First radar images from new Earth-mapping satellite showcase Maine coast and North Dakota farmland. NASA’s joint $1.3 billion NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission has delivered its inaugural L-band radar captures, revealing Mount Desert Island’s forests and Bar Harbor’s townscape in vivid magenta, and the branching farms and wetlands of North Dakota. Positioned 747 km above Earth, NISAR will survey land and ice twice every 12 days, tracing centimeter-scale shifts in terrain and ice with its 12 m reflector, offering critical data for disaster response, agriculture, and climate monitoring once full science operations commence in November (apnews.com).
“The resulting data have transformed scientific awareness of our planet’s large-scale ecology and environment… by tracking even the slightest shifts in land and ice, the satellite will give forecasters and first responders a leg up in dealing with floods, landslides, volcanic eruptions and other disasters.” (apnews.com)
How going to Mars can pave the way to saving the Earth. Ecologist Luke O’Neill chronicles his pivot from terrestrial research to leading remote-sensing efforts at Planet Labs, where fleets of toaster-sized satellites monitor global forests daily. He argues that innovations driven by aspirations for Martian exploration—miniaturized hardware, consumer-grade IMUs from video games, and agile code—are propelling cost-effective Earth observation, enabling granular environmental insights beyond NASA’s periodic scans. By harnessing lateral innovation born of interplanetary ambition, O’Neill suggests space-borne imagers can revolutionize climate science and resource management on Earth, forging a sustainable nexus between cosmic exploration and ecological stewardship (aeon.co).
“Watching what my colleagues do… has convinced me that brute force alone will not innovate the technologies that will enable human civilisation to become an effective arbiter of this planet and her resources.” (aeon.co)
Rabbit shows off the AI agent it should have launched with. In a new demonstration, Rabbit unveils a “generalist Android agent” that executes multi-step tasks on a tablet by translating typed prompts on a laptop into actions within apps–from locating YouTube videos to compiling cocktail recipes in Google Keep. Built on its LAM Playground framework, the agent still exhibits quirks–sending poems line by line–yet marks progress toward Rabbit’s vision of on-device AI orchestration originally promised with the R1 hardware. This preview hints at the forthcoming cross-platform multi-agent system Rabbit plans to detail in the coming weeks (theverge.com).
“The examples presented today are ‘only the core action loop an Android agent completes,’ according to Rabbit’s blog post… Rabbit promises to share more about its upcoming cross-platform multi-agent system soon.” (theverge.com)
Breaking Digital Habits and Relearning Film With a Leica IIIf. Christopher DellaCorte recounts his transition from digital immediacy to the deliberate mechanics of his 1957 Leica IIIf. Without an LCD preview, film demands previsualization, patience, and a commitment that transforms the photographer’s approach: “I have to flip my perspective upside-down… rather than underexpose as I do with digital, I must lean into overexposure” for depth-rich negatives. He celebrates film’s tactile engagement—from cocking the shutter to hours spent in development—as a meditative counterpoint to the instant gratification of pixels, revealing how analog practices can enrich creative discipline in the digital age (35mmc.com).
“Film is a commitment. One cannot snap a shot, look at the result, make an adjustment and retake the image. More time is involved in the planning process, the developing process and then in massaging the final image.” (35mmc.com)
Thirty hypotheses on interface aesthetics. Paul Amat explores the emotional underpinnings of digital form, proposing that interface beauty arises from a medium’s power to convey emotion—akin to Fauvist color choices in painting. He situates screen aesthetics within historical frameworks, from Durand’s imaginary profiles to modern science-fiction motifs, arguing that coherent emotional expression and character inform our visual appeal. By framing thirty propositions—from emotion-driven design to cultural archetypes—Amat offers designers a conceptual toolkit to interrogate how UI elements resonate psychologically and culturally, elevating functional layouts into expressive, affective experiences (uxdesign.cc).
“Let us pose the following hypothesis: the aesthetic phenomenon comes from the capacity of the medium to communicate an emotion… Aesthetics in that case is achieved by the expression of emotions or imaginary.” (uxdesign.cc)