China played host to what, presumably, was the world’s first robot and human half-marathon. You can check out the action and the Tiangong Ultra robot that won in the video below. The event took place in Beijing and spanned 21.1 km. There was, however, a barrier between lanes for humans and machines.
The human rules were the same as you’d expect, but the robots did need a few concessions, such as battery swap stops. The winning ‘bot crossed the finish line in just over 160 minutes. However, there were awards for endurance, gait design, and design innovation.
Entry-level oscilloscopes are a great way to get some low-cost instrumentation on a test bench, whether it’s for a garage lab or a schoolroom. But the cheapest ones are often cheap for a reason, and even though they work well for the price they won’t stand up to more advanced equipment. But missing features don’t have to stay missing forever, as it’s possible to augment them to get some of these features. [Tommy’s] project shows you one way to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, at least as it relates to oscilloscopes.
Most of the problem with these lower-cost tools is their low precision due to fewer bits of analog-digital conversion. They also tend to be quite noisy, further lowering the quality of the oscilloscope. [Tommy] is focusing his efforts on the DSO138-mini, an oscilloscope with a bandwidth of 100 kHz and an effective resolution of 10 bits. The first step is to add an anti-aliasing filter to the input, which is essentially a low-pass filter that removes high frequency components of the signal, which could cause a problem due to the lower resolution of the device. After that, digital post-processing is done on the output, which removes noise caused by the system’s power supply, among other things, and essentially acts as a second low-pass filter.
Although uranium-235 is the typical fuel for commercial fission reactors on account of it being fissile, it’s relatively rare relative to the fertile U-238 and thorium (Th-232). Using either of these fertile isotopes to breed new fuel from is thus an attractive proposition. Despite this, only India and China have a strong focus on using Th-232 for reactors, the former using breeders (Th-232 to U-233) to create fertile uranium fuel. China has demonstrated its approach — including refueling a live reactor — using a fourth-generation molten salt reactor.
The sky is falling. Or more specifically, it was about to fall, according to the security community this week. The MITRE Corporation came within a hair’s breadth of running out of its contract to maintain the CVE database. And admittedly, it would be a bad thing if we suddenly lost updates to the central CVE database. What’s particularly interesting is how we knew about this possibility at all. An April 15 letter sent to the CVE board warned that the specific contract that funds MITRE’s CVE and CWE work was due to expire on the 16th. This was not an official release, and it’s not clear exactly how this document was leaked.
Many people made political hay out of the apparent imminent carnage. And while there’s always an element of political maneuvering when it comes to contract renewal, it’s worth noting that it’s not unheard of for MITRE’s CVE funding to go down to the wire like this. We don’t know how many times we’ve been in this position in years past. Regardless, MITRE has spun out another non-profit, The CVE Foundation, specifically to see to the continuation of the CVE database. And at the last possible moment, CISA has announced that it has invoked an option in the existing contract, funding MITRE’s CVE work for another 11 months.
Spectroscopy seems simple: split a beam of light into its constituent wavelengths with a prism or diffraction grating, and measure the intensity of each wavelength. The devil is in the details, though, and what looks simple is often much harder to pull of in practice. You’ll find lots of details in [Gary Boyd]’s write-up of his optical scanning spectrometer project, but no devils.
Schematic diagram of [Gary Boyd]’s Czerny-Turner type scanning spectrometer.A scanning spectrometer is opposed to the more usual camera-type spectrometer we see on these pages in that it uses a single-pixel sensor that sweeps across the spectrum, rather than spreading the spectrum across an imaging sensor.
Specifically, [Gary] has implemented a Czerny-Turner type spectrometer, which is a two-mirror design. The first concave mirror collimates the light coming into the spectrometer from its entrance slit, focusing it on a reflective diffraction grating. The second concave mirror focuses the various rays of light split by the diffraction grating onto the detector.
In this case [Gary] uses a cheap VEML 7700 ambient light sensor mounted to a small linear stage from amazon to achieve a very respectable 1 nm resolution in the range from 360 nm to 980 nm. That’s better than the human eye, so nothing to sneeze at — but [Gary] includes some ideas in his blog post to extend that even further. The whole device is controlled via an Arduino Uno that streams data to [Gary]’s PC.
[Gary] documents everything very well, from his optical mounts to the Arduino code used to drive the stepper motor and take measurements from the VEML 7700 sensor. The LED and laser “turrets” used in calibration are great designs as well. He also shares the spectra this device is capable of capturing– everything from the blackbody of a tungsten lamp used in calibration, to a cuvette of tea, to the sun itself as you can see here. If you have a couple minutes, [Gary]’s full writeup is absolutely worth a read.
GPS and similar satellite navigation systems revolutionized how you keep track of where you are and what time it is. However, it isn’t without its problems. For one, it generally doesn’t work very well indoors or in certain geographic or weather scenarios. It can be spoofed. Presumably, a real or virtual attack could take the whole system down.
Addressing these problems is a new system called Broadcast Positioning System (BPS). It uses upgraded ATSC 3.0 digital TV transmitters to send exact time information from commercial broadcast stations. With one signal, you can tell what time it is within 100 ns 95% of the time. If you can hear four towers, you can not only tell the time, but also estimate your position within about 100 m.
The whole thing is new — we’ve read that there are only six transmitters currently sending such data. However, you can get a good overview from these slides from the National Association of Broadcasters. They point out that the system works well indoors and can work with GPS, help detect if GPS is wrong, and stand in for GPS if it were to go down suddenly.
AI continues to be used in new and exciting ways… like generating spam messages. Yes, it was inevitable, but we now have spammers using LLM to generate unique messages that don’t register as spam. AkiraBot is a Python-powered tool, designed to evade CAPTCHAs, and post sketchy SEO advertisements to web forms and chat boxes around the Internet.
AkiraBot uses a bunch of techniques to look like a legitimate browser, trying to avoid triggering CAPTCHAs. It also runs traffic through a SmartProxy service to spread the apparent source IP around. Some captured logs indicate that of over 400,000 attempted victim sites, 80,000 have successfully been spammed.
![Schematic diagram of [Gary Boyd]'s spectrometer, showing optical elements and rays of light as well as major physical elements like the motor and linear stage.](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-13-at-11-34-30-The-Scanning-Spectrometer-Project.png?w=400)
