Author: Maya Posch

2003 Articles

Using Starlink’s Satellites To Study Earth’s Upper Atmosphere

August 17, 2026 by 11 Comments

Aside from global access to cat videos, the presence of thousands of Starlink broadband internet access satellites in LEO has a very pleasant side effect for atmospheric researchers. Starlink publicly publishes near-real-time ephemeris data on its individual satellites. From this data you can deduce many details about the atmosphere at that altitude, including its density at specific altitudes at specific times, information which otherwise would be very hard to gather. Recently, this allowed [Mamoru Yamamoto] to determine the density of the thermosphere using tomography.

In a similar 2025 paper by [Zhuoliang Ou] et al. as published in Remote Sensing, this same data source was used to investigate details of the thermosphere. With Starlink publishing this data since 2021, this provides an invaluable dataset for studying this outermost part of the atmosphere.

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Printing FDM Filaments That Are Just Plain Weird

August 17, 2026 by 18 Comments

The fun thing about thermopolymers like PLA is that you can blend in additives, some of which are necessary to make it at all usable, while so many other additives are either just cosmetic or arguably just plain weird. In a recent video, [Zack Freedman] goes over some of the weirdest ones that he’s come across so far.

These range from the pretty-normal-but-unusual, like CMYK sets of filament for full-color printing, to the rather unusual, like very silky PETG and foamy TPU and TPE, all the way to the WTAF ones, such as Timeplast filaments that can be used as soap as well as fish food.

He also tried a range of filaments that vie for being the blackest filament possible, while others pretend to be paper or are made out of literal landfill trash. Some hit your olfactory senses with a hammer by smelling like all the lemons just got squirted right up into your nose, purportedly to keep flies at bay. There is also pumpkin spice-flavored PLA, for when you really need to make the holidays extra fragrant.

Overall, the range of filaments here is quite dizzying, with some being actually practical, while others are mostly about their green credentials, or about being pretty or having a specific olfactory experience. Whether any of them are for you depends. Do you have a longing for 3D prints that smell like pumpkin spice or are fish food?  We’ve noticed before that [Zack] likes strange filament.

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Using The Famicom Network System In 2026

August 16, 2026 by 16 Comments

Usually, the name ‘Famicom’ and the associated Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) don’t exactly bring to mind downloadable content and online services. However, at least in Japan, a modem add-on for the Famicom offered those features. Released in 1988, the Family Computer Network System (FCNS) offered all that using its modem to dial into Nintendo’s servers. Recently, [Throaty Mumbo] got his mitts on one of these units to try and see what you can still do with it in 2026.

Voiding that Nintendo warranty. (Credit: Throaty Mumbo, YouTube)

Although only mildly successful in the Japanese market, Nintendo still sold 130,000 of these modem add-ons, with tens of thousands of users for the stock brokering, banking, and Super Mario Club services offered. The experiences with the FCNS would form the foundation for Nintendo’s Satellaview for the Super Famicom and from there into today’s Nintendo Online offerings.

Of course, the main challenge with reviving the FCNS in 2026 is that the remote servers were turned off decades ago, along with the minor detail that to do anything with it you need to insert a special card. This was missing in the used version that [Throaty Mumbo] bought, but fortunately he got a workable Super Mario Club card. The next struggle? He doesn’t speak Japanese, so it took a while to eke out the details.

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Turning Energy Drinks Into Rocket Fuel

August 15, 2026 by 13 Comments

Sometimes claimed to give you wings, energy drinks can, at the very least, be used to make rockets fly. This is what [Nate Scovill] did in a recent video, where cans of the sugary stuff are processed to give a rocket its proverbial wings.

The basic concept is so-called rocket candy, which uses the fact that sugar is a pretty decent fuel type that — when combined with an oxidizer like potassium nitrate — can be turned into solid rocket fuel. Naturally it’d be easiest to start off with a pure source of sucrose or sorbitol for the sugar, but what if you only have access to cans of sugary soda?

Removing the moisture from the energy drink was the obvious first step, as water and rocket fuel aren’t a great mix. Adding and mixing potassium nitrate to the resulting thick syrup created the fuel-oxidizer mixture, also known as rocket fuel. This did take a detour involving removing the carbonation using a vacuum chamber, as CO2 and fire do not really like each other either.

We previously covered making your own rocket candy, though it’s far from the only rocket fuel that can be made at home using products bought at the local supermarket. Obviously, doing so comes with a whole heap of risks, not least of which is the notion that the difference between a rocket and a bomb is a pretty thin and fuzzy line that you do not want to accidentally cross.

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Large-Scale Pokémon Eviction Looms With Pokémon Bank Server Shutdown

August 14, 2026 by 10 Comments

After the Nintendo 3DS handheld console saw most its online services including the online store (eShop) taken offline not too long ago, it was only a matter of time before the demise of even the remaining paid services, such as the Pokémon Bank which Nintendo has now announced will be shutting down on February 25 of 2027.

The ability to transfer the digital pocket monsters, or Pokémon, between physical systems has been a staple of the series since the early Gameboy days when a link cable would be all you needed to trade and catch’em’all, as they say in the trade. Naturally over time this Cloud-based aspect wormed its way into this series as well, starting with the 3DS and this continuing on the Nintendo Switch in the form of the Pokémon HOME app.

With this paid service an avid Pokémon fan could collect up to 3,000 of these digital critters, move them between various Pokémon games and generally allow players to keep the same Pokémon with them across games. As noted by [Kevdog Plays] in an informative video on what to do before the shutdown, the service is free during these final months.

What’s interesting is that certain Pokémon can only be obtained from 3DS Pokémon games, which means that without either an alternative to this transfer mechanism or these games becoming available on newer Nintendo consoles, there will forever be that gaping hole in one’s Pokedex. Naturally this raises the usual questions about software archiving and preservation when an online service is required for the full game experience.

ShieldFont: Bludgeoning AI Scrapers That Disrespect Robots.txt

August 14, 2026 by 56 Comments

In the more innocent days of the World Wide Web you could simply put a robots.txt file in the root of your website that search engine indexing bots and similar would consult for the indexing wishes of the site owner. In this brave new world of LLM training data indexing such pleasantries are however rarely respected, leaving site owners to resort to increasingly more involved ways to bludgeon so-called AI scrapers, with ShieldFont being one of the most recent methods.

Its basic functioning is detailed in the white paper, explaining their use of ligatures. These are normally used to join multiple graphemes or letters into a single glyph which are rendered in the final text. By substituting about a quarter of the words in a text with such ligature-based versions in an intelligent, dictionary-based manner, the HTML version – as typically parsed by a scraper – will read as grammatically valid but nonsensical text, while the rendered font version will look normal.

Naturally, there are some disadvantages to this, such as screen readers for the visually impaired needing to also use the rendered font version, and it’s just as effective on legitimate search engine indexing bots. That said, if you apply this to static, archived content, or content marked as ‘do not follow’ in said robots.txt, then it might just be one way to make ChatGPT and friends spit out really funny output in the future now that the novelty of wood glue on pizza and eating rocks has somewhat worn off.

While LLM scrapers can adapt to this by also parsing the rendered text, this makes the scraping effort significantly more expensive. Together with maze traps like Nepenthes and Cloudflare’s offerings that seek to keep these scrapers busy scraping dynamically generated content through infinite linked pages, the tools available to combat the menace of these scrapers keep developing.

Removing Microplastics From Soil With Tumbling Magnetic Flakes

August 13, 2026 by 12 Comments

While in aquatic environments microplastics can be filtered out relatively easily, in soil it’s much harder to get to these microscopic particles. While you can certainly strip mine an entire area to process its soil, a less invasive method would involve something like the magnetic flakes proposed and demonstrated by [Jeonghyo Kim] et al. in a recent article in npg asia materials.

The Ti3C2Tx flakes, referred to as MXene microparticles, were designed to attract target microplastics. These were then combined with ferromagnetic nickel nanoparticles to make structures that can be propelled through soil using an external magnetic field.

During tests under laboratory conditions the researchers managed to remove about 81% of polystyrene and 72% of PET particles this way from soil, with a correspondingly higher percentage in water. After having the flakes rummage about for a while through the target material, they are removed with a strong magnetic field, which should recover most of them.

Naturally, the question with any such system is how it’ll perform once exposed to real world conditions and its myriad of soil types and conditions.