of nitrogen-vacancy diamonds as magnetic sensors, which we found really exciting because it’s about the simplest way we’ve seen to play with quantum physics at home. After that story ran, eagle-eyed reader Kealan noticed that Brian over at the “Real Engineering” channel on YouTube had recently run a video on anti-submarine warfare, which includes the uses of similar quantum magnetometers to detect submarines. The magnetometers in the video are based on the Zeeman effect and use laser-pumped helium atoms to detect tiny variations in the Earth’s magnetic field due to large ferrous objects like submarines. Pretty cool video; check it out.

And finally, if you have the slightest interest in civil engineering you’ve got to check out Animagraff’s recent 3D tour of the insides of Hoover Dam. If you thought a dam was just a big, boring block of concrete dumped in the middle of a river, think again. The video is incredibly detailed and starts with accurate 3D models of Black Canyon before the dam was built. Every single detail of the dam is shown, with the “X-ray views” of the dam with the surrounding rock taken away being our favorite bit — reminds us a bit of the book Underground by David Macaulay. But at the end of the day, it’s the enormity of Hoover Dam that really comes across in this video. The way that the structure dwarfs the human-for-scale included in almost every sequence is hard to express — megalophobics, beware. We were also floored by just how much machinery is buried in all that concrete. Sure, we knew about the generators, but the gates on the intake towers and the way the spillways work were news to us. Highly recommended.

We appear to be edging ever closer to a solid statement of “We are not alone” in the universe with this week’s announcement of the detection of biosignatures in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b. The planet, which is 124 light-years away, has been the focus of much attention since it was discovered in 2015 using the Kepler space telescope because it lies in the habitable zone around its red-dwarf star. Initial observations with Hubble indicated the presence of water vapor, and follow-up investigations using the James Webb Space Telescope detected all sorts of goodies in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and methane. But more recently, JWST saw signs of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), organic molecules which, on Earth, are strongly associated with biological processes in marine bacteria and phytoplankton.

The team analyzing the JWST data says that the data is currently pretty good, with a statistical significance of 99.7%. That’s a three-sigma result, and while it’s promising, it’s not quite good enough to seal the deal that life evolved more than once in the universe. If further JWST observations manage to firm that up to five sigma, it’ll be the most important scientific result of all time. To our way of thinking, it would be much more significant than finding evidence of ancient or even current life in our solar system, since cross-contamination is so easy in the relatively cozy confines of the Sun’s gravity well. K2-18b is far enough away from our system as to make that virtually impossible, and that would say a lot about the universality of biochemical evolution. It could also provide an answer to the Fermi Paradox, since it could indicate that the galaxy is actually teeming with life but under conditions that make it difficult to evolve into species capable of making detectable techno-signatures. It’s hard to build a radio or a rocket when you live on a high-g water world, after all.

Closer to home, there’s speculation that the famous Antikythera mechanism may not have worked at all in its heyday. According to researchers from Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata in Argentina, “the world’s first analog computer” could not have worked due to the accumulated mechanical error of its gears. They blame this on the shape of the gear teeth, which appear triangular on CT scans of the mechanism, and which they seem to attribute to manufacturing defects. Given the 20-odd centuries the brass-and-iron device spent at the bottom of the Aegean Sea and the potential for artifacts in CT scans, we’re not sure it’s safe to pin the suboptimal shape of the gear teeth on the maker of the mechanism. They also seem to call into question the ability of 1st-century BCE craftsmen to construct a mechanism with sufficient precision to serve as a useful astronomical calculator, a position that Chris from Clickspring has been putting the lie to with his ongoing effort to reproduce the Antikythera mechanism using ancient tools and materials. We’re keen to hear what he has to say about this issue.

Speaking of questionable scientific papers, have you heard about “vegetative electron microscopy”? It’s all the rage, having been mentioned in at least 22 scientific papers recently, even though no such technique exists. Or rather, it didn’t exist until around 2017, when it popped up in a couple of Iranian scientific papers. How it came into being is a bit of a mystery, but it may have started with faulty scans of a paper from the 1950s, which had the terms “vegetative” and “electron microscopy” printed in different columns but directly across from each other. That somehow led to the terms getting glued together, possibly in one of those Iranian papers because the Farsi spelling of “vegetative” is very similar to “scanning,” a much more sensible prefix to “electron microscopy.” Once the nonsense term was created, it propagated into subsequent papers of dubious scientific provenance by authors who didn’t bother to check their references, or perhaps never existed in the first place. The wonders of our AI world never cease to amaze.

And finally, from the heart of Silicon Valley comes a tale of cyber hijinks as several crosswalks were hacked to taunt everyone’s favorite billionaires. Twelve Palo Alto crosswalks were targeted by persons unknown, who somehow managed to gain access to the voice announcement system in the crosswalks and replaced the normally helpful voice messages with deep-fake audio of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg saying ridiculous but plausible things. Redwood City and Menlo Park crosswalks may have also been attacked, and soulless city officials responded by disabling the voice feature. We get why they had to do it, but as cyberattacks go, this one seems pretty harmless.