ISS Medical Emergency: An Orbital Ambulance Ride

January 15, 2026 by Tom Nardi 49 Comments

Over the course of its nearly 30 years in orbit, the International Space Station has played host to more “firsts” than can possibly be counted. When you’re zipping around Earth at five miles per second, even the most mundane of events takes on a novel element. Arguably, that’s the point of a crewed orbital research complex in the first place — to study how humans can live and work in an environment that’s so unimaginably hostile that something as simple as eating lunch requires special equipment and training.

Today marks another unique milestone for the ISS program, albeit a bittersweet one. Just a few hours ago, NASA successfully completed the first medical evacuation from the Station, cutting the Crew-11 mission short by at least a month. By the time this article is released, the patient will be back on terra firma and having their condition assessed in California. This leaves just three crew members on the ISS until NASA’s Crew-12 mission can launch in early February, though it’s possible that mission’s timeline will be moved up.

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Looking At A Real Fake Raspberry Pi RP2040 Board

January 15, 2026 by Maya Posch 19 Comments

Since the RP2040 microcontroller is available as a stand-alone component, it’s easy enough for third parties to churn out their own variations — or outright clones of — the Raspberry Pi Pico. Thus we end up with for example AliExpress sellers offering their own versions that can be significantly cheaper than the genuine article. The ones that [electronupdate] obtained for a test and decapping session cost just $2.25 a pop.

As can be seen in the top image, the board from AliExpress misses the Raspberry Pi logo on the silkscreen for obvious reasons, but otherwise appears to feature an identical component layout. The QSPI Flash IC is marked on the die as BY250156FS, identifying it as a Boya part.

Niggles about flash ROM quality aside, what’s perhaps most interesting about this teardown is what eagle-eyed commentators spotted on the die shot of the RP2040. Although on the MCU the laser markings identify the RP2040 as a B2 stepping, the die clearly identifies it as an ‘RP2 B0’ part, meaning B0 stepping. This can be problematic when you try to use the USB functionality due to hardware USB bugs in the B0 and B1 steppings.

As they say, caveat emptor.

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Windows? Linux? Browser? Same Executable

January 15, 2026 by Al Williams 23 Comments

We’ve been aware of projects like Cosmopolitan that allow you to crank out a single executable that will run on different operating systems. [Kamila] noticed that the idea was sound, but that the executables were large and there were some limitations. So she produced a 13K file that will run under Windows, Linux, or even in a Web browser. The program itself is a simple snake game.

There seems to be little sharing between the three versions. Instead, each version is compressed and stitched together so that each platform sees what it wants to see. To accommodate Windows, the file has to start with a PE header. However, there is enough flexibility in the header that part of the stub forms a valid shell script that skips over the Windows code when running under Linux.

So, essentially, Windows skips the “garbage” in the header, which is the part that makes Linux skip the “garbage” in the front of the file.

That leaves the browser. Browsers will throw away everything before an <HTML> tag, so that’s the easy part.

Should you do this? Probably not. But if you needed to make this happen, this is a clear template for how to do it. If you want to go back to [Kamila’s] inspiration, we’ve covered Cosmopolitan and its APE format before.