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Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent. They don't need to use generative AI to cheat on exams; they could just learn the material. But they also tend to be competitive, ambitious, and overscheduled, so AI can look like an easy shortcut that makes more time in their lives for things that can't be done by a chatbot. When the pressure is on, which approach do they choose?

A new scandal at Brown University reveals that huge numbers of these students are likely to cheat.

Record scores

A recent survey of Princeton students found that 29.9 percent admitted to cheating with AI on at least one exam or assignment. But the recent situation at Brown gives us a better sense of what this kind of cheating looks like in one particular class—and just how much it may be substituting for actual learning. And we know all this because the blind economics professor at the center of it all, Roberto Serrano, is not letting it go.

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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch for a record-breaking 36th time early Thursday morning (July 9), and you can watch the action live.

The Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday at 5:25 a.m. EDT (0925 GMT), carrying 29 of the company's Starlink broadband satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO).

You can watch it live via SpaceX beginning about 10 minutes before launch.

This particular booster, known as 1067, has already completed 35 orbital missions, more than any other SpaceX rocket in history. The overall record is held by NASA's space shuttle Discovery , which flew to orbit and back 39 times.

Thursday's flight will extend Booster 1067's company record. If all goes to plan, the rocket will come back to Earth about 8.5 minutes after liftoff, landing on the SpaceX drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas" stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, will haul the 29 Starlink satellites to LEO, deploying them there 63.5 minutes after launch.

Previous Booster 1067 missions

CRS-22 | Crew-3 | Turksat 5B | Crew-4 | CRS-25 | Eutelsat HOTBIRD 13G | O3B mPOWER | PSN SATRIA | Telkomsat Marah Putih 2 | Galileo L13 | Koreasat-6A | 24 Starlink missions

Thursday's launch will be the 80th Falcon 9 mission of the year already. About 80% of the rocket's 2026 flights have been devoted to building out Starlink, by far the largest satellite network ever assembled.

The megaconstellation currently consists of more than 10,700 active satellites, according to tracker Jonathan McDowell . And, as the upcoming launch shows, that number is growing all the time.

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"Just when I thought I was out," Al Pacino hissed in The Godfather Part 3, "they pull me back in!" I'm starting to feel that way about MindsEye , the infamously bad action game from Build a Rocket Boy: I played it, I had an accidental good time , the expansion was abysmally bad , and it was over. But now, for suitably bizarre reasons, it's back in my life.

We're talking about MindsEye today because, as reported by Eurogamer , Build a Rocket Boy is bringing in an unknown number of community members for an on-site playtest at its studio in Edinburgh. And by "bringing in," I mean the studio is paying for their flights to Scotland, two nights' accommodations, and flights back home. I would guess that at least one meal is also being covered, given that attendees will take part in a meet-and-greet with Build a Rocket Boy staff.

How bizarre , I thought to myself, particularly given the game's minuscule player numbers. What could Build a Rocket Boy possibly have to show that justifies an in-person event, and more to the point, why would anyone care?

But one group cares very much: Build a Rocket Boy developers. The studio is holding this event, and more to the point paying for round-trip flights and hotel rooms, after repeated rounds of layoffs—the most recent in May —that left the studio gutted, and that just doesn't sit right with at least some of the workers at the studio. So they're going to protest the playtest at Build a Rocket Boy headquarters this Saturday, July 11, while the playtest is happening.

To be clear, this all seems legitimate and true. Build a Rocket Boy did indeed announce an in-person playtest for "a small group of community members" on its Discord back in June, promising to pay for "flights to Edinburgh, flights back home after the event, and hotel accommodations."

(Image credit: Build a Rocket Boy (Discord)) And there is indeed a protest planned, according to a Town Spot post : "Build A Rocket Boy execs are spending thousands on an unnecessary playtest event after laying off over 400 staff over the last year—come join affected workers and supporters outside their offices to show we're organised and ready to fight for jobs."

It's serious enough that the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain—the group that's currently embroiled in legal action against Rockstar over the 2025 firing of 31 employees—is getting involved.

"With their latest release labelled the worst game of 2025, and surrounded by allegations from their workers of secret surveillance, mishandled redundancies and union blacklisting, BARB management are now desperately turning towards fans to save them," the union wrote on Instagram. "As well as trying to buy fan favour with prize holidays, they are handing over work, both paid and unpaid, from the BARB workforce to the BARB fanbase, during a game sector job crisis.

"The playtest, which will see fans take on testing duties usually carried out by professional staff, follows another recent decision to cut longstanding staff members on the community team and hire a player, with no sign of a formal interview process or role advertisement."

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The union, which is also in the midst of legal action against Build a Rocket Boy over allegations that the studio was " recording individuals in their homes and without their consent " via surveillance software installed on employee PCs without their knowledge, confirmed that it will be taking part in the July 11 protest.

What happens next, I can't even guess. MindsEye itself is enough fun that it's not a bad pickup for, say, a tenner or less, as long as you enjoy "fun" in the MST3K sense—but for some reason, it's still holding at a $35 regular price. The long awaited Blacklisted expansion that promised to reveal evidence of sabotage against the game, meanwhile, was just straight-up garbola, lacking even the high school drama club earnestness and occasional bits of absolutely bonkers bullshit that made MindsEye itself entertaining. As someone who's played more MindsEye than most, this dogged, determined effort to salvage MindsEye is beyond baffling, akin giving CPR to Lenin: People might talk about it, but probably not for the reasons Bulid a Rocket Boy wants.

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Around 100,000 years ago, an early Homo sapiens man was probably stabbed in the face with a sharp stone tool and later buried in a cave in what is now Israel, archaeologists have determined. The Stone Age cold case appears to be the earliest evidence of this kind of interpersonal violence, according to the research team.

In a study published June 30 in the journal Scientific Reports , the international team of researchers closely examined the skull and lower jaw of a person who was deliberately buried in Qafzeh cave in Israel during the Middle Paleolithic period.

At least 27 people were buried in Qafzeh cave between about 145,000 and 92,000 years ago, making them some of the earliest members of our species to be found outside Africa. Previous analysis of the skeletons, which were excavated between the 1930s and 1970s, revealed that two people had head injuries resulting from blunt trauma.

But the new analysis, which employed microscopic and micro-CT scanning techniques, revealed that Qafzeh 25, an adult male, had a cut mark across his lower left jaw that affected one of his bicuspids and part of his upper jaw. The jawbone showed signs of healing, suggesting that the man lived for a significant amount of time after being injured, the researchers wrote in the study.

Archaeologists had previously identified only a few cases of trauma caused by sharp weapons or projectiles in Middle Paleolithic skeletons. Although these injuries could have resulted from hunting accidents, the researchers wrote, they have generally been interpreted as evidence of interpersonal violence.

The cut mark on the jaw of Qafzeh 25 was found on the left side of his face, lending further support to the idea that the injury was not an accident.

A close-up of the left side of the lower jaw, showing a cut mark near a bicuspid. (Image credit: Ana Pantoja et al.) It's not clear what kind of tool made the cut mark, but stone tools found at Qafzeh included flint scrapers and sharp points that could have been fashioned into spear tips.

"Forensic studies of modern human populations have reported that craniofacial injuries resulting from blows are more frequently observed on the left side of the skull, a distribution commonly attributed to the predominance of right-handed assailants in face-to-face confrontations," the researchers wrote.

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If the researchers' interpretation of the cut mark is correct, it "would represent the earliest documented case of sharp force trauma in the archaeological record," they wrote.

Qafzeh cave is already well known within archaeology for its clear evidence that early humans buried their dead. The new discovery confirms that the earliest human groups left Africa with a complex culture.

"These results provide new data to the debate on the origin of complex behaviors such as interpersonal violence, the care of injured or sick individuals and funeral practices," study first author Ana Pantoja Pérez , a paleoanthropologist at Spain's National Research Center for Human Evolution, said in a statement .

See how much you know about early humans with our human evolution quiz!

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YouTuber bitluni has unveiled a RISC-V DIY Graphics Processing Unit

Builder has a library of insane DIY projects on his YouTube channel

RISC-V microcontrollers were sourced from AliExpress

YouTuber bitluni has unveiled his latest project, which might put any concerns you have over GPU pricing into context. The German DIYer, who has built up a strong following with his selection of intriguing and off-the-wall projects, has assembled a GPU using a large collection of affordable RISC-V microcontrollers (MCUs).

While the results are impressive for a DIY build, the GPU is unfortunately quite modest, and would probably have been abandoned long before now had a PCB design firm not got in touch to explore a partnership over the build.

Demonstrating the project on his channel, bitluni – real name Matthias Balwierz – expressed how difficult the build was, and how it almost drove him mad.

8000+ RISC-V MCUs output at 320x200 resolution

In his latest video, bitluni recalls a previous attempt at building a GPU in late 2025 which lead to PCB designers Altium getting involved, explaining, “The clusters I made before were already challenging my sanity. I thought I was done with the topic, but the budget and these tools would allow for a cluster of a different magnitude, and the magnitude I had in mind was just insane.”

Pushing things to the next level is a hallmark of bitluni’s videos, and the finished build has an incredible 8,192 RISC-V CH570 microcontrollers, each running at 100 MHz, with 12KB of SRAM. These are mounted on blades, which went through several revisions as the PCB company declared them “too complicated.”

Each CH570 has an array of LEDs mounted, and these correspond to each MCU, and the equivalent QVGA pixel. With 8,192 MCUs, the resulting 320x200 might seem modest, but bitluni already has plans for a more power version with 32,000 MCUs.

Graphics or hashing?

The spike in GPU prices before the AI boom was thanks to industrial-scale cryptocurrency hashing, which graphics cards a particularly suited to. It is this relationship between hashing and graphics that gives bitluni’s project some hope beyond displaying images and video.

Identifying the serial port as the bottleneck to the project’s success as a working (if unwieldy) GPU, bitluni has appealed for help from his community of viewers to find a workaround, but that didn’t bring the project to a close.

Changing tack, he used the microcontrollers for hashing and found it outperformed his PC’s 8 core CPU, with a low 4 watt power draw, so perhaps there is a use for this approach after all.

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We're always keeping an eye out for new Stardew Valley mods . For instance, not long ago I played a mod where I could open my own grocery store and make Pierre buy my seeds for a change, dammit! It was satisfying.

But here's a mod (via Gaming Bible ) created by modder kittycatcasey, aka spacechase0, that immediately looks different from all the other Stardew mods out there. That's cuz it's in 3D. Have a look at "The Third Dimension," a proof-of-concept video of a 3D version of Stardew Valley—and then come back here and help me decide if it looks completely rad or vaguely horrifying.

I'm delighted at first: the video shows the modder strolling around their house, interacting with the kids, and talking with their spouse, Penny. It really is neat seeing the game's bright and cheerful art in 3D, even though the sprites (except for structures like walls and floors) are all still 2D.

But as I watch more, it quickly begins to get unsettling. Since nearly every entity is still currently 2D, it only has one side to face the player, which means it all swivels to continue facing you no matter where you go. Everything: plants, decorations, furnaces, the mailbox, scarecrows, containers, all slowly turning as you walk by. As if alive. As if watching you. It's creeptastic.

This is temporary, of course: "Right now just about almost everything besides the terrain is billboarded sprites, but the plan is to over time give everything a unique 3D model," spacechase0 says.

I feel better again while watching spacechase0 harvest blueberries from the farm: it's delightful to look up instead of down at the plants, to be surrounded by them like you were really out there doing some gardening. But then I notice the house in the background. It, too, is swiveling to watch you, everywhere you go, like some sort of extremely nosy Baba Yaga's Hut. I'm glad the video doesn't show downtown Stardew. Just imagine those shops and houses all turning to watch as you walked around. Chilling!

This isn't shade on the modder, by the way: turning a 2D game into 3D is really impressive, and even this extremely early proof-of-concept looks great (except when it makes my skin crawl). The second half of the video is a demonstration of the 3D concept compatible with VR, which is amazing—though fighting off bats sure looks tricky.

The mod isn't available to try yet, which works for me: I think I'd be a little too creeped out with all those sprites slowly swiveling around to stare at me everywhere I went. If you want to play Stardew Valley in 3D or VR someday, though, this is one mod you should keep a close eye on.

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