Among all the machines of the 8-bit home computer era which booted straight to a BASIC prompt, there were a very few that went their own way with another language. The Jupiter Ace springs immediately to mind, a diminutive Z80-based machine similar to Sinclair’s ZX81, which booted to FORTH.
The Ace wasn’t a commercial success, but what would have happened had it booted to a more accessible language? It’s a question [jordanhubbard] appears to be trying to answer, with an OS that boots to a Python interpreter.. The OS is Python, and everything on top of it uses the interpreter. Better still, it has a GUI mode.
The OS boots on an x86-64 platform or in QEMU, and appears to have been created using an LLM. There are two build options for the GUI version or the interpreter version. It provides a set of UNIX-like commands for interacting with the OS and disk, something which brings back memories of disk-based systems back in the BASIC days. We’re surprised to see no screenshots of the GUI in action though, an omission he’d do well to correct, we think.
It’s fair to say that in 2026 this is more a bit of fun than a serious OS contender, but maybe someone will run with it. It has competition too, not so long ago we featured a similar OS that runs a BASIC interpreter.
Nintendo has made many game consoles in its long history — one that famously overlaps that of the Ottoman Empire — but only one of them was ever Super. It’s that console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, that [Inkbox] has decided to delve deeply into as he crafts a game in assembly using all the hardware tricks he can.
Hardware tricks he’ll need, given he’s limited to the two 64 kB RAM banks and 3.58 MHz Ricoh 6502-based CPU. Even the 4 MB limit he sets for a historically-accurate homemade cartridge seems positively claustrophobic by modern standards. The game he’s after making is a top-down adventure game a la Zelda, and [Inkbox] gets right into the weeds explaining how the SNES works as he shows his work in this nearly hour long video. If you’re looking for a deep dive into the architecture, along with how it is meant to be used, you could certainly find worse sources. Everything from the different graphics modes to what registers handle sound are covered in this and the previous video in the series.
We can’t help but call out his dedication to open source — the SNES Sound Engine he has put up on GitHub looks like it could be a real asset to anyone else doing this kind of homebrew. The game itself is on itch.io and is pay-what-you-want.
FILE - A Super Tuesday voter walks past a sign requiring a photo ID at a polling location, March 5, 2024, in Mount Holly, N.C. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson, File)
NASA’s Hubble, Webb Find Far-out Solar System Objects ‘Remember’ Past
This artist’s concept depicts a Trans-Neptunian Object, a small, faint, icy body orbiting the Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune. These objects are so small that even with NASA’s Hubble and Webb space telescopes, they appear only as tiny points of light.
Artwork: NASA, ESA, Leah Hustak (STScI)
For the first time, scientists used the joint power of NASA’s Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes to study some of the most far-flung bodies in our solar system, Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs). Some of these are the smallest and faintest ever directly seen. The researchers unexpectedly found fewer small TNOs than they expected, and that the colors of these bodies followed the same relationships as their larger family members.
These objects are typically small, faint, icy bodies orbiting the Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune. Most are more than 100 million times dimmer than objects visible to the unaided eye. In two complementary papers published Tuesday in The Astronomical Journal, teams analyzed the color, composition, and size distribution of 27 newly discovered tiny, dim TNOs.
This class of small bodies offers the best view into an early stage of planet-building, when a disk of dust and pebbles in orbit around the Sun coalesced into city-sized “planetesimals” — the solid building blocks that clump together to form planets — but had not yet merged into full-sized worlds. Beyond Neptune, this second stage never happened, leaving behind a frozen population of planetesimals.
In the deepest TNO survey to date, teams led by PhD candidates from the University of Victoria in Canada, under the guidance of the National Research Council of Canada, and Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff examined a patch of sky simultaneously with Hubble, observing the TNOs’ visible light, and Webb, observing their infrared light. The team of researchers measured the objects’ colors, which are like a fingerprint of the surface composition, as well as their sizes and determined their orbits.
In the coordinated observations, the teams studied two different types of TNOs. The first, dynamically “cold” TNOs, are on their original, relatively circular orbits around the Sun in the plane of the solar system. The second type, dynamically “hot” TNOs, formed between the current locations of Uranus and Neptune but were pushed outward where they are today when the outer gas giants migrated early in the solar system’s history. Today they reside in highly elliptical orbits and move in and out of the plane of our solar system.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center; Lead Producer: Paul Morris
Prior to these observations, astronomers thought that small TNOs from both hot and cold populations would have undergone many collisions, changing their surfaces compared to larger TNOs. But that’s not what the observations showed. Instead, the small bodies look like their larger counterparts. This implies that collisions are not changing the surfaces significantly—perhaps because there are fewer collisions than expected, or because the TNOs somehow retain their primordial, pre-collision compositions. The teams are still trying to unravel this mystery.
“You could imagine a scenario where getting knocked around and fragmented would change the surface composition, and then you would see a different surface color for tiny TNOs compared to their larger siblings. So it’s really fascinating to see that the smallest objects are somehow ‘remembering’ and preserving the history of how they were made,” said Northern Arizona University PhD candidate Anastasia Morgan, who led the study of color and composition.
“These dynamically ‘hot’ TNOs retain a signature of where they were born, even though they’ve been orbitally scrambled since then,” said co-author David Trilling of Northern Arizona University.
Both the “hot” and “cold” populations seem to keep the same colors as when they were formed, with little change since the birth of the solar system.
The Webb data also allowed researchers to measure the number of objects of each size. They found that the overall size distributions for both populations were surprisingly similar.
“It’s very interesting that the process of planetesimal formation ends up producing the same distribution of sizes for both cold and hot populations, despite forming in different regions of the early solar system. The process seems to be insensitive to disk conditions, producing similar planetesimal sizes whether the disk is hot or cold, and dense or fluffy,” said University of Victoria PhD candidate Marielle Eduardo, who led the study on size distribution.
Researchers also found fewer of these very small bodies than they expected based on some planet formation models. Webb discovered 27 new, remarkably dim TNOs, one so faint it is equivalent to standing on Earth and seeing a small swarm of fireflies on the Moon. The smallest one they observed has a diameter of about 3 miles (5 kilometers), which is about five times smaller than what is possible to detect with the most sensitive ground-based telescopes.
This project would not have been possible without Hubble and Webb working together to detect and characterize these TNOs. With Hubble’s sensitivity in visible light and Webb’s in infrared, the space telescopes provide more insights than either can on its own.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
This artist’s concept depicts a Trans-Neptunian Object, a small, faint, icy body orbiting the Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune. These objects are so small that even with NASA’s Hubble and Webb space telescopes, they appear only as tiny points of light.
Tiny Worlds Discovered by Hubble and Webb
This video explains how Hubble and Webb are giving scientists a new look at some of the solar system’s oldest survivors and revealing new clues about how the building blocks of planets, including Earth, first formed.
Explore More
NASA’s Hubble Finds Kuiper Belt Duo May Be Trio
A team of researchers found a potential three-body system in the Kuiper Belt. The system, known as the Altjira, challenges traditional collision theories by suggesting that these triple systems might form directly from the gravitational collapse of material in the early solar disk.
NASA’s Webb Reveals the Ancient Surfaces of Trans-Neptunian Objects
Within the first two years of science operations, Webb took high-quality spectra of over 75 TNOs and provided the first comprehensive look at what they are made of.
Uncovering Icy Objects in the Kuiper Belt
Hubble observations of the outskirts of our solar system found a moon orbiting Makemake and several new moons around Pluto. These observations played a critical role in helping NASA plan the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of Pluto and beyond.
Hubble Harvests Distant Solar System Objects
Astronomers using clever techniques to cull the data archives of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have added 14 new TNOs to the catalog.
Kuiper Belt: Exploration
The Kuiper Belt is a doughnut-shaped region of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is home to Pluto and most of the known dwarf planets and some comets.
Military officials are using medical and personnel data to uncover troops with current or past gender dysphoria as the Pentagon moves ahead with separations.
Air traffic visualizers seem to be having a bit of a moment right now, and now that moment has come to the venerable NES thanks to [k6lcm]’s NES Radar project, which is open-source under the GPL on GitHub. In spite of the name, there’s no Radio Direction or Range-Finding involved in this project– no radio at all, in fact, which makes this a bit interesting. It’s just an NES cartridge and a carefully constructed cable.
It looks like a period game, but it’s current-day air traffic.
The cartridge is a standard ROM cart that holds the software — no hidden ESP32 or PicoW here, which is what we initially suspected the project would be. So how is it that when you start up the NES with the cartridge inside, you can input an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) code, like, say, KATL, and get a visualization of the traffic? Well, okay, if you put in KATL, you won’t get all the traffic, since the software is limited to 8 sprites, and that’s the world’s busiest airport. Still, how does it know where those airplanes are?
The secret is in the carefully constructed cable mentioned above: this project is using the second controller port on the NES as a serial port, and getting the data that way. A handy Python script on a nearby computer is what actually fetches aircraft positions. It’s based on c64u-radar, also by [k6lcm], which does the same Python server trick but relies on the Commodore 64 Ultimate’s LAN port to get data rather than using serial. The NES has no such ports available, though, so the controller port it was. We saw a similar trick used for satellite tracking on the NES some years ago.
If you like the idea of tracking flights, perhaps you’d like to see it done on a real radar CRT, or projected directly onto the ceiling. Thanks to ADS-B and free APIs, it seems airplane trackers are everywhere; if an interesting one has come onto your radar, please send us a tip.
Speaking of tips, thanks to [Levi] for putting this one on our scopes!
The BepiColombo mission cleared a major milestone this week in the final stretch of an eight-year interplanetary voyage to Mercury, the hard-to-reach, scorching hot iron world at the Solar System's innermost frontier.
The robotic science mission, with a price tag of nearly $2 billion, is led by the European Space Agency with contributions from Japan and the United States. Since its launch in 2018, BepiColombo has spiraled closer to the Sun using a combination of plasma propulsion and a series of flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury. The maneuvers changed the spacecraft's velocity and steered it toward a final encounter with Mercury later this year.
Next time it reaches Mercury, BepiColombo will be traveling at just the right speed for the planet's gravity to capture the spacecraft into orbit. Scientists working on interplanetary missions are accustomed to long waits for scientific payoffs. It took nearly 10 years for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to travel from Earth to Pluto. It turns out traveling to fleet-footed Mercury and then entering orbit requires more energy, or delta-v, than sending a probe to fly by Pluto.
Having more than 150 non-human primates at a research center fall ill with diarrhea in a stomach-churning outbreak that flowed for over two years doesn't sound much like good fortune. But for some scientists, it kind of was, providing a heaping pile of valuable data on how they might finally defeat a foul foe.
In a study published in the latest issue of Science Translational Medicine, scientist sifted through the dump of immunological data from the infections, logging new ways to train immune cells to defeat the bacteria behind the outbreak, a type of Shigella. Researchers were able to pluck out specific bits of the bacteria that the immune system could most effectively attack, linking specific target molecules to specific types of germ-busting immune responses. The researchers even precisely homed in on some of the tiny notches within those craggy target molecules where the most potent antibodies attached.
In all, the study "revealed unexpected features of the anti-Shigella antibody response in naturally infected [non-human primates] and represents a step toward the rational design of Shigella vaccine candidates," the authors write.
Oftentimes, when we’re using a microcontroller, we’re whipping up some very specific code focused on executing a particular task. The device is set up to execute code that does exactly what we want with minimal overhead. However, sometimes, there are scenarios where it pays to go with a somewhat heavier setup, wherein the microcontroller runs an operating system for the benefits that offers.
Federico Terraneo came to Hackaday Europe to discuss this very topic. He talks about kernel architecture, real-time operating systems, and how to best use C++ in the world of microcontrollers.
Microcontrolling
The talk begins in a helpful place. Federico starts by explaining what an operating system actually is. Basically, it’s the software that exists between the hardware and the applications that run upon it. Breaking it down into parts, an operating system typically consists of a main kernel, atop which sits things like the basic system services, libraries, and device drivers, along with utility programs necessary to maintain and work with the system. The user interface sits on top of all that, which allows the user to select and run applications and generally use the operating system to get things done.
Federico talks about the Miosix RTOS as a practical implementation of the fluid kernel architecture.
Of course, different operating systems differ in the specifics of their architectures. Monolithic kernels, such as Linux relies on, keep a split between kernelspace and userspace. This is where where the kernel has full hardware access running on the CPU in system mode, while the applications run in user mode without such direct access. Monolithic kernels typically only run on architectures with memory management units (MMU)—think full-scale computers with proper CPUs, like your laptop or desktop. Unikernel operating systems, like FreeRTOS, are a little different, where applications and the operating system are collapsed down into a single executable binary that runs with raw hardware access. There is no abstraction, no memory protection, or anything like that, which makes the architecture easier to run on typical microcontrollers. There are also microkernels, which aim to minimize the amount of code that runs in system mode, pushing things like drivers and filesystem access into userspace. This architecture still needs an MMU, and is mostly only seen in niche uses where high security and/or attention to safety is critical.
A thermal camera running on a fluid kernel system serves as a great demo application for the platform, showcasing several important features like multithreading and DMA.
When it comes to microcontrollers, unikernels are the most relevant architecture to think about. However, they have limitations–in stability, in security, in the fact that there is no run-time code loading or any way to easily partially upgrade the system. The fluid kernel, which Federico came to explain, aims to solve some of these issues. It hopes to offer a scalable operating system solution that works across the world of embedded computing, where sometimes microcontroller resources are limited and where memory management units seldom exist. It’s also intended to be compatible with standard APIs—think POSIX, C++ standard libraries, and all that. Federico calls it the “UNIX on a chip” concept.
The fluid kernel aims to exist at the intersection of the monolithic kernel and the unikernel. It allows hosting applications in kernelspace or in userspace as needed. A fluid kernel is also built to be POSIX compliant twice—with the same API whether you’re operating in kernelspace or userspace. The fluid kernel concept is designed around achieving process abstraction via the hardware Memory Protection Unit (MPU) common in modern 32-bit microcontrollers. It’s not quite an MMU, and can’t do all the same fancy virtual memory tricks, but it’s enough to provide a basic level of memory protection on a microcontroller platform. The fluid kernel can also become a unikernel if so desired as a compile-time option, which takes away process support while reducing code size significantly. It allows for unikernel devleopment that can be upgraded into a fluid kernel later by flipping the compile-time option the other way.
Federico does a great job of explaining the pros and cons of the fluid kernel architecture, and explores the security implications inherent in going this route. The Miosix RTOS is discussed as the practical implementation of this philosophy, and there’s even a helpful diversion into the efficient use of C++ on microcontrollers. If you’re getting serious about embedded development, or you just want to learn about a new architecture you might find useful one day, it’s a great talk to dive into on your next lunch break.
NASA’s Hubble Tracks New Decagon Encircling Saturn’s South Pole
Recent NASA Hubble Space Telescope images show the gas giant Saturn and its southern pole, where astronomers have discovered a 10-sided atmospheric wave. Observations show the decagon extends through multiple layers of Saturn’s atmosphere.
Image: NASA, ESA, STScI, Agustin Sánchez-Lavega (UPV), Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), Michael Wong (UC Berkeley); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan
Recent observations with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have revealed a giant, evolving, 10-sided atmospheric wave encircling Saturn’s south pole. This discovery marks the first time a large, regular-sided jet pattern has been observed in the planet’s southern hemisphere. The feature appears remarkably similar to Saturn’s famous hexagon at its northern pole, but is also distinctly different, suggesting scientists may be witnessing a new atmospheric phenomenon develop on the iconic gas giant.
The results published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
By piecing together several years of Hubble observations dating back to 2023, researchers found subtle hints of the structure beginning to emerge before it became a clearly defined pattern. Those observations were taken as part of Hubble’s Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, which has photographed the outer planets annually for more than a decade.
“We’ve never seen anything quite like this in Saturn’s southern hemisphere,” said Amy Simon, study co-author and OPAL principal investigator, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The northern hexagon has been there every time we’ve looked for more than 40 years. This feature is different — it appears to be strengthening, giving us the rare opportunity to watch a giant atmospheric pattern develop.”
The discovery was possible because Saturn’s changing seasons gradually brought the planet’s south pole back into view from Earth, where astronomers who collectively analyze images of Saturn from ground-based observatories first identified it.
Agustín Sánchez-Lavega, lead author of the new study, is a researcher at the University of the Basque Country in Spain. The university manages a website, called Planetary Virtual Observatory Laboratory, that accepts ground-based images of solar system planets contributed by observers all over the world. It was in those images, first in 2024, that Sánchez-Lavega and amateur astronomers Trevor Barry and Jean-Paul Oger noticed a subtle undulating band along the southern pole. Additional 2025 imagery taken from the ground hinted even more strongly toward this decagon structure.
That’s when the Hubble observations come into the picture. Hubble’s view from space offers unmatched image sharpness and spatial resolution over full rotations of Saturn, without smearing by Earth’s atmosphere.
“Given Saturn’s symmetry in its north-south jet stream system, we have been searching for a counterpart to Saturn’s northern hexagon on the south pole in Hubble images since 1990,” Sánchez-Lavega said. “Images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn between 2004 and 2017, showed no inkling of a long-lived formation, either. The Hubble data confirmed the feature’s presence back to 2023.”
A single filter from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope distinctly shows a 10-sided wave encircling Saturn’s south pole, labeled “decagon”. An “X” denotes where data was not captured.
Image: NASA, ESA, STScI, Agustin Sánchez-Lavega (UPV), Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), Michael Wong (UC Berkeley); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan
The wave sits within one of Saturn’s powerful jet streams and extends through multiple layers of the atmosphere, indicating it is not just a cloud-level feature, but a vertically extended atmospheric structure. The decagon’s apparent position shifts slightly, because Hubble captures images from different wavelengths. Those different wavelengths probe different altitudes in Saturn’s atmosphere.
“The most intriguing part to me is that this seems to have just formed recently,” said Simon. “The question is, why did it suddenly form now when we haven’t seen one before?”
The authors say further study is needed from Hubble and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, as well as analysis of computer models, to understand how the decagon formed, how long it may last, and how it compares to the long-lived hexagon in the north.
Hubble’s long duration in operation has allowed astronomers to track changes over time in solar system planets and other astronomical objects as well.
Rather than providing a single snapshot, the OPAL program allows scientists to follow seasonal changes, track short-lived storms, and identify other atmospheric features that evolve slowly over time.
“When we started the OPAL program, we expected compelling surprises, but we didn’t know what to expect specifically,” said Mike Wong, study co-author, University of California, Berkeley. “A lot of the discoveries we see coming from OPAL are not just based on one observation, but on years and years of data. Regular observations over time are enabling a lot of new findings.”
The team plans to continue observing Saturn to determine whether the decagon settles into a long-lived, stable configuration like the northern hexagon or continues to evolve. Future observations also could help scientists determine what drives the wave, what it reveals about the atmospheric dynamics of giant planets throughout the solar system, and how they may relate to those we see here on Earth.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for more than three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
Recent NASA Hubble Space Telescope images show the gas giant Saturn and its southern pole, where astronomers have discovered a 10-sided atmospheric wave. Observations show the decagon extends through multiple layers of Saturn’s atmosphere.
Decagon on Saturn’s South Pole (Single Filter)
A single filter from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope distinctly shows a 10-sided wave encircling Saturn’s south pole, labeled “decagon”. An “X” denotes where data was not captured.
The first Japanese citizen to launch into space, Toyohiro Akiyama was also the first commercially sponsored cosmonaut and the world's first journalist to file reports while on a spaceflight.
Akiyama, 84, died last Wednesday, August 26, of lower gastrointestinal bleeding, news agencies in Japan reported. A funeral was held with his close relatives in attendance.
As a correspondent for the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), Akiyama was chosen out of his 162 fellow employees who applied to fly to space in celebration of the network's 40th anniversary. He trained at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, located outside of Moscow, and was assigned to the Soyuz TM-11 crew.
Solana ecosystem tokens have outpaced the broader altcoin market in recent performance benchmarks, giving traders another reason to watch the network’s internal rotation rather than SOL alone.
That is the interesting part here. Solana is not just one token story anymore.
When the ecosystem is active, capital can move through memecoins, DeFi tokens, infrastructure names, liquid staking assets, wallets, launchpads, and consumer-facing projects. Sometimes SOL leads. Sometimes the smaller ecosystem tokens move harder.
The latest performance data points to that second dynamic.
For more details, visit the official Coingecko platform.
TL;DR
Solana ecosystem tokens have outperformed broader altcoin benchmarks.
The move shows rotation inside the Solana ecosystem, not just demand for SOL.
Performance data should not be turned into a future price prediction.
Solana Rotation Has Its Own Rhythm
Solana has become one of the most active retail ecosystems in crypto.
Low fees and fast settlement make it easier for traders to move quickly between assets. That can create intense rotation when sentiment improves. Capital enters SOL, then spills into ecosystem tokens, memecoins, DeFi apps, and other smaller plays.
This is part of what makes Solana exciting.
It is also what makes it risky.
When liquidity is strong, ecosystem tokens can run faster than the broader market. When sentiment fades, those same tokens can fall quickly.
That is why performance benchmarks need context.
Ecosystem Tokens Tell A Different Story Than SOL
SOL is the network’s main asset.
It reflects broad investor appetite for Solana as an ecosystem. But smaller Solana tokens can show where traders are taking more specific risk. They may point to attention around a particular app, sector, launch, or narrative.
That makes ecosystem performance useful.
If multiple Solana-linked tokens are outperforming, it can suggest that activity is spreading beyond the base asset. That often happens when traders feel more confident and start looking for higher-beta opportunities inside a strong chain.
Outperformance Is Not Always Quality
This is worth saying clearly.
A token outperforming does not automatically mean the project is strong. Some moves are driven by speculation, thin liquidity, incentives, listings, or social momentum. Solana’s ecosystem has plenty of serious builders, but it also has plenty of fast-moving risk.
So the data needs a careful read.
The useful point is that Solana-linked assets are attracting attention. The harder question is which parts of that attention are durable.
Why Traders Watch Ecosystem Breadth
Breadth matters in crypto.
If only one asset is moving, the rally can be narrow. If many tokens within an ecosystem are moving, the market may be showing deeper participation.
For Solana, stronger ecosystem breadth can support the idea that the network is not only benefiting from SOL demand, but from wider on-chain activity and speculation.
That can feed back into the main network narrative.
But again, it is not automatic. Performance needs to be paired with usage, liquidity, developer activity, and product traction.
The Market Signal
The latest benchmark shows Solana ecosystem tokens running ahead of the wider altcoin market.
That tells us traders are taking risk inside the Solana ecosystem again. It also suggests that the network’s internal market remains lively after a strong August.
The next test is whether the move spreads into real activity.
If trading volume, app usage, and liquidity support the price action, the ecosystem story gets stronger. If the move is mostly speculative, it may cool quickly.
Either way, Solana remains one of the main places where altcoin rotation is happening.
This article draws on CoinGecko Solana ecosystem performance data.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
This report is based on information released by Coingecko. at Coingecko
Disk Defragmenter was a wonderful utility that Microsoft included with Windows back in the day. Back then, you’d use it to theoretically speed up disk access. Today, you can run a fun simulation right in your browser thanks to [Dennis Morello].
The theory behind defragmenting hard disks was simple. Your hard drive would store data on spinning magnetic platters. Sometimes, a given file or group of files would end up with their different parts scattered across different parts of a platter, or even multiple platters, as the file system tried to slot everything into the space available over time. On a drive accessed with a literal physical mechanism, this fragmentation of files across multiple areas of a disk could cause functional read speeds to drop. To solve this, you could defragment the drive, wherein a utility would grab disparate bits of different files and put them physically closer together on the drive platters, such that the read heads could access larger contiguous chunks of files more easily.
[Dennis’s] project does none of that. It just simulates the visuals and sound of running Microsoft’s disk defragmenter tool from Windows 98. It’s got the little rows of squares that get rearranged, blue for unoptimized data, dark blue for defragmented data, and white boxes for free space. It’s got the progress bar along the bottom, too, and a nice little simulated sound of a hard disk ca-chunking away as it shuffles little bits of data to and fro. This was the kind of thing you’d do on a rainy Saturday afternoon in the 1990s, just watching your PC make itself a few percent faster while you drank coffee and wondered if your ex-wife Jacinta was ever coming back. She never did, but you did notice that Age of Empires II loaded a fair bit quicker after you ran a full defrag on your main drive. Sometimes, that’s as good as it gets.
Modern file systems are better at managing issues like fragmentation, and the virtually instant seek speeds of solid-state drives essentially eliminated the need for defragmentation for good. Still, it’s fun to visit an ancient tool from yesteryear and remember what it meant to us way back when. Maybe you could give Jacinta a call, too, just for old times sake, and discuss that time a Janet Jackson song started crashing brand-new Windows laptops right out of the box…
Use the Moon to find Antares and the Teapot, spot brilliant Venus, welcome the equinox, and see the Harvest Moon near Saturn and Neptune.
Skywatching Highlights
Sept. 14-20: Use the Moon to find Antares and the Teapot; dark skies may reveal the Milky Way center
Sept 18: Venus reaches peak brilliance for this evening appearance
Sept. 22: September equinox; fall begins in the Northern Hemisphere and spring in the Southern Hemisphere
Sept. 26: Harvest Moon rises near Saturn and Neptune
Birds fly over a barn as a harvest Moon rises.
Mike Linnihan
Transcript
The Moon joins a tea party… Venus cranks up the brightness… the seasons officially change… and the Harvest Moon meets up with some planetary neighbors.
That’s What’s Up for September.
A sky chart looking southwest after sunset on Sept. 20, 2026.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
From September 14 through 20, let the Moon guide you to a few celestial landmarks. About an hour after sunset, look south to find the Moon in the evening sky.
Night by night, the Moon shifts position against the background stars, passing near Antares.
This bright, reddish star marks the heart of the constellation Scorpius.
Next you’ll see the Teapot, a group of stars in neighboring Sagittarius that really does resemble a teapot, complete with a handle, lid, and spout.
If you are under an especially dark sky… you may see hazy steam rising from the Teapot’s spout. Follow that steam to its thickest part, and you’ll be looking toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
A sky chart looking west after sunset on Sept. 18, 2026.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Look west on September 18 as Venus hits peak brilliance, shining at its brightest of this evening appearance..
You won’t have to search hard to find it. Shortly after sunset, Venus will stand out as a brilliant point of light low above the western horizon, outshining every star around it. A clear view of the horizon will give you the best chance to catch it before it sets.
On September 19, celebrate International Observe the Moon Night!
People around the world are invited to look up and connect with our nearest celestial neighbor while learning more about lunar science, exploration, and the many ways the Moon has shaped cultures around the world. Find an event near you — or learn how to participate from wherever you are — at go.nasa.gov/ObserveTheMoon.
Then on September 22, it’s officially fall in the Northern Hemisphere …while spring begins in the Southern Hemisphere.
That’s the September equinox, when the Sun is directly above Earth’s equator and day and night are close to equal in length around the world.
From there, daylight keeps getting shorter in the Northern Hemisphere and longer in the Southern Hemisphere.
A sky chart looking east after sunset on Sept. 26, 2026.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
And on September 26, the Harvest Moon takes center stage, rising in the east shortly after sunset.
It won’t be alone. Saturn appears nearby, with faint Neptune completing a wide triangle in the sky.
Saturn is the easy one-you can see it with just your eyes. Neptune is a bit more challenging. At around magnitude 8, it’s too faint to see with the unaided eye …so you’ll need binoculars or a telescope to spot it. Darker skies and good observing conditions can help bring it into view.
Here are the phases of the Moon for September.
The phases of the Moon for September 2026.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
You can stay up to date on all of NASA’s missions exploring the solar system and beyond at NASA Science. I’m Raquel Villanueva from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and that’s What’s Up this month.
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For the first time in more than 30 years, NASA has no firm plans to send any new landers or rovers to Mars. Instead, the agency's near-term focus at the red planet is on aerial drones, a pioneering mode of exploration that didn't seem realistic until a few years ago.
The first real use of drones for science at Mars will come with the SkyFall mission, a fleet of three helicopters set for launch as soon as late 2028. SkyFall's helicopters will ride to the red planet with NASA's Space Reactor-1 "Freedom" mission, which has the primary objective of demonstrating nuclear electric propulsion in deep space.
The launch schedule is aggressive for SR-1 Freedom and SkyFall, projects that didn't even exist in NASA's portfolio six months ago. NASA's plan for the SR-1 Freedom mission, estimated to cost $2.1 billion, calls for repurposing the core module of the canceled Gateway lunar space station into a testbed for nuclear electric propulsion. SkyFall will build on NASA's success with the Ingenuity helicopter, an experimental vehicle that became the first rotorcraft to fly on another world in 2021.
BNB Chain’s August ecosystem update showed continued growth in new decentralized applications, giving the network another activity signal beyond simple BNB price movement.
The update tracked new dApp launches and active project growth across the ecosystem during August. That kind of expansion matters because blockchain networks are ultimately judged by what users can actually do on them.
A token can rally on sentiment.
A chain grows when developers keep launching applications, users keep interacting, and infrastructure keeps supporting new activity.
For BNB Chain, August’s dApp growth gives the ecosystem a more practical story.
For more details, visit the official Bnbchain platform.
TL;DR
BNB Chain’s August update showed new dApp launches across the ecosystem.
The story is about application growth, not BNB price action.
New projects can strengthen network activity, but quality and usage still matter.
Why New dApps Matter
Decentralized applications are the user layer of a blockchain.
They are where trading, lending, gaming, payments, NFTs, social apps, tokenization, and on-chain tools actually happen. Without useful applications, a chain can have strong infrastructure but limited real demand.
That is why ecosystem updates matter.
They show whether builders are still choosing the network. A steady flow of new projects suggests developer interest remains active, even if broader market sentiment changes.
BNB Chain has long competed on low fees, large user reach, exchange-linked liquidity, and retail accessibility.
New dApp launches help keep that flywheel moving.
Activity Is More Important Than Announcements
Not every launch becomes meaningful.
Crypto ecosystems often celebrate new apps, but the market eventually asks harder questions. How many users arrive? How much liquidity appears? Do transactions grow? Are apps retained after incentives fade? Do projects create real utility or short-lived speculation?
That is the difference between ecosystem breadth and ecosystem depth.
BNB Chain’s August update is a positive sign, but the next layer is measurable usage.
Developers can launch dozens of applications. The winners are the ones that hold attention after the initial announcement.
BNB Chain’s Retail Advantage
BNB Chain has an advantage many ecosystems envy: distribution.
The network has historically benefited from Binance-linked familiarity, broad token support, low-cost transactions, and a large global retail base. That makes it easier for new dApps to reach users compared with smaller chains.
But distribution also brings noise.
Open ecosystems can attract strong builders, but also low-quality launches and copycat projects. That means curation and security remain important.
For users, the presence of new dApps is useful only if the applications are safe, liquid, and worth using.
Avoiding The Price Trap
BNB price action is not the center of this story.
The cleaner read is ecosystem activity. If new dApps increase transactions, liquidity, and user retention, that may support the network’s long-term relevance. But it should not be reduced to a short-term BNB price claim.
Networks are not built in one candle.
They are built through repeated developer activity and sustained user demand.
The Market Read
BNB Chain’s August dApp expansion shows that the ecosystem remains active even as competition across L1s and L2s intensifies.
Solana, Ethereum L2s, Avalanche, Sui, Base, Arbitrum, and others are all fighting for builders. BNB Chain’s ability to keep attracting new applications suggests it remains part of that competition.
The next test is whether those apps create durable on-chain activity.
For now, August gave BNB Chain another builder-side signal — and in a market obsessed with price, that is the more useful thing to watch.
This article is based on BNB Chain’s August ecosystem materials and public network updates.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
This report is based on information released by Bnbchain. at Bnbchain
The average hot water is a relatively simple appliance to understand. It uses gas or electricity to dump energy into water in the form of heat, keeping it at a pleasant temperature for uses like bathing and cleaning. Basic mechanisms are in place to ensure the water stays at a relatively constant temperature, neither too hot where it could cause burns, nor too cold such that it wouldn’t be fit for purpose.
Legionella pneumophila is a bacteria that loves to grow in warm water. It can enter the body via aerosol and cause of Legionella’s disease. Credit: CDC, public domain
One of the interesting problems of our modern era is that changing our water usage has changed the risk profile for pathogens growing in hot water. NIST has noted for some time that while the pipes in our walls haven’t changed size, things like our shower heads have changed their flow rate to save water. Less flow rate in the same sized pipes means that water stays in the pipes for longer, increasing the time in which harmful pathogens have to grow in that environment.
Chief amongst these pathogens? The one most commonly feared is legionella pneumophila, the bacterium responsible for causing Legionnaires’ disease. The severe form of pneumonia comes with a fatality rate of 10%, and infection typically comes from inhaling aerosolized droplets containing the bacteria.
Of course, a great way to create aerosolized droplets filled with bacteria is to spray not-quite-hot water through a shower head. This is why hot water systems, particularly in large multi-occupancy buildings, are a risk for such infections. Legionnaires’ disease is rare, but it’s always out there, with 6000 confirmed cases showing up in the US each year. It’s possible that the true number is up to 10 times higher because the disease isn’t routinely tested for. The disease’s rarity is in part because engineers and tradespeople put in plenty of work to minimize the ability for the bacterium to breed in hot water systems. As NIST’s work demonstrates, though, there is possibly even more that could be done to tackle this problem.
Ideally, your hot water pipes in your house would not host any nasty bacteria. But often, hot water systems sit around 49 °C (120 °F), a temperature that’s hot enough to be useful and pleasant without a major scalding risk. Legionella pneumophila won’t easily grow at that temperature; the bacteria thrives between 20 °C to 45 °C (68 °F – 113 °F). Unfortunately, though, it’s not hot enough to kill the bacteria completely. Furthermore, water cools as it travels through pipes to an outlet, and thus pipes can be a perfect environment to spur further growth.
The solution developed by NIST is simple—jack up the set point of the hot water heater, then fit a heat exchanger on top to cool outgoing hot water with the incoming cold supply. Credit: Brandon Hayes/NIST
The simple solution would be to simply jack up the hot water system to store water at a much higher temperature, say around 70 °C (160 °F). This could be undesirable in many contexts, though, as water that hot can more easily cause burns. It would be ideal to store the water at a higher temperature, while making sure it was delivered at a slightly lower temperature so it didn’t hurt anybody when it left the tap or shower head.
A prototype unit whipped up by NIST cost only about $100. Credit: NIST
It turns out that there is a remarkably simple way to achieve this. NIST developed a simple heat exchanger which can be mounted atop any old hot water system. It’s designed such that the hot water leaving the tank passes through a heat exchanger where it’s surrounded by cold water which is running to the water heater’s intake pipe. This has dual benefits. The hot water inside the tank can be stored in the tank at 70 °C, which kills almost all legionella peumophila almost instantly. That water, though, is then cooled to a slightly safer temperature as it passes through the heat exchanger and out to the tap or shower. The hot water remains at a safe temperature for the user, and contains far less harmful bacteria, and cooling it doesn’t introduce any pathogens from another source. In turn, the cold water coming into the tank is pre-warmed slightly by the hot water, so the energy isn’t simply wasted.
This trick isn’t just simple, it’s also cheap. NIST engineers were able to fabricate a prototype unit to fit to a residential water heater using just $100 of components. It could be a useful addition for homeowners looking to make their hot water service a little cleaner. However, the real benefits are likely to be for larger operators of multiple-occupancy facilities, like nursing homes and hotels. These facilities often have to take great care to avoid the build up of harmful bacteria in building-wide hot water systems. Having the ability to increase the tank temperature to the point that legionella pneumophila bacteria simply die off would be a huge boon to this effort.
Sometimes, it’s possible to make great gains with a simple hack. Using the cold water service to cool hotter outgoing water is a smart trick that uses only minimal additional equipment to offer a safer hot water supply. It could yet become a common install for hot water systems in order to fight the good fight against a harmful disease that likes to lurk in our pipes. If you happen to see a heat exchanger atop a hot water heater in future, you can smile that someone has done the work to try and make that hot water supply just a little safer going forward.
The introduction of optical media in the form of CDs meant a revolution in the world of gaming consoles, escaping the restrictions of a few dozen MB of storage and instead offering a theoretically infinite amount of storage through the miracle and tedium of swapping discs. After the SNES narrowly escaped getting a CD add-on and the N64 doubled down on cartridges, we can now at least get an impression of what it’d be like if the Nintendo Entertainment System had been gifted a CD add-on back in the 1980s, courtesy of a project by [Throaty Mumbo].
The NES future we could have had.
There’s also an accompanying video containing typical hijinks and a demonstration of this system. Initially [Throaty Mumbo] was going to make a SNES CD add-on to match that console’s initial prototype, but doing it for the NES seemed more fun. Obviously, since the NES is quite limited hardware-wise it was always going to be a struggle, even if the original front-loading NES conveniently has a mostly unused expansion slot.
On the custom PCB there is an RP2350B microcontroller that mediates between an Everdrive N8 Pro cartridge and an IDE CD drive, along with a PCM5102 audio DAC. The expansion port is hereby used to receive the audio samples on its audio mix input pin, along with power. After boot the game ROM is read off the CD by the MCU and streamed over USB to the Everdrive.
National Emergency Declaration for Grid Security White House released Executive Order 14420, which targets security risks within the nation’s bulk-power system. Invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the administration...
The AM29000 series of processors were AMD’s entry into the world of super-fast next-generation silicon of the late 1980s. It was a time when ARM was still a niche architecture in a British educational computer, the 68000 series was still a major player, and it was by no means certain that the x86 would maintain its position. It therefore wasn’t an unreasonable choice for someone building a high performance computer at the time, which is what [Oscar Toledo G.] and his father did. If that wasn’t enough, he went on to write an operating system for it in AM29000 assembly, complete with a GUI, a C compiler, and an up-to-date web browser for the late 1990s. The story makes for an engaging read.
It’s written across two parts, with the first looking at the computer and the early software development, and the second at the C compiler and web browser. It’s a tale of epic mastery of the machine, and something we remember ourselves, piecing together knowledge in a time before the Internet placed it all at our fingertips. Tales such as hand porting — we can’t really say compiling — C code into AM29000 machine code are completely next-level. You have to read these two write-ups, and there’s even an in-browser emulator should you want to try it.
Meanwhile, in case you think something is a little familiar here, he’s the same person who brought us a Transputer in the browser.
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