A worker inspects JUNO's acrylic sphere under the watching eye of PMTs

Worlds Largest Neutrino Detector Is Collecting Data In China

September 1, 2025 by 15 Comments

To say that neutrinos aren’t the easiest particles to study would be a bit of an understatement. Outside of dark matter, there’s not much in particle physics that is as slippery as the elusive “ghost particles” that are endlessly streaming through you and everything you own. That’s why its exciting news that JUNO is now taking data as the world’s largest detector.

First, in case you’re not a physics geek, let’s go back to basics. Neutrinos are neutral particles (the name was coined by Fermi as “little neutral one”) with very, very little mass and a propensity for slipping in between the more-common particles that make up everyday matter. The fact that neutrinos have mass is kind of weird, in that it’s not part of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Since the Standard Model gets just about everything else right (except for dark matter) down to quite a few decimal points, well… that’s a very interesting kind of weird, hence the worldwide race to unravel the mysteries of the so-called “ghost particle”. We have an explainer article here for anyone who wants more background.

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NASA Seeks Volunteers To Track Artemis II Mission

September 1, 2025 by 29 Comments

As NASA’s Artemis program trundles onwards at the blazing pace of a disused and very rusty crawler-transporter, the next mission on the list is gradually coming into focus. This will be the first crewed mission — a flyby of the Moon following in the footsteps of 1968’s Apollo 8 mission. As part of this effort, NASA is looking for volunteers who will passively track the Orion capsule and its crew of four as it makes its way around the Moon during its 10-day mission before returning to Earth. Details can be found here.

This follows on a similar initiative during the Artemis I mission, when participants passively tracked the radio signals from the capsule. For this upcoming mission NASA is looking for Doppler shift measurements on the Orion S-band (2200-2290 MHz) return link carrier signals, with the objective being to achieve and maintain a carrier lock.

Currently penciled in for a highly tentative April 2026, the Artemis II mission would fly on the same SLS Block 1 rocket configuration that launched the first mission, targeting a multi-trans-lunar injection (MTLI) profile to get to the Moon using a free return trajectory. The crew will check out the new life support system prior to starting the MTLI burns.

Because Artemis II will be on a free return trajectory it will not be orbiting the Moon, unlike Apollo 8’s crew who made ten lunar orbits. Incidentally, Apollo 8’s crew included James Lovell, who’d go on to fly the world-famous Apollo 13 mission. Hopefully the Artemis astronauts will be spared that level of in-space excitement.

In the center of the picture is a colored drawing of a man wearing a kimono, climbing out of a window. To the left and right the sides of two other pictures are just visible.

The Challenges Of Digitizing Paper Films

August 31, 2025 by 16 Comments

In the 1930s, as an alternative to celluloid, some Japanese companies printed films on paper (kami firumu), often in color and with synchronized 78 rpm record soundtracks. Unfortunately, between the small number produced, varying paper quality, and the destruction of World War II, few of these still survive. To keep more of these from being lost forever, a team at Bucknell University has been working on a digitization project, overcoming several technical challenges in the process.

The biggest challenge was the varying physical layout of the film. These films were printed in short strips, then glued together by hand, creating minor irregularities every few feet; the width of the film varied enough to throw off most film scanners; even the indexing holes were in inconsistent places, sometimes at the top or bottom of the fame, and above or below the frame border. The team’s solution was the Kyōrinrin scanner, named for a Japanese guardian spirit of lost papers. It uses two spools to run the lightly-tensioned film in front of a Blackmagic cinematic camera, taking a video of the continuously-moving film. To avoid damaging the film, the scanner contacts it in as few places as possible.

After taking the video, the team used a program they had written to recognize and extract still images of the individual frames, then aligned the frames and combined them into a watchable film. The team’s presented the digitized films at a number of locations, but if you’d like to see a quick sample, several of them are available on YouTube (one of which is embedded below).

This piece’s tipster pointed out some similarities to another recent article on another form of paper-based image encoding. If you don’t need to work with paper, we’ve also seen ways to scan film more accurately.

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Microsoft Removed WMR Headset Support? No Problem!

August 31, 2025 by 15 Comments

In late 2024 Microsoft removed support for WMR (Windows Mixed Reality), and they didn’t just cease development. As of Windows 11 version 24H2, headsets like the HP Reverb and others by Acer, Samsung, Lenovo, and Dell stopped working at all. But the good news is developer [Matthieu Bucchianeri] created the Oasis driver for Windows Mixed Reality which allows WMR headsets (and their controllers) to work again.

Oasis is available as a free download from Steam and involves a few specific setup steps in order to get working, but once the headset and controllers are unlocked and room setup is complete, the hardware will be usable again. Note that while SteamVR is handy, one’s headset and controllers are not actually tied to SteamVR. Any VR application that uses OpenVR or OpenXR should work.

It’s an extremely well-documented project, and anyone willing to read and follow a short list of directions should be off to the races in no time.

Now that there’s a way for folks to dust off their WMR hardware and get back in the game, it’s a good time to mention that if you have ever suffered from VR sickness, we’ve covered ways to help deal with and adapt to it.

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Hackaday Links: August 31, 2025

August 31, 2025 by 8 Comments

Back in March, we covered the story of Davis Lu, a disgruntled coder who programmed a logic bomb into his employers’ systems. His code was malicious in the extreme, designed as it was to regularly search for his Active Directory entry and fire off a series of crippling commands should it appear he had been fired. His 2019 sacking and subsequent deletion of his AD profile triggered the job, wreaking havoc on servers and causing general mayhem. Whatever satisfaction Lu drew from that must have been fleeting, because he was quickly arrested, brought to trial in federal court, and found guilty of causing intentional damage to protected computer systems.

Lu faced a decade in federal prison for the stunt, but at his sentencing last week, he got four years behind bars followed by three years of supervised release. That’s still a pretty stiff sentence, and depending on where he serves it, things might not go well for him. Uber-geek Chris Boden has some experience in the federal prison system as a result of some cryptocurrency malfeasance; his video on his time in lockup is probably something Mr. Lu should watch while he can. Honestly, we feel bad for him in a way because we’ve been there; we certainly toyed with the logic bomb idea when we were coding for a living, without actually ever doing it. Maybe he thought it would just get treated as a prank, but that was probably never in the cards; as we’re fond of telling our kids, the world just doesn’t have a sense of humor anymore.

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Lightning Talks On Time, With This Device

August 31, 2025 by 2 Comments

Ask a Hackaday scribe who’s helped run the lightning talks at one of our events, and they’ll tell you that keeping the speakers on time is a challenge. Conversely if the staffer is trying to indicate to the speaker how much time they have left, it must be difficult from the podium to keep track while delivering your talk. Fortunately there’s [makeTVee] waiting in the wings with a solution, a cube whose faces each have a custom 5×7 LED matrix on them. The countdown is clear and unambiguous, and should provide no distractions.

The brains behind it all is a XIAO nRF52840 Sense board using the Zephyr RTOS, the LEDs are WS2812s on their own PCBs, and the party piece is only revealed at the end of the countdown. A tilt mechanism triggered by a servo releases a ball bearing down a track, where it hits a telephone bell and provides a very audible reminder to the speaker. The result saw action during the lightning talks at the Hackaday Europe event earlier in the year, but it’s taken a while for the write-up to make it online.

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NASA Is Taking Suggestions For Raising Swift’s Orbit

August 31, 2025 by 42 Comments

Launched in 2004, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory – formerly the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer – has been dutifully studying gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) during its two-year mission, before moving on to a more general space observation role during its ongoing mission. Unfortunately, the observatory is in LEO, at an altitude of around 370 km. The natural orbital decay combined with increased solar activity now threatens to end Swift’s mission, unless NASA can find someone who can boost its orbit.

Using Swift as a testbed for commercial orbit-boosting technologies, NASA is working with a number of companies to investigate options. One of these is the SSPICY demonstration of in-orbit inspection technology by Starfish Space that’s part of an existing Phase III program.

Although currently no option has been selected and Swift is still at risk of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere within the near future, there seems to be at least a glimmer of hope that this process can be reverted, and a perfectly fine triple-telescope space observatory can keep doing science for many years to come. Along the way it may also provide a blueprint for how to do the same with other LEO assets that are at risk of meeting a fiery demise.