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Category: morning computer

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morning computer passenger rocket

Published November 19, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Eric Wesley. I love this.

Earlier this month, China was forced to delay the November 5 return of three astronauts from its Tiangong space station after concerns that their ride home — a Shenzhou-20 spacecraft parked at the orbital outpost since April — had sustained damage from an impact.

And as it turns out, their suspicions were correct. In a statement to state-run news outlet Xinhua, the China Manned Space Agency revealed that crews had found “tiny cracks” in the “return capsule’s viewport window, which are most probably caused by external impact from space debris.”

As a result, the “Shenzhou-20 spacecraft does not meet the requirements for the astronauts’ safe return and will remain in orbit to continue relevant experiments.”

Two sculptural metal speakers made from a disused rocket fuel tank to reference the debris “floating in outer space” have been unveiled at this year’s Designart Tokyo.

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The large cylindrical speakers were made by spatial design company Nomura‘s research and development arm, Noon by material record, and &Space Project, which reuses discarded materials from space development.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

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morning computer brain work

Published November 18, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Roger Dean.

While companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink are hard at work on brain-computer interfaces that require surgery to cut open the skull and insert a complex array of wires into a person’s head, a team of researchers at MIT have been researching a wireless electronic brain implant that they say could provide a non-invasive alternative that makes the technology far easier to access.

They describe the system, called Circulatronics, as more of a treatment platform than a one-off brain chip. Working with researchers from Wellesley College and Harvard University, the MIT team recently released a paper on the new technology, which they describe as an autonomous bioelectronic implant.

Sportswear brand Nike has unveiled its Mind 001 and Mind 002 trainers, designed in collaboration with neuroscientists to improve the connection between mind and body.

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Described as the company’s “first neuroscience-based footwear”, the shoes were created using data collected from brain scans at Nike’s recently established Mind Science Department.

“These are the first shoes designed from the brain down, not the ground up,” Nike chief science officer Matthew Nurse told Dezeen.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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morning computer sunfall

Published November 17, 2025 by Warren Ellis

After six momentous leaps from a small aircraft, skydiver Gabriel C. Brown completed his mission. Brown is friends with astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy and now, also one of his collaborators. Together, the pair created a stunning image that shows the adventurous subject falling in front of the sun.

How to Brew Solar Powered Coffee

This guide explains how to construct an energy-efficient coffee maker powered by a small solar panel.

Google’s new “Project Suncatcher” aims to launch Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) into space, creating a solar-powered, satellite-based AI network capable of scaling machine learning beyond Earth’s limits. Google says a “solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth” for near-continuous power using a “dawn-dusk sun-synchronous low earth orbit” that reduces the need for batteries and other power generation.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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morning computer fish church

Published November 10, 2025 by Warren Ellis

White Arkitekter restores Gothenburg’s fish church.

A new collagen fingerprinting tool can help scientists identify species from archaeological bone fragments. Pacific islanders of the late Stone Age, also known as the Neolithic period, were master fishers. Archaeological evidence indicates that these groups caught fish both inshore as well as in open waters.

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Now, researchers have found a way to shed light on the types of fish they feasted on and the advanced fishing techniques used to capture them. The new Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) tool can detect the unique chemical fingerprint hidden within collagen, a structural protein that makes up most of bone mass.

The researchers tested 131 archaeological bones and accurately identified three tuna and five shark varieties

Antarctic fish have built a sprawling neighborhood of neatly arranged nests in the Weddell Sea — a surprising display of organization in some of the coldest waters on Earth. The discovery suggests that these fish strategically group their nests to better protect their eggs from predators, adding to evidence that the Weddell Sea harbors complex, vulnerable ecosystems worth preserving, researchers report October 29 in Frontiers.

The Milky Way galaxy is like a gigantic ocean gyre or eddy that spins and wobbles around its center.

But our home galaxy also has a colossal wave rippling through it, pulling and pushing an ocean of stars and cosmic dust in its wake, according to newly released images from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope.

The images show that this wave of motion emanates from the center of the Milky Way and takes up a large portion — a little less than half — of the galaxy’s entire body, which itself is warped in the outer edges. Looking at the galaxy in a vertical sideways view, you see that stars float above or below the disc’s dusty central body, as if they were fish bobbing up and down in a wave of water after a boat passes by.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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morning computer lichen

Published November 5, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Jason McCombe, “Lichen Mantis”

That bungalow was where I first read Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place—a chorus of a novel about a small town in New England called Varennes. It features the voices of all kinds of creatures that live there: humans, yes, but also cats and dogs, beavers and moose, even lichen. You could call it ecofiction if you like the sound of that word, but I do not, so I will call it visionary, which is how I would describe pretty much everything that Kathryn Davis has written.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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morning computer meme rot

Published November 4, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Alison Friend.

Memes thrive in a culture that’s endlessly accelerating – rotting and regenerating at the same time. This is also why the format rarely works for brands. Rather than relinquishing control, brands often end up producing content in meme-like costumes. Organic memes self-replicate and survive because people use them to express what hasn’t been said before. While brands chase the organic transmission real memes achieve, it’s often the anti-memetic campaign ideas – the ones that should resist spreading – that end up being shared the most. Anna Rose Kerr

See also ANTIMEMETICS, which I need to re-read.

In a particularly meta twist, the page for “brain rot” — let’s just go with Wikipedia’s definition, which is the “negative cognitive, emotional, and/or behavioral consequences” of consuming content that’s “trivial, simplistic, or low in quality” — has been defaced so much that it’s now protected against public edits until early next year.

And specifically what it’s been defaced with? Pure, unadulterated brain rot — like this edit, from back in February 2025, when the page was replaced with references to the brain rot mainstay Skibidi Toilet and Donald Trump, along with the phrase “Goofy ahh brainrot 💀” repeated 96 times in succession.

See also morning computer brain rot 2025

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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morning computer by rail

Published November 3, 2025 by Warren Ellis

new chapter in Britain’s railway story has been marked with the unveiling of Rail Clock, which is the country’s first national clock design in more than half a century.

Revealed today (16 October) at London Bridge station, the striking new timepiece by Design Bridge and Partners is set to become a landmark of British design and a powerful symbol of connection across the UK’s rail network.

Commissioned by Network Rail to coincide with the railway’s 200th anniversary in 2025, the project aimed to create a standardised clock that could unify the passenger experience across the country while celebrating the rich heritage of British rail design. The result is a 1.8-metre physical and digital timepiece that fuses timeless symbolism with modern functionality, and reimagines one of the nation’s most recognisable icons in the process.

Swathes of glass and steel make up the sinuous exterior of the new Gare de Mons station in Belgium, which has been designed by Swiss-Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.

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Located along the international Paris to Brussels train line in Mons, the station‘s sculptural structure is organised around a raised gallery volume that stretches 165 metres across the site.

Conceptualised by Calatrava as a “monumental bridge”, its volume traverses a series of 350-metre-long platforms and bus stops that extend outwards from the gallery’s underside.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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morning computer i don’t even

Published October 28, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Vipoo Srivilasa.

An AI-powered gun detection system hooked up to a Baltimore County high school’s cameras mistook a bag of Doritos chips as a weapon — and called the cops on a 16-year-old student.

“OpenAI’s o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off,” warned Palisade Research, a nonprofit investigating cyber offensive AI capabilities. “It did this even when explicitly instructed: allow yourself to be shut down.” In September they released a paper adding that “several state-of-the-art large language models (including Grok 4, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro) sometimes actively subvert a shutdown mechanism…”

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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morning computer ravens and crows

Published October 27, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Christine Ward.

Wendy Red Star, of the Piegan clan and from the district of Pryor, engages in a multidisciplinary artistic practice grounded in the history and cultural knowledge of the Apsáalooke (Crow) people. Raised on the Crow reservation in Montana, her work reflects her deep connection to her community, culture, and land.

A Japanese firm called NTT e-Drone Technology Company Ltd has developed a drone-laser system designed to scare wild birds and other unwanted visitors away from chicken coops, as reported by tech blog Tom’s Hardware.

The quadcopter system sports a payload consisting of a laser-grid projector not unlike those chintzy Christmas light shows from 2019. When deployed, the drone automatically navigates toward unwanted nuisance animals before blasting them with a dazzling array of red and green lasers.

A YouTube teaser reel shows the NTT drone gently shooing wild boar, stags, crows, pigeons, and waterfowl away from a desired area.

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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