ZSNES developed rapidly (alongside the contemporary, competing Snes9x project) throughout the late ’90s and early 2000s. Updates slowed after the original creators left the project, and new releases ceased entirely around 2007.

But a successor to ZSNES has arrived. The project's original creators (who go by the handles zsKnight and _Demo_) have returned 19 years later with a new follow-up project called "Super ZSNES," an SNES emulator that emphasizes audio-visual upgrades to those aging ’90s-era Super Nintendo games. The only more surprising emulator news would be if NESticle somehow rose from the dead.

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The Chinese government formally asked Meta to unwind the acquisition on April 27 after deciding to ban foreign investment in Manus based on national security concerns. It had already spent months officially scrutinizing Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of Manus that took place in December 2025—Chinese regulators announced they were reviewing the deal in January 2026 and instructed the two Manus cofounders to not leave China while the investigation was ongoing, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Manus burst onto the scene in March 2025 with its “general AI agent,” designed to help users with tasks such as searching real estate sites for a new home or booking airline tickets and hotels for an international trip. The Manus AI agent is an “agentic wrapper” or “agentic harness” that enables an underlying AI model—in this case, Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet—to take actions to carry out user requests. But Manus actually incorporates multiple AI agents to perform and verify tasks, including a planner agent that assigns tasks and an executor agent that can browse and interact with websites, create spreadsheets, use various software tools, and even code new applications.

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Scientists have long sought to find logical explanations for alleged hauntings. In 2003, for instance, University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman conducted two studies that investigated the psychological mechanisms underlying supposed "ghostly" activity. Subjects walked around Hampton Court Palace in Surrey, England, and the South Bridge Vaults in Edinburgh, Scotland—both with reputations for manifesting unusual phenomena—and reported back on which places at those sites they sensed such phenomena. The subjects reported more odd experiences in places rumored to be haunted, regardless of whether the subjects were aware of those rumors or not.

Those areas did, however, feature variances in local magnetic fields, humidity, and lighting levels, suggesting that such sensations are simply people responding to normal environmental factors. Wiseman hypothesized that stronger magnetic fields may affect the brain, similar to how electrical stimulation of the angular gyrus can make one feel as if there is another person standing behind, mimicking one's movements.

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Valve's upcoming Steam Controller (not to be confused with the 2015 controller of the same name) is the Steam maker's effort to replace those controllers with something more explicitly designed for the PC, and for the upcoming Steam Machine. After spending a few weeks with the controller, though, we're not quite sure it sets itself apart from the competition enough to justify its high $99 asking price.

Baseline quality

From the first time you hold a Steam Controller in your hands, it's clear that this is a well-made piece of hardware. There's a sturdy build quality to all the pieces that makes the controller feel solid in the hand, with just enough heft to feel substantial without being too heavy.

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The administration has provided no explanation for purging the board, which helps steer the National Science Foundation and acts as an independent advisory body for the president and Congress on scientific and engineering issues, providing reports throughout the year. The ousters represent another severe blow to the NSF and the overall scientific enterprise in America.

Members received a two-sentence email saying that, "On behalf of President Donald J. Trump," their positions were "terminated, effective immediately."

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Their projections suggest the tropical Pacific is simmering toward a strong El Niño, the warm phase of an ocean-atmosphere cycle that can intensify and shift those impacts.

In a world already superheated by greenhouse gases, a strong El Niño during the next 12 to 18 months could permanently push the planet’s average annual temperature past the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold enshrined in scientific documents and political agreements as a turning point for potentially irreversible climate impacts.

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The immediate response to these comments on Wednesday before a House committee from some space industry observers was doubt—Isaacman, they said, must be lying.

However, the primary contractor for the Habitation and Logistics Outpost, Northrop Grumman, soon acknowledged there was a manufacturing irregularity. On Friday, the European Space Agency, providing the other habitation module (I-HAB), acknowledged that there had been "corrosion" observed.

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Legacy players who spoke to Ars Technica described pre-purchasing thousands of dollars' worth of NFTs, in some cases, to buy into the crypto-fueled vision offered by Molyneux, his development studio 22cans, and publisher Gala Games. Those players said the Legacy they got was a pale shadow of what was promised, with a broken-by-design economic system that caused players to abandon the game en masse within a couple of weeks of its 2023 launch.

Despite the game's almost total failure as a going concern, though, Legacy rode the crest of the crypto hype wave to pre-sold economic success that Molyneux said “[gave] us the money to fund Masters of Albion," in a 2024 interview. "That's what we used the majority of the money for…”

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Paramount+ unveiled a new teaser for the upcoming fourth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds at CCXP in Mexico City over the weekend.

(Some spoilers for prior seasons below.)

The third season of Strange New Worlds was admittedly a bit uneven, with serious plot lines mixed in with some downright silly ones that divided fans. Arguably the most significant moment was bidding farewell to Melanie Scrofano's Marie Batel, Pike's (Anson Mount) love interest. Her parting gift to Pike: an illusory alternate life where she and Pike got to grow old together. So expect Pike to be dealing with her loss in the upcoming season, among other challenges.

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If your spider-sense is tingling, perhaps it's because Prime Video released the official full trailer for its upcoming live action series, Spider-Noir, at CCXPMX26 in Mexico City over the weekend. As it did with the first teaser back in February, the streaming platform released the trailer in two formats: one in black and white (above)—very Raymond Chandler-esque—and another in color (below), which the showrunners are calling “True Hue.”

As previously reported, Marvel Comics created its “noir” line in 2009, reinterpreting familiar Marvel characters in an alternate universe, usually set during the Great Depression in the US. A version of the Spider-Noir character, voiced by Cage, briefly appeared in the animated masterpieces Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Across the Spider-Verse (2023). (He is set to reprise that role in the upcoming Beyond the Spider-Verse.)

Co-showrunner (with Steve Lightfoot) Oren Uziel is a film noir fan, so that Marvel series naturally appealed to him. The live-action series is still set in 1930s New York, but the spidery superhero is not Peter Parker. (Uziel thought the Parker character was too associated with a boyish high school type, which didn’t really fit the noir vibe.) So Cage is playing Ben Reilly, a hard-boiled PI with a secret superhero identity, The Spider. Per the official premise: “Spider-Noir tells the story of Ben Reilly (Nicolas Cage), a seasoned, down on his luck private investigator in 1930s New York, who is forced to grapple with his past life, following a deeply personal tragedy, as the city’s one and only superhero.”

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To fix that, a team of researchers at the Swiss École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has developed what they call Kinematic Intelligence, a framework that makes switching robots work more like switching smartphones. They describe their system in a recent Science Robotics paper.

Demonstrating skills

For years, roboticists have been working on getting robots to learn from demonstration—teaching them new skills by showing them what to do, rather than writing lines of code. The idea is to remotely control or physically guide the robot's arm to teach it a task like wiping a table, stacking boxes, or welding a car component. The problem is that most of these taught skills end up tied to the specific robot the training was done with.

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There are five men still alive who flew to the Moon on NASA's Apollo missions. All are now in their 90s. Between 1968 and 1972, 24 astronauts visited the Moon, and 12 of them walked on its surface. We'll have to wait a little longer to add to the roster of Moonwalkers, but there are four new names to etch on the list of lunar explorers.

The Artemis II astronauts, all in their 40s or 50s, flew a little more than 4,000 miles from the Moon, higher above the surface than the Apollo lunar missions. The four-person crew on Artemis II set a new record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth: 252,756 miles (406,771 kilometers).

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Around that time, two former employees reconnected by phone. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?”

“That was their greeting,” the other former employee says. “There’s this feeling not of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and hard,’ but ‘This feels wrong.’”

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The roster of Golden Dome Space-Based Interceptor (SBI) contractors, some of which were previously reported, includes Anduril Industries, Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics Mission Systems, GITAI USA, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Quindar, Raytheon, Sci-Tec, SpaceX, True Anomaly, and Turion Space.

The Space Force made 20 individual awards to the 12 companies in late 2025 and early 2026 using an acquisition mechanism known as Other Transaction Authority, or OTA, agreements. OTAs allow the Pentagon to bypass federal acquisition regulations and cast a wide net to attract a larger number of potential contractors and are especially useful for rapid prototyping. That is exactly what the Space Force wants to see with the first phase of the SBI program.

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The investment follows Amazon's $5 billion initial investment in Anthropic a few days ago; the Amazon deal also leaves the door open to further investment based on performance. Both investments value Anthropic at $350 billion.

Anthropic has seen rapid growth in the use of its Claude models and related products, such as Claude Code, which promises to significantly increase the speed and efficiency with which companies or individuals can develop software. (The reality varies from big improvements to setbacks, depending on the nature of the project and company, how Claude Code is used, and many other factors.)

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This week, the European Commission authorized Moderna to market the vaccine, mRNA-1083 or mCOMBRIAX, making it the world's first authorized combination shot for the two respiratory viruses. The decision follows a positive review in February from a key European Medicines Agency's committee, which paved the way for the approval.

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel welcomed the news. "By combining protection against two significant respiratory viruses in a single dose, our vaccine aims to simplify immunization for adults, particularly those at high risk," Bancel said in a press release. "mCOMBRIAX offers an important new option for Europeans, while also aiming to strengthen the resilience of healthcare systems across Europe."

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The FCC added a new section to an FAQ titled, "Is my device a consumer-grade router under the National Security Determination?" The new FAQ section says this category includes "consumer-grade portable or mobile MiFi Wi-Fi or hotspot devices for residential use." The ban does not cover "mobile phones with hotspot features," the FAQ says.

This means that companies making consumer hotspots need an exemption from the government to import and sell any future hotspots that haven't previously been approved by the FCC. As with routers, devices previously approved for sale in the US can continue to be imported and sold without obtaining a special exemption.

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The sites included berkeley.edu, columbia.edu, and washu.edu, the official domains for the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and Washington University in St. Louis. Subdomains such as hXXps://causal.stat.berkeley.edu/ymy/video/xxx-porn-girl-and-boy-ej5210.html, hXXps://conversion-dev.svc.cul.columbia[.]edu/brazzers-gym-porn, and hXXps://provost.washu.edu/app/uploads/formidable/6/dmkcsex-10.pdf. All deliver explicit pornography and, in at least one case, a scam site falsely claiming a visitor’s computer is infected and advising the visitor to pay a fee for the non-existent malware to be removed. In all, researcher Alex Shakhov said, hundreds of subdomains for at least 34 universities are being abused. Search results returned by Google list thousands of hijacked pages.

Hijacking a university's good name

Shakhov, founder of SH Consulting, said that the scammers—which a separate researcher has linked to a known group tracked as Hazy Hawk—are seizing on what amounts to a clerical error by site administrators of the affected universities. When they commission a subdomain such as provost.washu.edu, they create a CNAME record, which assignes a subdomain to a "canonical" domain. When the subdomain is eventually decommissioned—something that happens frequently for various reasons—the record is never removed. Scammers like Hazy Hawk then swoop in by hijacking the old record.

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For one 15-year-old in Nepal, the misery continued long after the blisters burst. After some of her crusty scabs began to form scars, they mushroomed into large, uncontrolled skin growths, which were also painful and itchy—and permanent. One on her chest, the largest, measured 4 by 4 cm (about 1.6 by 1.6 inches).

These rubbery, firm nodules are called keloids, which are poorly understood skin growths that result from wound healing that goes awry and expands beyond the borders of the original wound. In the teen's case, five large keloids abruptly burst from her chickenpox scars, breaking out in different places on her body—on her right jaw, chest, abdomen, and right flank. The simultaneous emergence of the growths aligns with the diagnosis of "eruptive keloids," an ultra-rare outcome of a chickenpox infection. Only five such cases appear to exist in the scientific literature. Her case, marking the sixth, was published this week in the journal Clinical Case Reports.

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Army soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke made a profit of nearly $410,000 by making bets on Polymarket, and he was indicted on charges of unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction, the Department of Justice announced yesterday.

"As alleged in the indictment, Van Dyke participated in the planning and execution of the US military operation to capture Nicolás Maduro, called 'Operation Absolute Resolve,' and Van Dyke used his access to classified information about that operation to personally profit," the DOJ said.

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