It’s been quite some time since we heard anything about Netflix’s animated adaptation of Splinter Cell — but the streamer has finally provided some details on the show. The reveal comes in the form of a very brief teaser trailer, which shows a little bit of the show, but mostly showcases Liev Schreiber’s gravelly take on lead character Sam Fisher. We also have a proper name now: it’s called Splinter Cell: Deathwatch.

Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my Wordle today, NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games.

A blockchain entrepreneur, a cinematographer, a polar adventurer and a robotics researcher plan to fly around Earth’s poles aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule by the end of the year, becoming the first humans to observe the ice caps and extreme polar environments from orbit, SpaceX announced Monday.

The historic flight, launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, will be commanded by Chun Wang, a wealthy bitcoin pioneer who founded f2pool and stakefish, “which are among the largest Bitcoin mining pools and Ethereum staking providers,” the crew’s website says.

“Wang aims to use the mission to highlight the crew’s explorational spirit, bring a sense of wonder and curiosity to the larger public and highlight how technology can help push the boundaries of exploration of Earth and through the mission’s research,” SpaceX said on its website.

Wang’s crewmates are Norwegian cinematographer Jannicke Mikkelsen, Australian adventurer Eric Philips and Rabea Rogge, a German robotics researcher. All four have an interest in extreme polar environments and plan to carry out related research and photography from orbit.

The mission, known as “Fram2” in honor of a Norwegian ship used to explore both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, will last three to five days and fly at altitudes between about 265 and 280 miles.

“This looks like a cool & well thought out mission. I wish the @framonauts the best on this epic exploration adventure!” tweeted Jared Isaacman, the billionaire philanthropist who charted the first private SpaceX mission — Inspiration4 — and who plans to blast off on a second flight — Polaris Dawn — later this month.

The flights “showcase what commercial missions can achieve thanks to @SpaceX’s reusability and NASA’s vision with the commercial crew program,” Isaacman said. “All just small steps towards unlocking the last great frontier.”

Like the Inspiration4 mission before them, Wang and his crewmates will fly in a Crew Dragon equipped with a transparent cupola giving them a picture-window view of Earth below and deep space beyond.

No astronauts or cosmonauts have ever viewed Earth from the vantage point of a polar orbit, one tilted, or inclined, 90 degrees to the equator. Such orbits are favored by spy satellites, weather stations and commercial photo-reconnaissance satellites because they fly over the entire planet as it rotates beneath them.

The high-inclination record for piloted flight was set in the early 1960s by Soviet Vostok spacecraft launched into orbits inclined 65 degrees. The U.S. record was set by a space shuttle mission launched in 1990 that carried out a classified military mission in an orbit tilted 62 degrees with respect to the equator.

The International Space Station never flies beyond 51.6 degrees north and south latitude. NASA planned to launch a space shuttle on a classified military mission around the poles in 1986, but the flight was canceled in the wake of the Challenger disaster.

“The North and South Poles are invisible to astronauts on the International Space Station, as well as to all previous human spaceflight missions except for the Apollo lunar missions but only from far away,” the Fram2 website says. “This new flight trajectory will unlock new possibilities for human spaceflight.”

SpaceX has launched 13 piloted missions carrying 50 astronauts, cosmonauts and private citizens to orbit in nine NASA flights to the space station, three commercial visits to the lab and the Inspiration4 mission chartered by Isaacman.

Isaacman and three crewmates plan to blast off Aug. 26 on another fully commercial flight, this one featuring the first civilian spacewalks. NASA plans to launch its next Crew Dragon flight to the space station around Sept. 24.

Today we’re launching a totally new, totally different app. Meet Orion.

Orion is a small, fun app that helps you use your iPad as an external HDMI display for any camera, video game console, or even VHS. Just plug in one of the bajillion inexpensive adapters, and Orion handles the rest.

But wait — we’re a camera company. Why an HDMI monitor?

We built this to scratch a few itches. First, in professional cinematography, it’s common to connect an external screen to your camera to get a better view of the action. Orion not only gives you a bigger screen, but you can even share screenshots with your crew with a couple of taps.

We also built this for… pure fun. When traveling with a Nintendo Switch, it’s a delight to play games on a bigger screen, especially alongside friends.

Orion goes a step beyond display. By default, inputs could look fuzzy on an iPad’s retina display. (Why? The Switch runs a modest 1080p resolution, and even if it ran at a higher resolution, most adapters on the market can only run 60 frames per second at 1080P.)

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Orion sharpens those low resolution inputs with an AI powered upscaler!

Another perk is control over the brightness of the image beyond the iPad’s screen brightness. If you’re trying to view video in daylight, crank up brightness to HDR range for extra help. If you’re on a late-night flight and don’t want to bother anyone around you, make things darker than the iPad’s darkest.

OK, I hear you ask, but how much does all of this cost? A camera monitor is hundreds of dollars. Well, Orion is free. Yep, free.

If you want to support the app, get Orion Pro: It packs AI upscaling, CRT emulation for retro games, and image adjustments (and whatever else we cook up). It’s a one-time upgrade for $5. It unlocks everything. No subscriptions.

As for those adapters, we found plenty available for under $20. Now it’s easy to get confused and accidentally buy, say, a USB-C hub with video output, which can’t capture anything. (Ask me how I know.) That’s why we personally tested the top ten adapters on Amazon and made a helpful buying guide with our recommendations and some other accessories, too.

The Story of Orion

This summer, Apple announced a set of awesome new features coming to iOS 17, and one of them was external-webcam support on iPad. After digging into the feature for our flagship app, Halide, we weren’t satisfied with the results in a camera app.

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However, we did discover that a ton of companies sell tiny, inexpensive adapters that convert HDMI signals into webcams. “What if you could use an iPad as a portable screen?” Hmm! Intriguing. We had an idea, and we got to work.

We wrote the first line of code on August 6th, we’re shipping September 20th — 45 days later.

We’re launching at the start of new iPhone season, so we’re already super busy and shifting our focus to our flagship iPhone photography app, Halide. Orion won’t distract us from that, because we’re calling it a b-side.

B-sides are small fun, small, and focused projects. Apps like Halide needs major work every year to keep up with new hardware, but we expect Orion will be “done” after a release or two. We’ll keep maintaining it so it doesn’t break, but we won’t revolve our lives around it. It’s a fun utility, and that’s why we’re only asking for a few bucks.

Beyond being fun to build and design, apps like Orion let us experiment with new developer tools earlier than in our flagship apps. In a mature app used by lots of people, it’s a good idea to wait a year or two before adopting a cutting edge technology; while Apple launched SwiftUI in 2019, but we waited until 2021 to add it to Halide. SwiftUI has been a huge win for certain types of problems— and we couldn’t have built Orion so quickly without it— but by waiting two years before adding SwiftUI it to Halide, we had to play a lot of catchup in 2021.

So apps like Orion allow us to scratch our own itch, which is how we got into building apps in the first place, and also help us keep up with where iOS is heading.

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The Orion Video System Design

You might notice something about the styling of Orion — it’s very stylized in a… retro sort of way.

When we set off to design the app, we really wanted it to be fun. Starting with the basic idea—a portable screen—we thought of the era where televisions and video were still exciting, fresh technology. The techno-utopia of the early 1980s came to mind. We find this a delightful aesthetic.

Pastels, purples and pinks. Detailed technical illustrations and bright colors. Futuristic logos. Type that tracked far too tightly thanks to the invention of the photo-typesetter. And of course, the invention of bitmap typefaces and on-screen user interfaces and icons.

We didn’t want to just lean into the clichés—there are enough vaporwave sunsets with Deloreans out there that try to seem ’80s’— so went and developed a visual language that is based on the electronics brochures and VCR interfaces of bygone days that conveys ‘modern’ in a way only the 1980s visual vernacular can.

In Halide, we did everything we could to make the app feel as tactile as a real camera. Great cameras are wonderfully tactile — every knob and switch has a weighted, deliberate feel and click to it.

In Orion, we wanted to give you the joy of your own ‘video system’. That meant starting from the beginning: you open the box to unpack it. Because, well, why not.

Instructions follow, so you can get started quickly.

And when not actively in use, you return to a glowing, slightly distorted nostalgic place of on-screen menus, where our custom-made pixel font called Radiant steals the show.

If it wasn’t obvious, we had a lot of fun doing this. And that’s what really mattered to us: if anything, Orion was a project to collaborate with friends on something fun and different.

Thank you

We want to build things with craft, fun and delight. To showcase that apps are an art form, and have no business being boring. We hope you enjoy the result — we know that we loved building it for you. Thanks to you, we get to do what we love.

Get Orion here, and let us know what you think!

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Acknowledgements

Orion was a collaboration with friends. Some of the incredible design and typography on display (and our two custom typefaces) are the work of Jelmar Geertsma. Orion was co-engineered with Anton Heestand. The opening music (yes, opening music) is by Cabel Sasser. Extra thanks go to Louie Mantia for bézier wrangling and our families — especially Margo — for supporting us in doing what we love. If you are still reading here, please consider leaving us a review on our apps — it goes a very long way.

The saga of the large invasive Joro spiders that parachute through the air isn’t over. A new study found that the critters with 4-inch-long legs are truly built differently, with hearts that are able to withstand the loud and bustling noises of big cities. 

University of Georgia researcher Andy Davis made the discovery while conducting cardiac stress tests on Joro spiders and their cousin, the golden silk spider. The research, published in Physiological Entomology on Monday, found that the species know how to chill out and stay calm when put in heart rate-raising situations. 

The Joro spider, also known as Trichonephila clavata, “is known for making webs not only in natural green spaces but also in cities and towns, often on buildings and human dwellings,” the study says. “The stress reactions of Trichonephila spiders could be characterized as ‘even-tempered,’ which may factor into their ability to live in habitats with frequent disturbances.”

Davis and his team evaluated the physiological reactions of Joro spiders and golden silk spiders and compared them to those of another pair of similarly-sized species that are related to each other, garden spiders and banded garden spiders. 

Researchers recorded baseline heart rates of the arachnids while they were resting and inactive, and then recorded their heart rates after restraining them under electronic sensors for 10 minutes.

“When subjected to the novel restraint stress, heart rates of all spider species became elevated, which is an expected reaction that other spider researchers have noted,” the study says. “However, there were differences among species in the magnitude of this elevation, and of how the responses progressed during the 10 min period.”

The garden spiders, both of which belong to the Argiope genus, showed “distinct periods of fluctuations during the restraint” and were even found to struggle against the restraints, researchers said. Joro spiders and their golden silk cousins, on the other hand, were “less variable and more even.” They were also observed entering a state of thanatosis for more than an hour after stressors, meaning they essentially froze up during that time. 

The tests “are beginning to paint a picture of how the invasive Joro spider and its cousin, the golden silk spider, have a unique way of tolerating novel stressors, which may be the reason for their ability to occupy anthropogenic landscapes,” researchers said, noting that other spider species in their family line could share this trait, although that would need further investigation.

Joro spiders have been making headlines for years as they continue to spread up the East Coast. Originally from Asia, the spiders are believed to have been first introduced to north Georgia around 2010. They have since been found across nearly a dozen other states. In December, Davis told The New York Times that New York is “right in the middle of where they like to be.” It’s been predicted that they could pop up in the New York tri-state area this summer, although no reports of such have been made.

“They seem to be OK with living in a city,” he told the paper, adding that they’ve been seen hanging out on street lamps and telephone poles, where “regular spiders wouldn’t be caught dead in.” 

The latest findings may not definitively prove that the spiders’ relaxed demeanor is the reason for “their affinity for urban settings,” the study says, adding that more research is needed. It does, however, bolster Davis’ research from February, which also found that Joro spiders don’t necessarily mind the increased noise and vibrations that come with city living. 

“These Joro webs are everywhere in the fall, including right next to busy roads, and the spiders seem to be able to make a living there. For some reason, these spiders seem urban tolerant,” Davis said of his earlier research. 

UGA student and co-author of that study, Alexa Schultz, agreed, saying, “It looks like Joro spiders are not going to shy away from building a web under a stoplight or an area where you wouldn’t imagine a spider to be.” 

But don’t worry — while the spiders are venomous, they don’t pose a danger to humans, although they may elevate your heart rate more than you elevate theirs.