Super Mario 64 might be over two decades old now, but that doesn’t mean that it’s no longer fun to play. Last year, fans sought to resurrect the game by starting a recompilation project. Together, they reverse engineered the game’s source code. Finally, the finished product, which is a fully functioning PC port of the game, was released online a few days ago.

Unlike PC emulators which imitate the conditions of the original N64 hardware, the DirectX 12-powered port allows players to run Mario 64 at far higher resolutions without compromise, such as native 4K or in ultra-widescreen mode.

But wait, there’s more!

It’s even possible to add modern visual effects to Super Mario 64 via third-party app Reshade, including primitive ray tracing.

While activating ray tracing may not change the gameplay experience that much, it makes the game visually more appealing.

More details about this over at Video Games Chronicle.

Via PC Mag

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A post shared by Ran (@konel_bread) on May 2, 2020 at 5:31am PDT

After years of following a strict regimen of regular workouts and eating balanced meals, these bear breads have finally achieved their body goals. Despite having this amazing body, however, they have but one weakness: teeth.

(Image Credit: konel_bread/ Instagram)

Cookies are defined by Cookiebot as “the memory of the Internet.” These are what companies use to remember you. Using these, companies can make a “profile” of you, which they use to personalize your browsing experience. 

Cookies themselves may not pose that much of a threat to us users, as they are just a bunch of plain text that contain no executable code within themselves. However, the danger lies in those who handle these cookies.

There have been cases of data breaches connected to cookies, which is where the anxiety stems from. In February 2015, a Yahoo data breach compromised data from over 32 million users. Hackers stole Yahoo's code relating to cookies, which allowed the bad actors to piece together the cookies for all of those affected, without needing a password.

These so-called "forged cookies" included email addresses, full names, dates of birth, phone numbers, hashed passwords and security questions. In other words, all that was needed to commit identity theft.

So how do you keep yourself safe from the potential dangers of cookies? You do so by removing them from your computer. And how do you remove them? Popular Mechanics will teach you how over at their site. But if you don’t want to read their definitive guide, then I suggest that you do this frequently: clear your history and check “remove cookies.”

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There are many ways to protect the brain from aging, such as exercising regularly and having a balanced diet. But if you want to further protect your brain from aging, learning another language might interest you, as this research from Singapore University of Technology and Design suggests that bilingualism has a protective effect against cognitive decline in aging.

Researchers… examined and found that active bilingualism – the regular balanced use of two languages and language switching – will offer protection against the brain’s aging process. The paper was published in the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences.

More details about this study over at Neuroscience News.

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On April 29, 2010, Felix Arvid Urf Kjellberg joined YouTube. Back then, he did not know that he was about to be the most subscribed individual user on the said platform. 

Ever since the day he joined, he constantly uploaded videos on YouTube. Now, with over 104 million subscribers, Felix, also known as PewDiePie, clearly has earned his special place at the platform.

Celebrating his decade in YouTube, Felix decides to take a peek at how much his channel progressed over the years, reflecting how much has changed since the beginning.

Obvious Plant (Jeff Wysaski) has made a documentary! The Exciting of Trains goes off the rails, so to speak, early on and then gets weirder as it goes. After all, trying to make random old clips of train travel into a coherent story just invites nonsense. -via Metafilter

Holy cow- surely this isn't how this guy's head is shaped! No, it's just a well-done optical illusion tattoo. Click the right arrow on the image; Ryan's tattoo looks just as good in color. And it's not even finished! This tat is the work of Matt Pehrson of the Zion Tattoo Company. You can see more of his intricate geometric tattoos at Instagram. -via Laughing Squid

Residents of one street in Chester, UK, made this video to support each other while social distancing. You have to wonder if this is sort of an artist's colony, since the residents have such a fashion sense and no hesitance about performing. They did a wonderful job! -via Nag on the Lake

Yehuda Devir (left) and his wife Maya (center) are the happy parents of Ariel (right) a growing baby. Yehuda and Maya are both artists and, appropriately, illustrate their adventures together in an ongoing comic series titled One of These Days. In it, the parents address the joys, anxieties, and tribulations of raising a baby.

You can follow their labors on Instagram or view a roundup of their babycare-related cartoons at My Modern Met.

If you need something to argue with your family about, here's a touchy topic and a list made to be taken apart. While some die-hard Star Wars fans will say nothing good has come of Disney purchasing Lucafilm, it at least ensured that Star Wars would continue. Since that happened in 2012, the House of Mouse has been busy producing movies, TV series, novels, animations, video games, and comic books. If you've been keeping up with all that, you'll be interested in how io9 ranked the best moments from all that Star Wars media. If not, you may find something in the Star Wars universe you'll want to seek out and experience for yourself.

You might be, like me, very overdue for a hair cut. Unless you wear a pageboy style, it's not so simple to cut it yourself. Too bad you don't still have a Flowbee to make it easy! In case you weren't around in the late 1980s, the Flowbee was a hair trimmer that attached to your vacuum cleaner. It sucked in your hair and made sure every strand was cut to the same precise yet adjustable length. At least that was the idea. It was invented by carpenter Rick Hunts.

Hunts, who raised more than $100,000 from investors and even sold his cabinet shop to obtain additional funds to mass market his creation, clearly felt the Flowbee would be a slam-dunk. He approached major personal grooming companies like Conair, Norelco, and Remington to see if they’d be interested in the Flowbee. He also approached beauty salons to see if they’d consider selling them to customers. He later recalled that all of them said the idea was nuts. In the case of the salons, they were afraid the Flowbee might actually work as advertised and see a reduction in foot traffic from people content to cut their own hair.

But the Flowbee found everlasting fame in infomercials, where it became both ubiquitous and fascinating. Read the history of the Flowbee at Mental Floss.

Facial recognition systems have indeed advanced over the years, improving in both accuracy and efficiency. Facial recognition systems, like the ones made by Los Angeles startup TrueFace, are used to speed security checks over at the base entrances at the US Air Force. But because of the world changing drastically in only a few months’ time, not only are we heavily affected by this sudden change, but our systems as well.

… CEO Shaun Moore says he’s facing a new question: How good is TrueFace’s technology when people are wearing face masks?

“It’s something we don’t know yet because it’s not been deployed in that environment,” Moore says. His engineers are testing their technology on masked faces and are hurriedly gathering images of masked faces to tune their machine-learning algorithms for pandemic times.

In other words, some facial recognition systems are struggling to cope with the current times. Others, however, like those in Russia and China (because of their lighter privacy rules), as well as Japan (because they have a flu season, a time when people wear face masks), cope a bit better.

So how well are our facial recognition systems in scanning faces with face masks? Good, but far from perfect.

Check out Ars Technica for more details about this subject.

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With the Pentagon releasing some videos which contain “unidentified aerial phenomena”, the Japanese government is now preparing to deal with unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, in case they encounter one.

The Japanese Defense Ministry says its pilots have never encountered an unidentified flying object, The Japan Times reports, but authorities want to be prepared should it happen in the future. And while the new protocols are geared toward identifying military drones, they could also serve as guidance for first contact with hypothetical aliens.

More details about this over at Futurism.

What are your thoughts about this one?

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From 1995 to 2003, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft spent its time exploring Jupiter’s system. In these years, the aforementioned spacecraft was able to make 11 flybys over one of Jupiter’s icy moons: Europa.

On the 26th of September 1998, the spacecraft was able to take highly-detailed photos of Europa’s surface — photos that scientists now revisit as they prepare for future missions, such as the Europa Clipper, which is targeted to launch in 2023 or 2025.

"We've only seen a very small part of Europa's surface at this resolution," Cynthia Phillips, a planetary geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and Europa project staff scientist working on future missions, said in a statement. "Europa Clipper will increase that immensely."

More details about this story over at Space.com.

(Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute)

You’ve probably heard of lots of people who got laid off from their jobs because there’s a new machine in town that could do more things than they could. This has been a sad trend throughout the years, as old as the Industrial Revolution, or perhaps older. And because robots are now slowly becoming an essential element in some services, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear more stories about people getting fired.

In many parts of the U.S., robots have been replacing workers over the last few decades. But to what extent, really? Some technologists have forecast that automation will lead to a future without work, while other observers have been more skeptical about such scenarios.

Now a study co-authored by an MIT professor puts firm numbers on the trend, finding a very real impact—although one that falls well short of a robot takeover. The study also finds that in the U.S., the impact of robots varies widely by industry and region, and may play a notable role in exacerbating income inequality.

More details about this over at TechXplore.

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