[It’s on my MIND] designed a clever BB blaster featuring a four-bar linkage that prints in a single piece and requires no additional hardware. The interesting part is how it turns a trigger pull into launching a 6 mm plastic BB. There is a spring, but it only acts as a trigger return and plays no part in launching the projectile. So how does it work?

The usual way something like this functions is with the trigger pulling back a striker of some kind, and putting it under tension in the process (usually with the help of a spring) then releasing it. As the striker flies forward, it smacks into a BB and launches it. We’ve seen print-in-place shooters that work this way, but that is not what is happening here.

With [It’s on my MIND]’s BB launcher, the trigger is a four-bar linkage that transforms a rearward pull of the trigger into a forward push of the striker against a BB that is gravity fed from a hopper. The tension comes from the BB’s forward motion being arrested by a physical detente as the striker pushes from behind. Once that tension passes a threshold, the BB pops past the detente and goes flying. Thanks to the mechanical advantage of the four-bar linkage, the trigger finger doesn’t need to do much work. The spring? It’s just there to reset the trigger by pushing it forward again after firing.

It’s a clever design that doesn’t require any additional hardware, and even prints in a single piece. Watch it in action in the video, embedded just below.

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.

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.