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Sleeping arctic fox (Alopex lagopus). (Credit: Rama, Wikimedia)

Investigating Why Animals Sleep: From Memory Sorting To Waste Disposal

February 5, 2025 by 20 Comments

What has puzzled researchers and philosophers for many centuries is the ‘why’ of sleep, along with the ‘how’. We human animals know from experience that we need to sleep, and that the longer we go without it, the worse we feel. Chronic sleep-deprivation is known to be even fatal. Yet exactly why do we need sleep? To rest our bodies, and our brains? To sort through a day’s worth of memories? To cleanse our brain of waste products that collect as neurons and supporting cells busily do their thing?

Within the kingdom of Animalia one constant is that its brain-enabled species need to give these brains a regular break and have a good sleep. Although what ‘sleep’ entails here can differ significantly between species, generally it means a period of physical inactivity where the animal’s brain patterns change significantly with slower brainwaves. The occurrence of so-called rapid eye movement (REM) phases is also common, with dreaming quite possibly also being a feature among many animals, though obviously hard to ascertain.

Most recently strong evidence has arisen for sleep being essential to remove waste products, in the form of so-called glymphatic clearance. This is akin to lymphatic waste removal in other tissues, while our brains curiously enough lack a lymphatic system. So is sleeping just to a way to scrub our brains clean of waste?

Continue reading “Investigating Why Animals Sleep: From Memory Sorting To Waste Disposal” →

What Happens If You Die In Space?

February 5, 2025 by 51 Comments

There are no two ways about it—space will kill you if you give it half a chance. More than land, sea, or air, the space environment is entirely hostile to human existence. Precision-engineered craft are the bare minimum just to ensure human survival. Even still, between the vacuum, radiation, micrometeorites, and equipment failures, there are plenty of ways for things to go catastrophically wrong beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

Despite the hazards, most spacefaring humans have completed their missions without injury. However, as we look to return to the Moon, tread on Mars, and beyond, it’s increasingly likely that future astronauts could pass away during longer missions. When that inevitably happens, the question is simple—how do you deal with death in space?

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A Closer Look At The Tanmatsu

February 4, 2025 by 29 Comments

A few weeks ago we brought you news of a new palmtop computer for hackers, powered by the new Espressif ESP32-P4 application processor. The Tanmatsu (Japanese for “Terminal”) is a compact handheld device with a QWERTY keyboard and an 800×480 DSI display, and while it currently exists at the final prototype stage there is a pre-order page upon which you can reserve an early production model for yourself. We’ve been lucky enough to be invited to give one a close-up inspection, so it was time to hot-foot it on the train to a Dutch hackerspace in order to bring you a preview.

A Little History, And First Impressions

The Tanmatsu, held in both hands.
Recesses in the case fit well against the hands.

Before looking at the device, it’s time for a little history. The Tanmatsu has its origin in badge.team, the Netherlands-based group that has produced so many European event badges over the years, and it was destined to eventually become the badge for the upcoming WHY2025 hacker camp. As sometimes happens in any community there has been a significant difference of opinion between the event orga and the badge.team folks that it’s inappropriate to go into here, so now it exists as a standalone project. It’s destined to be open-source in its entirety including hardware and software (and we will hold them to that, never fear), but because of the events surrounding its conception the full repositories will be not be made public until some time late in the summer.

Picking the Tanmatsu up and holding it, it’s a rectangular slab a bit larger and thicker than a CD case with that QWERTY keyboard and display on its front face, an array of ports including an SMA socket for a LoRA antenna on its sides, and an expansion connector on its rear. It has a sandwich construction, with a PCB front face, a 3D printed spacer, the PCB itself, and a 3D printed back cover all held together with a set of screws. The recesses on its bottom edge and the lower halves of the sides locate neatly with fingers and thumbs when it’s held in two hands for two-thumb typing. The keyboard is a silicone moulding as is common on this type of device, and while the keys are quite small it was not difficult to type on it. The display meanwhile feels of much higher quality than the SPI parts previously seen on badges. Continue reading “A Closer Look At The Tanmatsu” →

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Keyboard Configurator

February 3, 2025 by 11 Comments

Have you ever wished you could experiment with different layouts super easily, just by adding or removing a few switches here and there and printing a new case? Well, [heyisjambo] says that it’s more than possible with menura, the modular keyboard system.

A collage of menura keyboards, which are modular via the VIK standard.
So many lovely options! Image by [heyisjambo] via GitHub
[heyisjambo] is happy with 36 keys, but is reduced-count-curious and wanted a way to explore without a lot of wasted time and PCBs.

At the same time, [heyisjambo] wanted to experiment with split vs. uni-body construction, and especially the different shapes that are possible when tweaking the angle and distance between them.

And as if that weren’t enough, there’s support for [Sadek Baroudi]’s VIK standard for interfacing data between PCBs, which calls for an FPC 12-pin, 0.5 mm pitch connector and allows for ultra-cool magnetic connectors. This way, you can easily add things like displays, trackpads, and trackballs in the between the halves.

Thanks for the tip, [calculus]!

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Keyboard Configurator” →

Underwater Robotics Hack Chat

February 3, 2025 by 2 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, February 5 at noon Pacific for the Underwater Robotics Hack Chat with Tony White!

Almost anywhere you look, there’s a good chance you can see a robot at work. Whether they’re sweeping your floors, delivering a snack, building a car, or even driving one, robots are everywhere on this planet. And since over 70% of this planet is covered in water, it makes sense that robots should be there, too. Getting a robot to work underwater at all is one thing, but getting it to work underwater reliably can be quite a challenge. Water always finds a way to ruin your day, after all, and this reality only worsens when you add a little salt into the mix.

join-hack-chatTony White knows the marine engineering field well, having worked in the space for over a decade. He’s currently an applications engineer at Blue Robotics, where he’s worked on everything from full-size autonomous surface vessels to underwater swarm robots. He’s stopping by the Hack Chat to talk about the harsh engineering realities of underwater automation, so if you’ve ever wanted to take the plunge, you’ll want to come to this Hack Chat for sure.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, February 5 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

 

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Hackaday Links: February 2, 2025

February 2, 2025 by 8 Comments

All things considered, it was a very bad week for aviation here in the United States. Three separate crashes, two of which involved US military aircraft, have left over 70 people dead. We’ll spare you the details since there are plenty of other places to get news like that, but we did want to touch on one bright spot in this week’s aviation news: the first successful supersonic flight by a US-made civilian aircraft. There are a lot of caveats to that claim, but it’s clear that Boom Supersonic is on a path to commercializing supersonic air transportation for the first time since the Concorde was retired. Their XB-1 “Baby Boom” test aircraft managed three separate supersonic runs during the January 28 test flight over the Mojave test range. As usual, Scott Manley has excellent coverage of the test flight, including a look at how Boom used a Starlink terminal and an iPhone to stream cockpit video.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: February 2, 2025” →

This Week In Security: DeepSeek’s Oopsie, AI Tarpits, And Apple’s Leaks

January 31, 2025 by 8 Comments

DeepSeek has captured the world’s attention this week, with an unexpected release of the more-open AI model from China, for a reported mere $5 million training cost. While there’s lots of buzz about DeepSeek, here we’re interested in security. And DeepSeek has made waves there, in the form of a ClickHouse database unintentionally opened to the world, discovered by the folks from Wiz research. That database contained chat history and log streams, and API keys and other secrets by extension.

Finding this database wasn’t exactly rocket science — it reminds me of my biggest bug bounty win, which was little more than running a traceroute and a port scan. In this case it was domain and sub domain mapping, and a port scan. The trick here was knowing to try this, and then understanding what the open ports represented. And the ClickHouse database was completely accessible, leaking all sorts of sensitive data. Continue reading “This Week In Security: DeepSeek’s Oopsie, AI Tarpits, And Apple’s Leaks” →