The Slug Algorithm has been around for a decade now, mostly quietly rendering fonts and later entire GUIs using Bézier curves directly on the GPU for games and other types of software, but due to its proprietary nature it didn’t see much adoption outside of commercial settings. This has now changed with its author, [Eric Lengyel], releasing it to the public domain without any limitations.
Originally [Eric] had received a software patent in 2019 for the algorithm that would have prevented anyone else from implementing it until the patent’s expiration in 2038. Since 2016 [Eric] and his business have however had in his eyes sufficient benefit from the patent, making it unnecessary to hold on to it any longer and retain such exclusivity.
To help anyone with implementing their own version of the algorithm, there is a GitHub repository containing reference shader implementations with plenty of inline comments that should help anyone with some shader experience get started.
Although pretty niche in the eyes of the average person, the benefits of using on-GPU rendering of elements like fonts are obvious in terms of rendering optimization. With this change open source rendering engines for games and more can finally also use it as well.
Sunday night, around 7:00 PM local time, a bright fireball streaked across the western German sky, exploded, and rained chunks of space rock down on the region around Koblenz. One of the largest known chunks put a soccer-ball-sized hole in someone’s roof, landing in their bedroom. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. But given the apparent size of the explosion, there must be many more pieces out there for the finding, and a wave of hopeful meteorite hunters has descended upon the region.
But if you wanted a piece of the action, where exactly would you start looking? How do scientists find meteorites anyway? And what should you do if you happen to see a similar fireball in the night sky?
Citizen Science
Meteorite video-bombs a boring parking lot in Heerlen, NL.
In the age of always-on dashboard cameras, ubiquitous smartphones, and other video recording devices, it’s hard for a shy meteorite to find a quiet spot out of the public eye. That makes them a lot easier to find than they were in the past. Indeed, the International Meteor Organization, which aggregates amateur meteor observations, received more than 3,200 reports of this one, including several with video documentation. Some are stunning, and others may not even be of the event at all.
By collecting reports from many locations, they can hope to piece together the meteorite’s trajectory. However, if you look at the individual reports, it’s clear that this is a difficult task. Nobody is expecting a bright fireball to streak across the night sky, so many of the reports are reasonably vague on the details and heavy on the awe.
You’ve got to be ambitious to target a legend. If there’s one thing the folks at Hermeus Aerospace are, though, it’s ambitious: not only do they plan on their Quarterhorse unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to outfly the SR-71 blackbird, they’re hoping to do it in record time. They took one big step closer to that goal in March 2026, when Quarterhorse 2.1 took off for the first time from Spaceport America.
The F-16-sized prototype is actually the second first flight Hermeus can brag of in the past year– version one first flew in May 2025. They’re iterating fast. Version 2.1 is hoped to prove a key part of the engine design for v2.2, which is the plane Humerus hopes to use to break the SR-71’s air-breathing speed record of Mach 3.3 from 1976. They’re hoping the next prototype can actually hit mach 5, which would be amazing if they pulled it off. Of course when exactly v2.2 will fly will depend largely on how this current model does in its test envelope.
This Quarterhorse hasn’t yet broken the sound barrier, but it certainly will. With the same F100 engine as the F-15 and F-16 fighters, it’s got the thrust, and one look tells you it has the aerodynamics. Of course an F100 can’t fly at Mach 5 — not on its own — but the F100 isn’t purely stock. It’s actually a component in Hermeus’ Chimera engine, which combines the F100 with a pre-chiller to actively cool the incoming supersonic air so the engine doesn’t melt at high speeds, and a ramjet stage that bypasses the engine entirely. That would make the Chimera a turboramjet engine; starting with an old and well-known turbine stage seems like a good move and is arguably a hack.
It would work like this: the engine takes off on turbine, the chiller kicks in when the aircraft goes supersonic, and the turbine is bypassed completely at high mach. This is how they hope to break the SR-71’s record: as well-designed as the J-58 engine was in that plane, it only pushed bleed air into the afterburner, rather than bypassing its turbine stage entirely, so was limited by the need to not melt said turbines. In some ways, the Chimera reminds us of a cheaper, simpler SABER engine. Of course as ambitious as breaking a 50 year old speed record might be, Hermeus’ goals are downright humble compared to the single-stage-to-orbit dreams the SABRE was meant to allow.
It remains to be seen just how fast Quarterhorse 2.1 will be able to go. Notably, at least as it was first unveiled, the aircraft doesn’t have any kind of shock cone on the inlet. It’s unlikely that the pre-chiller makes that unnecessary; it is more likely that either 2.1 is going to be restricted to low mach numbers where such things aren’t necessary, or it will be fitted later. Either way, we look forward to following the test program, at least as much as it is made public. Check out footage from the test flight in the video embedded below.
Last year California’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) was signed into law, requiring among other things that operating system providers implement an API for age verification purposes. With the implementation date of January 1, 2027 slowly encroaching this now has people understandably agitated. So what are the requirements, and what will its impact be, as it affects not only OS developers but also application stores and developers?
The required features for OS developers include an interface at account setup during which the person indicates which of the four age brackets they fit into. This age category then has to be used by application developers and application stores to filter access to the software. Penalties for non-compliance go up to $2,500 per affected child if the cause is neglect and up to $7,500 if the violation was intentional.
As noted in the Tom’s Hardware article, CA governor Newsom issued a statement when signing the unanimously passed bill, saying that he hopes the bill gets amended due to how problematic it would be to implement and unintended effects. Of course, the bigger question is whether this change requires more than adding a few input fields and checkboxes to an OS’ account setup and an API call or two.
2000 m above ground level (AGL), winds are stronger and much, much more consistent than they are at surface. Even if the Earth were a perfect sphere, there’d be a sluggish boundry layer at the surface, but since it’s got all these interesting bumps and bits and bobs, it’s not just sluggish but horribly turbulent, too. Getting above that, as much as possible, is why wind turbines are on big towers. Rather than build really big tower, Beijing Lanyi Yunchuan Energy Technology Co. has gone for a more ambitious approach: an aerostat to take power from the steady winds found at high altitude. Ambitiously called the Stratosphere Airborne Wind Energy System (SAWES), the megawatt-scale prototype has recently begun feeding into the grid in Yibin, Sichuan Province.
The name might be a bit ambitious, since its 2000 m test flight is only one tenth of the way to the stratosphere, but Yibin isn’t a bad choice for testing: as it is well inland, the S2000 prototype won’t have to contend with typhoons or other ocean storms. The prototype is arguably as ambitious as the name: its 12 flying turbines have a peak capacity of three megawatts. True, there are larger turbines in wind farms right now, but at 60 m in length and 40 m in diameter, the S2000 has a lot of room to grow before hitting any kind of limit or even record for aerostats. We’re particularly interested in the double-hull construction– it would seem the ring of the outer gas bag would do a good job funneling and accelerating air into those turbines, but we’d love to see some wind tunnel testing or even CFD renderings of what’s going on in there.
A rear view shows the 12 turbines inside the double hull. It should guide air into the gap, but we wonder how much turbulence the trusses in there are making.
During its first test flight in January 2026, the system generated generated 385 kilowatt-hours of electricity over the course of 30 minutes. That means it averaged about 25% capacity for the test, which is a good safe start. Doubtless the engineers have a full suite of test flights planned to demonstrate the endurance and power production capabilities of this prototype. Longer flights at higher capacity may have already happened by the time you read this.
Flying wind turbines isn’t a new idea by any means; a few years ago we featured this homemade kite generator, and the pros have been in on it too. Using helium instead represents an interesting design choice–on the plus side, its probably easier to control, and obviously allowing large structures, but the downside is the added cost of the gas. It will be interesting to see how it develops.
While you may have never heard of TAT-8, there is a good chance you sent some data through it. TAT-8 was the 8th transatlantic communications cable and the first transatlantic fiber-optic cable, carrying 560 Mbit/s on two fibers between Tuckerton, New Jersey, and, thanks to an underwater splitting device, Widemouth Bay, England, and Penmarch, France. Construction of the cable began in 1998. Later that year, the first call, made by [Issac Asimov] took place. The cable was retired in 2002. Now, Subsea Environmental Services is recovering the cable for recycling.
The 6,000 km cable was built by a consortium of companies including AT&T, France Télécom, and British Telecom. The 1.3 micron fiber used special optical repeaters about 40 km apart and cost about $335 million (just shy of a billion dollars today). Designers were optimistic, with some claiming the cable would end the need for future cables or, at least, that the cable would not reach capacity for ten years or more. In reality, the cable was saturated within 18 months. Turns out, the equivalent of 40,000 phone lines wasn’t enough.
One of the issues with nuclear power plants is that they produce long-lived radioactive waste. Storing spent nuclear fuel is a real problem. However, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility have made strides not only to produce more electricity from spent fuel but also to break it down into shorter-lived nuclear waste. [Aman Tripathi] shares the details about NEWTON, a program to fire high-energy protons at a target to produce a flood of neutrons that can interact with nuclear waste. You can read the original press release, too.
Short-lived, of course, is a relative term. Unprocessed spent fuel may be dangerous for about 100,000 years. After the proposed processing, the danger period is down to “only” 300 years. On the plus side, the process generates a lot of heat, which you can convert to electricity in the usual way.
