Last month, we passed along Modern Vintage Gamer's (MVG) confident assertion that Doom is functionally impossible to run on the Neo Geo , owing to the console's sprite-based display hardware and lack of a frame buffer. We all should have known better than to tell a dedicated group of hackers that something is "impossible," though, as two recent projects have made great progress toward functional Doom ports on stock Neo Geo hardware.

Both of these projects have significant graphical compromises that limit how viable they would have been for a marketable, '90s-era console port, as MVG lays out in a new video . Still, they stand as a testament to the surprising results that clever, determined coders can coax out of legacy hardware.

It looks like Doom if you squint

To create the Doom64KB project for the Neo Geo, coder FrenkelS adapted an earlier Doom port they designed to run on 16-bit PC processors like the 8088 and 286. Using that engine, the Neo Geo code then makes a kind of proto-frame-buffer out of the console's fix layer , an area of display memory that's usually used to display menus and HUD information on top of gameplay.

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NASA breathed a deep sigh of relief six years ago when SpaceX launched two astronauts, Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, on a successful mission to the International Space Station. With the safe landing of Crew Dragon, the US space agency broke a nearly decade-long gap in its ability to put humans into orbit.

Through its Commercial Crew program and multibillion-dollar contracts awarded in 2014, NASA had hoped to foster two providers of low-Earth orbit transportation, SpaceX and Boeing. However Boeing has yet to complete a successful crewed test flight—a perilous 2024 test flight by Boeing's Starliner was later declared a Type A mishap —and probably won't fly another crewed mission before 2028.

With the International Space Station slated for retirement in the early 2030s, NASA is partnering with several US companies to develop private space stations. As part of that effort, the private companies will have to work with NASA to determine how they will transport astronauts to and from their space stations, some of which could launch as soon as 2030.

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Prompt injections, the malicious commands attackers embed into content to entice large language models to follow them, have been attackers’ go-to tool for turning AI platforms against their users. A well-phrased command sneaked into an email or calendar invitation is often all it takes to cause the LLM to exfiltrate sensitive data or follow other harmful actions.

Now, defenders are embracing the prompt injection, too.

A strong, sharp effect

Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking agents. The prompts direct the attacking LLM to perform an action forbidden by its guardrails, the safety barriers AI developers erect to prevent it from taking harmful actions. The LLM responds by shutting down.

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Over the past few years, many of us have gotten a crash course in what we now call artificial intelligence—but really, it has mostly been a crash course in large language models. Increasingly, however, LLMs are no longer the only category of AI drawing high expectations, massive funding rounds, and significant research and product development.

Over the past year, we've seen a plethora of new announcements in a category labeled "world models," and you'll likely see more movement there in the coming months and years.

Instead of or in addition to working with language, world models aim to lay the groundwork for AI systems that are capable of simulating the physical world, or at least a useful approximation of it.

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The same question drives both the plot of Moana and decades of archaeological research: Why, after centuries of relative stability, did Polynesian voyagers suddenly begin settling islands thousands of kilometers away across the Pacific?

The latest Moana movie is a live-action adaptation of a Disney animated movie of the same name. While the films are fictional, they draw inspiration from the rich seafaring heritage of Polynesian peoples, whose ancestors undertook one of the greatest episodes of maritime exploration in human history.

New climate evidence may help us understand why they embarked on these voyages.

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WD 1856 b is the only confirmed case of a planet that survived the death of a Sun-like star. It’s a Jupiter-size world orbiting a white dwarf—the burned-out remnant of a Sun-like star. Now, a team of astronomers has used the James Webb Space Telescope to take a closer look at this planet for the first time, and what they found makes an already strange system even stranger.

A feeding frenzy

WD 1856 b was an accidental discovery. Astronomers pointed the TESS observatory at a sample of roughly 2,000 white dwarfs in 2020. These stars are the remains of a Sun-like star that have already gone through a red-giant phase, leaving behind an Earth-size body that’s primarily composed of elements like carbon and oxygen. The TESS team was searching for small objects like comets or asteroids that might transit across the face of these dead stars.

What they found in the WD 1856 system was a gas giant. “As soon as they looked at it, they said, okay, that’s weird,” said Christopher O’Connor, a theoretical astrophysicist at Cornell University and co-author of the recent Nature study on WD 1856 b.

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The federal government is rewriting its rules governing ranching on public lands to increase the number of cattle, sheep, and other livestock grazing on 155 million acres in the West, an area twice the size of New Mexico.

Public lands grazing is overseen by a nearly century-old system that heavily subsidizes some of the wealthiest Americans while doing little to address its harms to the environment, ProPublica and High Country News found last year.

Even though rangeland management experts say overgrazing has degraded public lands, the new rules being drafted by the US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management—the first overhaul since 1995—would instead expand the practice.

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There are some obvious big picture issues that stand between us and useful quantum computing. Issues like whether we can make enough high-quality hardware qubits to connect into the error-corrected logical qubits we need, and how we generate the states needed to perform universal computation on those logical qubits. But there are also many less prominent challenges that will need to be solved before we can perform calculations.

One of those challenges, which only affects some types of hardware, is calibration. For devices we manufacture, like superconducting qubits, there are always subtle variations among individual qubits. (This is not true when we use something like an atom to hold the qubit, but the lasers that control them can drift.) As a result, this hardware is put through a process called calibration, where we test different frequencies and amplitudes of the microwave pulses that control them to find the combination that produces the lowest error rates, and then save those settings for use in calculations.

However, you can't perform the typical calibration process while e you're doing calculations, which means drift becomes an issue for long and complicated algorithms. Google, though, has figured out that it's possible to do calibration using the same data that's used for error correction.

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More cities and towns deployed drones to spot illegal fireworks during the Fourth of July celebrations commemorating America’s 250th anniversary—leading to a $100,000 fine in one instance and coming as part of a broader national trend of first responders turning to drone surveillance.

Police and fire departments have described using both increased drone surveillance and steep fines to deter people from shooting off illegal fireworks, with many departments publicizing their drone videos on social media and warning that their drones will be watching in the future. Incidents involving illegal fireworks have led to costly fires , injuries, and even multiple deaths each year, along with creating local air and noise pollution for residential neighborhoods.

This year, the $100,000 fine for illegal fireworks came from the Sacramento Fire Department in Northern California deploying its own drones for the first time on the Fourth of July, according to CBS News Sacramento . Sacramento Fire Captain Justin Sylvia described the fire department’s drones as being capable of recording scenes in high-resolution video to help investigators identify the house or closest location using Google Maps.

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