{"id":462839,"date":"2026-02-09T01:37:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-09T01:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/462839\/"},"modified":"2026-02-09T01:37:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T01:37:08","slug":"hackaday-links-february-8-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/462839\/","title":{"rendered":"Hackaday Links: February 8, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

We start this week with a bit of a good news\/bad news situation. On February 6th, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)<\/a> was shut down\u00a0after 25 years of operation<\/a>. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, the RHIC was the only operating particle collider in the United States, and along with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was one of only two heavy-ion colliders in existence.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s the bad news. The good news is that the RHIC is going dark so that the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC)<\/a> can take its place. Planned for activation in the mid-2030s, the EIC will occupy the same tunnel as the RHIC and reuse much of the same hardware. As the name implies, it will be used to collide electrons.<\/p>\n

Switching gears (no pun intended) to the world of self-driving cars, Waymo\u2019s chief safety officer, Dr. Mauricio Pe\u00f1a, made a surprising admission this week during a U.S. Senate hearing<\/a>. When asked what his company\u2019s vehicles do when they are presented with a situation that their on-board systems can\u2019t resolve, Dr. Pe\u00f1a explained that they would contact a human \u201cremote assistance operator.\u201d He further clarified that these individuals, located both in the US and the Philippines, don\u2019t literally drive the car remotely. Still, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts questioned not only the company\u2019s transparency on the issue of remote assistance, but the idea that individuals overseas could be making decisions on how vehicles should operate on US roadways.<\/p>\n

While on the subject of a hyped-up technology that hasn\u2019t quite delivered, CNN posed an interesting question \u2014 in an article titled \u201cNo, but seriously: What\u2019s going on with bitcoin?<\/a>\u201c, David Goldman pointed out that the cryptocurrency recently dropped below $63,000 USD for the first time in over a year and a half (as of today, it has rebounded slightly to just under $71,000). He goes on to explain that global uncertainty and rapidly improving AI technology are partly to blame, although we\u2019re honestly not quite sure how that second one works. But more importantly, he theorizes that the market is returning to where it was before the 2024 presidential election. Then candidate Trump embraced the digital currency and promised to remove restrictions he claimed were holding it back. This naturally caused a bump in Bitcoin value after he won the White House, but as those changes have yet to materialize, the excitement is apparently wearing off.<\/p>\n

In software news, the remaining Windows users who still haven\u2019t been beaten into submission by Microsoft will have another feature taken away from them; as of February, the operating system\u2019s integrated 3D Viewer is officially being deprecated<\/a>. The tool allows users to inspect various types of 3D files, including STLs, and was added to Windows back when Microsoft was convinced \u201cmixed reality\u201d was going to be a thing. Anyone who has 3D Viewer installed will still be able to use it, but it will no longer be available for download officially from Microsoft. On the bright side, the web-based alternative that Microsoft recommends<\/a> seems pretty slick.<\/p>\n

Those holding out hope for life on the Red Planet will be excited to read the recent report from NASA which claims that the organic compounds discovered on Mars by the Curiosity rover can\u2019t be fully explained by non-biological processes<\/a>. In other words, while there are geological processes that could have produced some of the molecules detected, and some could have been deposited on the planet by meteorites, none of the possibilities studied could account for them all. The researchers caution that this doesn\u2019t mean there is current or active life on the Martian surface, however, as we still don\u2019t fully understand the timescales required to break these molecules down. Curiosity might have sniffed out the signs of life, but that life could still have died off billions of years ago.<\/p>\n

On the subject of space, a recent post about the number of satellites in low-Earth orbit<\/a> by mathematician John Cook got some debate going. He runs the numbers and argues that given the current number of LEO satellites (~12,500), and the area of space that they operate in, each bird has roughly 100,000,000 km\u00b3 to itself. Not exactly the close quarters flying that we\u2019ve been hearing so much about recently with the proliferation of satellite constellations such as SpaceX\u2019s Starlink. That said, others were quick to point out that his math only really works out if all the satellites were evenly distributed, which is obviously not the case in the real world. So while his estimate is probably a bit too generous, it still helps put into context just how mind-bogglingly big space actually is.<\/p>\n

Finally, for those who would prefer to scroll endlessly through something a bit more intellectually stimulating than social media, check out Xikipedia<\/a>. This open source project takes the content from the Simple English Wikipedia and turns it into a never ending feed that you can browse, complete with an algorithm that will suggest articles to you based on your personal interests. What do you call the opposite of doomscrolling \u2014 maybe knowledgescrolling?<\/p>\n

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line<\/a>, we\u2019ve love to hear about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We start this week with a bit of a good news\/bad news situation. On February 6th, the Relativistic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11996,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-462839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}