Because what is science if not magic wearing a lab coat and fake mustache so you don’t recognize it, this is a video of science essayist Steve Mould using an additional prism and convex lens to recombine the ROYGBIV separated from one prism back into a beam of white light. That’s cool. But do you know what would be even cooler? “X-ray glasses.” I don’t even care about your underwear, I just want to see which lotto scratchers have winning numbers before I buy them.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 1966, a beach-ball-size robot bounced across the moon. Once it rolled to a stop, its four petal-like covers opened, exposing a camera that sent back the first picture taken on the surface of another world. This was Luna 9, the Soviet lander that was the earliest spacecraft to safely touchdown on the moon. While it paved the way toward interplanetary exploration, Luna 9’s precise whereabouts have remained a mystery ever since.

That may soon change. Two research teams think they might have tracked down the long-lost remains of Luna 9. But there’s a catch: The teams do not agree on the location. “One of them is wrong,” said Anatoly Zak, a space journalist and author who runs RussianSpaceWeb.com and reported on the story last week. The dueling finds highlight a strange fact of the early moon race: The precise resting places of a number of spacecraft that crashed or landed on the moon in the run up to NASA’s Apollo missions are lost to obscurity. A newer generation of spacecraft may at last resolve these mysteries.

Luna 9 launched to the moon on Jan. 31, 1966. While a number of spacecraft had crashed into the lunar surface at that stage of the moon race, it was among the earliest to try what rocket engineers call a soft landing. Its core unit, a spherical suite of scientific instruments, was about two feet across. That size makes it difficult to spot from orbit. “Luna 9 is a very, very small vehicle,” said Mark Robinson, a geologist at the company Intuitive Machines, which has twice landed spacecraft on the moon.

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Like most of the eastern United States this winter, I experienced some rough snowstorms with ice rain. Now that I’ve seen what can happen during any winter, I wasted no time getting myself a power station. This is a great time to get yourself one, since the Anker SOLIX C1000 Portable Power Station is 50% off right now, going for $397 (originally $799). This is the lowest price it has been, according to price-tracking tools.

Anker SOLIX C1000

$397.00
at Amazon

$799.00
Save $402.00

$397.00
at Amazon

$799.00
Save $402.00

Many people in my city had to endure below-freezing temperatures without power. Luckily for me, our power didn’t go out, but I still had to prepare for the worst. I decided to finally dive into the world of power stations, and I was surprised to learn that some of these power stations can power refrigerators. The Anker SOLIX C1000 can power a fridge for around 32 hours, depending on the size. That can be the difference between losing all of your food in the fridge during a power outage or being able to feed your household during the outage.

Anker’s power stations are some of the best in the market. Like most top-tier power stations, they have accessories like solar panels or extra batteries that you can buy separately if you ever feel the need to have a longer or more sustainable option in the future. It also has an excellent app that tracks how your energy is being used and lets you customize the battery output. As Mashable’s review points out, it’s also a versatile tool that you can take on camping trips to power TVs, cooking materials, phones, etc.

The peace of mind of having a power station at home by itself is worth the price to me. If you’ve been considering one, get it now while it’s 50% off, not when the next storm is on the horizon.

Meta has been going all in on AI, whether people want it or not, and now it’s bringing more features in that vein to Facebook. The network’s latest move is to let people use Meta AI to animate their profile photos. Because what better way to express your individuality than to use a pre-canned AI-generated animation on your own face?

Meta AI is also coming for your Facebook Stories and Memories. The network’s Restyle lets you use gen-AI to change up the aesthetic of your posts. You can once again use pre-canned stylings or give the AI assistant your own prompt.

In the company’s own words, the new tools that will create “share-worthy moments that spark meaningful interactions and conversations with friends.” I guess meaning is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re desperate to behold even more AI slop, Meta recently said its Vibes feed of exactly that content will be getting a standalone app.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/facebook-is-offering-meta-ai-powered-animations-for-profile-photos-201022506.html?src=rss

While there are a lot of chat apps out there, WhatsApp is the undeniable leader of the pack. The app has over three billion monthly active users, constantly messaging and calling one another across the globe. However, currently those calls are all happening over the mobile app, or maybe the desktop app. Though WhatsApp does have a web app, the service has never supported audio or video calls outside of its downloadable apps—until now.

You can now make calls from the WhatsApp web app

According to WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is slowly rolling out audio and video calls to its web app. At launch, the functionality is coming to individual chats with users who elect to enroll in the WhatsApp web app’s beta, but the company plans to roll out the feature to all web app users over the coming weeks.

WABetaInfo notes that voice and audio calls work about the same as they do in the WhatsApp desktop app. When you open an individual chat in the web app, you’ll now see a video call icon at the top. Click this, and you’ll find two options: one to place a voice call, and one to place a video call. These calls are still end-to-end encrypted, as they are on WhatsApp’s desktop and mobile apps, meaning only the users who are a part of the calls can hear what’s being said. In addition, the web app’s video call client supports Screen Share, so you can share a live stream of your computer’s screen to another WhatsApp contact.

WhatsApp is also reportedly working on group chat calls for web app users, as well. While that feature won’t roll out alongside individual calls, when it does launch, you’ll be able to join group chats with up to 32 people.

If you tend to use the WhatsApp desktop or mobile apps, this might not seem like huge news—but it is pretty substantial for a few subsets of WhatsApp users. One, of course, is the user base that just prefers using WhatsApp in their computer’s web browser—but the other is Linux users. WhatsApp doesn’t actually offer a version of its desktop app for Linux, so those users have to use the web app if they want to run WhatsApp on their computers. That means they’ve never before been able to place calls without pulling out a mobile device.

How to sign up for the WhatsApp web app beta

This feature will soon roll out to all web app users, but until then, you need to be running the WhatsApp web app beta in order to try it.

Luckily, it’s pretty easy to get up and running. To start, open the web app, then head to the settings menu, choose “Help,” then choose the “Join beta” option. This will immediately switch you over to the beta version of the web app. (You should see a “Beta” label on your screen.) Now that you’re running the beta, should you find the option to place calls in individual chats.

Google on Tuesday expanded its “Results about you” tool to let users request the removal of Search results containing government-issued ID numbers — including driver’s licenses, passports and Social Security numbers — adding to the tool’s existing ability to flag results that surface phone numbers, email addresses, and home addresses.

The update, announced on Safer Internet Day, is rolling out in the U.S. over the coming days. Google also streamlined its process for reporting non-consensual explicit images on Search, allowing users to select and submit removal requests for multiple images at once rather than reporting them individually.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wikipedia editors are discussing whether to blacklist Archive.today because the archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blogger who wrote a post in 2023 about the mysterious website’s anonymous maintainer.

In a request for comment page, Wikipedia’s volunteer editors were presented with three options. Option A is to remove or hide all Archive.today links and add the site to the spam blacklist. Option B is to deprecate Archive.today, discouraging future link additions while keeping the existing archived links. Option C is to do nothing and maintain the status quo.

Option A in particular would be a huge change, as more than 695,000 links to Archive.today are used across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. Archive.today, also known as Archive.is, is a website that saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.

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You have likely heard about the masked agents of ICE mucking around in Minnesota for the past few months, resulting in numerous violent incidents and deaths. Itch.io is hosting a bundle to help raise money for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, which was organized by charity creator Jes Wade.

The No ICE in Minnesota bundle includes nearly 1,300 video games and tabletop games and costs just $10, though those with deep pockets can certainly donate more than that. It has a goal of $100,000, which it certainly is on pace to meet.

There are some nifty titles here, particularly for those interested in indie puzzle games and life sims. The standout is likely the stellar puzzler Baba Is You, which won the Game Designers Award at the Tokyo Games Show in 2020. This is a game that has to be played to be understood, as players are given the opportunity to change the rules to find novel solutions to complex puzzles. It’s very good.

The bundle includes the life simulation game Calico, which involves players running a cat cafe on a magical island. The art style is gorgeous and the gameplay is relaxing. Also, calico cats are awesome.

Other titles include the bee-collecting sim Apico, the musical sci-fi adventure Periphery Synthetic and the space-based roguelike Hyperspace Dogfights. Scroll through the list to see if anything else strikes your interest, but mark out some time on the calendar first. Scrolling through nearly 1,300 games can take a while.

The Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota is a nonprofit that provides free representation to low-income immigrants and refugees. The organization also provides support for those who have witnessed violent attacks and advocates for public policies which “respect the universal human rights of immigrants.”

I live in Minneapolis. ICE is still here in full force, despite the media moving on to shinier objects. We really do need all the help we can get. The long-term presence of these masked, armed agents is really starting to destroy the local economy and many people are quite literally trapped indoors. To say morale is low would be an understatement. Schools are still being raided and people are still being brutally beaten. American citizens are still being arrested for dubious reasons. This is all happening after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

That’s why these fundraising bundles on Itch have become so important. They really do shine a light on important topics. This is organizer Jes Wade’s second ICE-related bundle, with a former focusing on California relief efforts. There have also been bundles to help raise money for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund and to raise cash for charities working in Ukraine.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/this-itchio-bundle-to-help-minnesota-includes-over-1200-games-and-costs-just-10-190643987.html?src=rss

The U.S., whose population the Census Bureau did not expect to start shrinking until 2081, may record its first-ever decline as early as this year because of the Trump administration’s accelerating immigration crackdown. Census data released in late January showed US population growth slowed to just 0.5% in the year prior to July 2025 — the lowest rate since the pandemic — as net migration fell to 1.3 million from a peak of 2.7 million the year before.

Census experts now expect net migration to drop to only 316,000 in the year prior to July 2026 and say the country is “trending toward negative net migration.” A joint study by researchers at the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution estimates that 2026 net immigration could range from a gain of 185,000 to a loss of 925,000. Births exceeded deaths by just 519,000 in the most recent period, a surplus the Congressional Budget Office expects to vanish by 2030. At the low end of the AEI/Brookings range, the overall US population would shrink by more than 400,000 — something that has never happened since the country began taking censuses in 1790.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.