To the people of Mbiabet Esieyere and Mbiabet Udouba in Nigeria’s deep south, sundown would mean children doing their homework by the glow of kerosene lamps, and the faint thrum of generators emanating from homes that could afford to run them. Like many rural communities, these two villages of fishermen and farmers in the community of Mbiabet, tucked away in clearings within a dense palm forest, had never been connected to the country’s national electricity grid.

Most of the residents had never heard of solar power either. When, in 2021, a renewable-energy company proposed installing a solar “mini-grid” in their community, the villagers scoffed at the idea of the sun powering their homes. “We didn’t imagine that something [like this] can exist,” says Solomon Andrew Obot, a resident in his early 30s.

The small installation of solar panels, batteries and transmission lines proposed by the company Prado Power would service 180 households in Mbiabet Esieyere and Mbiabet Udouba, giving them significantly more reliable electricity for a fraction of the cost of diesel generators. Village leaders agreed to the installation, though many residents remained skeptical. But when the panels were set up in 2022, lights blinked on in the brightly painted two-room homes and tan mud huts dotted sparsely through the community. At a village meeting in September, locals erupted into laughter as they recalled walking from house to house, turning on lights and plugging in phone chargers. “I [was] shocked,” Andrew Obot says.

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Robots, quantum computing, and AI—so much AI.

Ideally, you’d expect any Super NES console—if properly maintained—to operate identically to any other Super NES unit ever made. Given the same base ROM file and the same set of precisely timed inputs, all those consoles should hopefully give the same gameplay output across individual hardware and across time.

The TASBot community relies on this kind of solid-state predictability when creating tool-assisted speedruns that can be executed with robotic precision on actual console hardware. But on the SNES in particular, the team has largely struggled to get emulated speedruns to sync up with demonstrated results on real consoles.

After significant research and testing on dozens of actual SNES units, the TASBot team now thinks that a cheap ceramic resonator used in the system’s Audio Processing Unit (APU) is to blame for much of this inconsistency. While Nintendo’s own documentation says the APU should run at a consistent rate of 24,576 Hz (and the associated Digital Signal Processor sample rate at a flat 32,000 Hz), in practice, that rate can vary just a bit based on heat, system age, and minor physical variations that develop in different console units over time.

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The patient, an Australian man in his 40s, lived with his fully functional heart implant long enough to be discharged from the hospital.

Astronomers using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope have discovered 128 new moons around Saturn, bringing its total to 274 — more than all the other planets combined. CBC News reports: Jupiter and Saturn have been locked in a battle for the most moons for years — with Saturn stealing the crown from Jupiter only two years ago when the same group of researchers found 64 additional moons orbiting it. But scientists say this discovery likely settles the score once and for all. […] He and the other scientists working on the project made the discovery using the Canada France Hawaii Telescope, a 3.6-meter optical telescope on the summit of the dormant volcano Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Scientists have been capturing pictures of the moons using the telescope since 2019. The researchers aligned and layered 44 of those images on top of one another in order to enhance the appearance of the moons and determine what they were. These moons are nothing like Earth’s very own, however. Sara Mazrouei, a planetary scientist and educational developer at Humber Polytechnic, says that while we tend to think of a spherical shape when we hear the word moon, anything that orbits a planet, or another body in space that is not a sun, is considered a moon. Mazrouei says many of the moons surrounding other planets in our solar system — including the ones observed here — are in fact only a few kilometers across in size and oddly shaped, like an asteroid.

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From a Space.com article: Athena, the second lunar lander from Houston company Intuitive Machines, tipped over during its touchdown on March 6, ending up on its side within a small crater near the moon’s south pole. This orientation prevented the lander’s solar panels from capturing enough sunlight, and Intuitive Machines declared Athena dead on March 7. (The company’s first moon lander, named Odysseus, also tipped over during its historic February 2024 touchdown but was able to operate for longer on the lunar surface.)

Athena beamed home a few shots of its surroundings before giving up the ghost. And we now have views of the lander and its crater grave from on high, courtesy of NASA’s sharp-eyed Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). On March 7, LRO captured a gorgeous oblique photo of Athena and its landing site — the Mons Mouton region, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the lunar south pole. Then, three days later, the probe snapped another pic, which provided a closer look at Athena on the shadowed floor of a 65-foot-wide (20 meters) crater.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Something very strange is happening inside Super Nintendo (SNES) consoles as they age: a component you’ve probably never heard of is running ever so slightly faster as we get further and further away from the time the consoles first hit the market in the early ’90s. The discovery started a mild panic in the speedrunning community in late February since one theoretical consequence of a faster-running console is that it could impact how fast games are running and therefore how long they take to complete. This could potentially wreak havoc on decades of speedrunning leaderboards and make tracking the fastest times in the speedrunning scene much more difficult, but that outcome now seems very unlikely. However, the obscure discovery does highlight the fact that old consoles’ performance is not frozen at the time of their release date, and that they are made of sensitive components that can age and degrade, or even ‘upgrade’, over time. The idea that SNESs are running faster in a way that could impact speedrunning started with a Bluesky post from Alan Cecil, known online as dwangoAC and the administrator of TASBot (short for tool-assisted speedrun robot), a robot that’s programmed to play games faster and better than a human ever could.

[…] So what’s going on here? The SNES has an audio processing unit (APU) called the SPC700, a coprocessor made by Sony for Nintendo. Documentation given to game developers at the time the SNES was released says that the SPC700 should have a digital signal processing (DSP) rate of 32,000hz, which is set by a ceramic resonator that runs 24.576Mhz on that coprocessor. We’re getting pretty technical here as you can see, but basically the composition of this ceramic component and how it resonates when connected to an electronic circuit generates the frequency for the audio processing unit, or how much data it processes in a second. It’s well documented that these types of ceramic resonators are sensitive and can run at higher frequencies when subject to heat and other external conditions. For example, the chart [here], taken from an application manual for Murata ceramic resonators, shows changes in the resonators’ oscillation under different physical conditions.

As Cecil told me, as early as 2007 people making SNES emulators noticed that, despite documentation by Nintendo that the SPC700 should run at 32,000Hz, some SNESs ran faster. Emulators generally now emulate at the slightly higher frequency of 32,040Hz in order to emulate games more faithfully. Digging through forum posts in the SNES homebrew and emulation communities, Cecil started to put a pattern together: the SPC700 ran faster whenever it was measured further away from the SNES’s release. Data Cecil collected since his Bluesky post, which now includes more than 140 responses, also shows that the SPC700 is running faster. There is still a lot of variation, in theory depending on how much an SNES was used, but overall the trend is clear: SNESs are running faster as they age, and the fastest SPC700 ran at 32,182Hz. More research shared by another user in the TASBot Discord has even more detailed technical analysis which appears to support those findings. “We don’t yet know how much of an impact it will have on a long speedrun,” Cecil told 404 Media. “We only know it has at least some impact on how quickly data can be transferred between the CPU and the APU.”

Cecil said minor differences in SNES hardware may not affect human speedrunners but could impact TASBot’s frame-precise runs, where inputs need to be precise down to the frame, or “deterministic.”

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With Microsoft ending free security updates for Windows 10 in October, millions of PCs that don’t meet Windows 11’s hardware requirements face an uncertain fate… Charities that refurbish and distribute computers to low-income individuals must choose between providing soon-to-be-insecure Windows 10 machines, transitioning to Linux — despite usability challenges for non-tech-savvy users — or recycling the hardware, contributing to ewaste. Tom’s Hardware reports: So how bad will it really be to run an end-of-lifed Windows 10? Should people worry? [Chester Wisniewski, who serves as Director and Global Field CISO for Sophos, a major security services company] and other experts I talked to are unequivocal. You’re at risk. “To put this in perspective, today [the day we talked] was Patch Tuesday,” he said. “There were 57 vulnerabilities, 6 of which have already been abused by criminals before the fixes were available. There were also 57 in February and 159 in January. Windows 10 and Windows 11 largely have a shared codebase, meaning most, if not all, vulnerabilities each month are exploitable on both OSs. These will be actively turned into digital weapons by criminals and nation-states alike and Windows 10 users will be somewhat defenseless against them.”

So, in short, even though Windows 10 has been around since 2015, there are still massive security holes being patched. Even within the past few weeks, dozens of vulnerabilities were fixed by Microsoft. So what’s a charity to do when these updates are running out and clients will be left vulnerable? “What we decided to do is one year ahead of the cutoff, we discontinued Windows 10,” said Casey Sorensen, CEO of PCs for People, one of the U.S.’s largest non-profit computer refurbishers. “We will distribute Linux laptops that are 6th or 7th gen. If we distribute a Windows laptop, it will be 8th gen or newer.” Sorensen said that any PC that’s fifth gen or older will be sent to an ewaste recycler.

[…] Sorensen, who founded the company in 1998, told us that he’s comfortable giving clients computers that run Linux Mint, a free OS that’s based on Ubuntu. The latest version of Mint, version 22.1, will be supported until 2029. “Ten years ago if we distributed Linux, they would be like what is it,” he said. But today, he notes that many view their computers as windows to the Internet and, for that, a user-friendly version of Linux is acceptable. Further reading: Is 2025 the Year of the Linux Desktop?

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A leaked Apple meeting reveals significant internal struggles with Siri’s development, as AI-powered features announced last June have been delayed and may not make it into iOS 19. The Verge reports: Bloomberg (paywalled) has the full scoop on what happened at a Siri team meeting led by senior director Robby Walker, who oversees the division. He called the delay an “ugly” situation and sympathized with employees who might be feeling burned out or frustrated by Apple’s decisions and Siri’s still-lackluster reputation. He also said it’s not a given that the missing Siri features will make it into iOS 19 this year; that’s the company’s current target, but “doesn’t mean that we’re shipping then,” he told employees. “We have other commitments across Apple to other projects,” Walker said, according to Bloomberg’s report. “We want to keep our commitments to those, and we understand those are now potentially more timeline-urgent than the features that have been deferred.”

The meeting also hinted at tension between Apple’s Siri unit and the marketing division. Walker said the communications team wanted to highlight features like Siri understanding personal context and being able to take action based on what’s currently on a user’s screen — even though they were nowhere near ready. Those WWDC teases and the resulting customer expectations only made matters worse, Walker acknowledged. Apple has since pulled an iPhone 16 ad that showcased the features and has added disclaimers to several areas of its website noting they’ve all been punted to a TBD date. They were held back in part due to quality issues “that resulted in them not working properly up to a third of the time,” according to Mark Gurman.

[…] Walker told his staff that senior executives like software chief Craig Federighi and AI boss John Giannandrea are taking “intense personal accountability” for a predicament that’s drawing fierce criticism as the months pass by with little to show for it beyond a prettier Siri animation. “Customers are not expecting only these new features but they also want a more fully rounded-out Siri,” Walker said. “We’re going to ship these features and more as soon as they are ready.” He praised the team for its “incredibly impressive” work so far. “These are not quite ready to go to the general public, even though our competitors might have launched them in this state or worse,” he said of the delayed features.

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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a four-member crew to the International Space Station on Friday night, paving the way for NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to return to Earth after being there for nine months due to issues with Boeing’s Starliner capsule. Arrival is set for late Saturday night. The Associated Press reports: NASA wants overlap between the two crews so Wilmore and Williams can fill in the newcomers on happenings aboard the orbiting lab. That would put them on course for an undocking next week and a splashdown off the Florida coast, weather permitting. The duo will be escorted back by astronauts who flew up on a rescue mission on SpaceX last September alongside two empty seats reserved for Wilmore and Williams on the return leg.

Reaching orbit from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, the newest crew includes NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, both military pilots; and Japan’s Takuya Onishi and Russia’s Kirill Peskov, both former airline pilots. They will spend the next six months at the space station, considered the normal stint, after springing Wilmore and Williams free. “Spaceflight is tough, but humans are tougher,” McClain said minutes into the flight. You can watch a recording of the launch here.

Wilmore and Williams aren’t stranded on the International Space Station, and they weren’t abandoned, the astronauts reminded CNN in a rare space-to-earth interview last month. “That’s been the rhetoric. That’s been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck — and I get it. We both get it,” [NASA astronaut Butch] Wilmore said. “But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about. We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded.” Wilmore added a request: “If you’ll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative. Let’s change it to ‘prepared and committed.’ That’s what we prefer…”

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