Do you find yourself involuntarily salivating for Twin Snakes or Starmix? Are you standing tippy-toe for a handful of Sour Patch Watermelons? Is there a nonstop conveyer belt of tart treats going down your gullet? There is another way. I want to open a muscadine clinic for all the Haribo loyalists in the world. Nature's gummy candy could fill the void as summer turns to fall.

The muscadine is a grape, but not the kind that populates fruit salads and Ziploc baggies. Those are mushy, easily yielding to the teeth, tossed into the mouth and eaten whole. Instead, the muscadine is an imposing orb that forces the eater to meditate upon its structure. Its skin might be a dull green with a purplish blush, or a wine-dark purple with a pinkish blush; it might have a dusty metallic sheen. It might be rough and speckled on the surface, a little leathery, and strangely taut. If that doesn't sound like a pleasant bite of fruit, that's fine—you won't actually be eating that part. Think of the muscadine as an individually packaged treat.

Enlarge / Let's see, you landed on my "Google Ads" space, and with three houses... that will be $1,400. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Hasbro)

Google's war on ad blockers is just gearing up, with YouTube doing its best to detect and block ad blockers and Chrome aiming to roll out the ad block-limiting Manifest V3 extension platform in June 2024. A new article from Engadget detailing the "arms race" over ad blocking brings up an interesting point regarding the power that YouTube and Chrome have in this battle: a dramatic update advantage over the ad blockers.

In addition to hamstringing Chrome's extension platform with no real user-centric justifications, Manifest V3 will also put roadblocks up before extension updates, which will delay an extension developer's ability to quickly respond to changes. YouTube can instantly switch up its ad delivery system, but once Manifest V3 becomes mandatory, that won't be true for extension developers. If ad blocking is a cat-and-mouse game of updates and counter-updates, then Google will force the mouse to slow down.

Chrome's "Manifest V3" makes dramatic changes to the Chrome extension platform. The current platform, Manifest V2, has been around for over ten years and works just fine, but it's also quite powerful and allows extensions to have full filtering control over the traffic your web browser sees. That's great for protecting privacy, speeding up the web, and blocking ads, but it also means you can download a browser from the world's biggest ad company and use it to block ads—and that was only going to last for so long.

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One would think that after a full week of terrible, hazardous air, I would have had my fill of all things smokey, but something about the change in season has me craving a smoked cocktail. I feel badly about it, but my (dumb, perverted) heart wants what it wants.

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AdamDavenport shares:

This helps make quick work of feeding the string from your hoodie back into your hood.
demonstration here!

The model is fairly large as is; the width of the knot holder is about 12mm. If your hoodie has smaller knots and/or smaller eyelets, you might want to scale the model smaller when you print. Enjoy!

download the files on: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4345572

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

We've known for some time that planets like Earth are born from disks of gas, ice, and dust surrounding stars as they themselves form. But details matter: Planets like Earth form differently than ones like Jupiter, and where in the disk they're born makes a difference in their potential size, composition, and more.

These disks can be many billions of kilometers across, but the distances to stars are vast; even close-by stars are a thousand trillion kilometers from us! It takes powerful telescopes and a lot of clever technology to discern them.

And oh, have I mentioned that astronomers have powerful telescopes and a lot of clever technology?

WHOA. Those images show just six of the 26 debris disks seen around nearby stars found in the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey. Debris disks are where the material around the star has already started to coalesce and form smaller objects (like asteroid-sized bodies) and possibly planets as well.

For the survey, astronomers targeted nearby (closer than about 500 light years) young (< 500 million years old) stars known to have too much infrared light coming from them. Stars emit light at different wavelengths in a predictable way, and if they have too much infrared coming from them it means they must have something warm around them — possibly a disk of dust warmed by the star's light.

Over four years they targeted 104 such stars, finding the 26 debris disks they could resolve (that is, the disks were large enough to appears as more than just a dot in their detector) and three more that they classified as protoplanetary disks — younger disks that haven't had enough time to really start getting the planetary formation process going.

These observations are tough, so the astronomers really took advantage of everything they could. First, they used the Gemini South telescope, a monster 10-meter ‘scope in Hawaii, where the conditions are excellent, with steady skies and good viewing. The camera they used, the Gemini Planet Imager, has a coronagraph, a small disk of metal that blocks out the light of the star itself, which can be millions of times brighter than the faint disks.

They also observed in polarized light, where all the waves in the light are aligned the same way. This happens when light bounces off objects like grains of dust, for example, so by filtering out unpolarized light from the star it reduces the glare, increasing the contrast hugely (polarized sunglasses work in a similar way; light reflecting off glass is polarized and is blocked by the glasses, reducing glare).

This does cause some odd issues; light gets more polarized if it's forward scattered, that is, if the light source is behind it from your viewpoint. So, for example, looking at the disk around HR 4796, a star 240 light years away, it seems like there's only half a disk! In reality the disk (more like a ring in this case) goes all the way around, but the back side isn't as polarized and is harder to detect using this method. You'll be forgiven if you think it looks like Praxis from Star Trek VI.

Another advantage of this survey is that all the disks are seen using the same equipment in the same way, making it easier to compare them to each other. On top of that, many of these stars were born together from the same cloud of gas, so their ages and distances are similar, making it even easier to compare them. This makes the survey the largest collection of such resolved disks yet made.

All the disks except one seem to have a paucity of dust closer in to the star. That's not surprising; over time small grains of dust get blown out by the fierce light of the young star. That makes these objects more like rings than disks. In general it's thought that planets tend to form closer to their stars than the inner edge of these rings, so even just measuring the ring size helps us understand planetary formation.

There is something undeniably provocative about these images. They're beautiful, certainly, but if you saw them without knowing what they are they'd only be of passing interest.

But when you know what you're seeing — rings of dust billions of kilometers across surrounding young stars quadrillions of kilometers away — then they start to have an actual impact on your brain. And then finding out that these are objects that can be studied, analyzed for composition, mass, and temperature, understanding that we are witnessing planets being born in front of our eyes, well. That's when their actual and wondrous nature is truly revealed.