Astronomers say they've spotted a black hole star — a black hole cloaked in enough surrounding material that it behaves, from a distance, like an ordinary star. It's the kind of find that quietly rewrites a category rather than making headlines with a bang, but it changes how researchers will hunt for hidden black holes going forward.

Retro hardware had its own big day. A five-year effort to fully decompile GoldenEye 007 for the N64 finished, cracking open the game's code for mods and ports that were never possible before. Meanwhile a Japanese repair shop is soldering extra GDDR6 onto old RTX 2080 Ti cards, turning a $282 mod into a 22GB budget AI card, and one maker squeezed a two-minute song down to 21KB and printed it as eight QR codes, playable only with a neural net decoder.

Infrastructure is getting less forgiving. PJM, America's largest power grid, now wants data centers over 50MW to bring their own backup generation or risk being cut first during shortages. Satellite operators are warning of a worsening launch bottleneck, a critical macOS Screen Sharing flaw just got a 9.8 severity score after active cryptojacking attacks, and one 3D-printing hobbyist built a slip-on 'Flock Sock' to blind traffic cameras — proof that the fight between surveillance hardware and the people under it keeps getting more physical.