Technologies

A Room With a View: Check Out This Stunning Aurora From the ISS

Astronaut Don Pettit captured the footage while the ISS was flying backward.

There are some stunning views out there, like hotels that let you see the New York City skyline and resorts with gorgeous mountain or ocean views. But there are few places with a view as absurdly cool as the International Space Station. On Wednesday, astronaut Don Pettit — who is also a noted photographer and inventor of the zero-G coffee cup — took a gorgeous time-lapse video of the ISS as it flew over an aurora.

The video, viewable on X, is about 50 seconds long. It shows the ISS orbiting around Earth. It’s a cool shot all on its own, but around the 27-second mark, the aurora starts to show up from the left. A few short seconds later, viewers are greeted with what looks like a snaking, flowing mist covering part of the Earth.

Then, the Earth is awash in a green glow that looks like something out of a movie or a video game. As quickly as the aurora shows up, it leaves the camera’s view, and the POV is stretched back into space.

Despite its misty appearance, the aurora borealis is anything but. The glowing effect is caused by an interaction between the sun’s solar winds and Earth’s magnetic field. These interactions most often happen when the sun emits coronal mass ejections, which massively eject plasma into the Earth’s magnetic field.

With the sun at its solar maximum and amid aurora season, it may only be a matter of time before those green lights stretch far down into the US, like we saw last year.

Moving backward through space

Pettit was able to get the time-lapse video because the ISS is currently flying backward. It doesn’t typically do this, but the space station was expecting company. On Tuesday, the Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft launched with NASA astronaut Jonny Kim and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky, with the final destination being the ISS. Flipping the entire space station 180 degrees helped to facilitate the docking maneuver, which was successfully completed 3 hours after launch.

In addition to flipping 180 degrees, the ISS also intentionally lowers its altitude, as hinted by Pettit in his tweet when he said «changes in altitude, changes in latitude.» While this isn’t a maneuver that the ISS performs often, it is performed virtually every time a Soyuz spacecraft launches to the ISS. With the slight drop in altitude (usually around one kilometer) and the reorientation, it allows the Soyuz to dock just a few hours after launch, instead of longer like some other spacecraft.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Friday, April 18

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for April 18.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword is maybe a medium-difficulty puzzle. For every clue I couldn’t figure out, like 1-Across, there was a nice easy one, like 2-Across. Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

The Mini Crossword is just one of many games in the Times’ games collection. If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get at those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Lack of practice, metaphorically
Answer: RUST

5A clue: The width of your thumb, if you need a rough approximation
Answer: INCH

6A clue: It has many private entries
Answer: DIARY

8A clue: Disc golfer’s obstacle
Answer: TREE

9A clue: Emoji that can mean «I’m intrigued»
Answer: EYES

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Dispose (of)
Answer: RID

2D clue: Bring together
Answer: UNITE

3D clue: Like graveyards at night
Answer: SCARY

4D clue: Shortest allowable number of letters for a New York Times crossword answer
Answer: THREE

7D clue: «Totally with you!»
Answer: YES

How to play more Mini Crosswords

The New York Times Games section offers a large number of online games, but only some of them are free for all to play. You can play the current day’s Mini Crossword for free, but you’ll need a subscription to the Times Games section to play older puzzles from the archives.

Technologies

Nike Workout Shoes With Compression and Heating Will Cost $900

The Nike Hyperboot shoes will be available next month and are intended to help you warm up before and recover after workouts.

Those warmup compression shoes Nike and Hyperice showed off at CES 2025 finally have a launch date and price. The Hyperboot will be available to buy online in North America starting May 17, for a cost of $899.

The high-tops, which Nike and Hyperice say are a wearable much like your smartwatch, help your feet warm up before and recover after a workout. The footwear does this with heating and air-compression massage technology right there in your shoes, taking the idea of heating pads and compression socks and making them mobile.

CNET former mobile senior writer Lisa Eadicicco got the chance to try these shoes on in January.

«You can definitely feel the heat in here,» Eadicicco said at the time, as she walked across a demo room in Las Vegas wearing the fancy footwear. The boots massage and compress your ankles and feet, and in CNET’s test, we could especially feel the heat around the ankles.

Buttons on the shoes let you adjust compression and the amount of heat, with multiple settings for each.

«The Hyperboot contains a system of dual-air bladders that deliver sequential compression patterns and are bonded to thermally efficient heating elements that evenly distribute heat throughout the shoe’s entire upper,» Nike explains.

The battery lasts for 1 to 1.5 hours on max heat and compression settings, or 8 hours if you’re only using the massage setting. It takes 5 to 6 hours to charge via USB-C cable. The boots come in five sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL.

Technologies

Marvel Rivals’ New Costume Customization Is Fairly Priced, but There’s a Problem

A couple dollars isn’t much to pay for in-depth skin customization, but you can’t spend your existing Units on the new feature.

Marvel Rivals’ latest Season 2 feature is targeted at all the fashionistas out there. Costume customization lets players change the color palette of their skin, creating a new in-game look that suits them best.

The new palette swap customization isn’t free and isn’t available on every skin, though more skins will be available to customize as time goes on. Four reskins shipped with the feature’s introduction.

Unlocking costume customization will cost you the in-game currency equivalent of $6 per skin, but you can freely change the color to any variation released for a skin you bought customization on as they are released.

The pricing of these reskins is actually generous compared with Rivals’ largest competitor: Overwatch 2. Palette-swapped legendary reskins in Blizzard’s first-person hero shooter have typically cost just as much as the original skin, and unlocking the black-and-gold customization for special Mythic skins costs the equivalent of $20.

The $6 price tag for Marvel Rivals costume customization is a tame monetization practice in comparison. But the biggest problem with the new feature isn’t the price tag — it’s the introduction of Unstable Molecules, which feels like an unnecessary additional currency introduced to lure players into spending more money.

Marvel Rivals is developing a currency bloat problem

There were already three separate currencies to manage in the game, alongside the occasional addition of special tokens that let players interact with limited-time events like Galacta’s Cosmic Adventure.

Of the three existing currencies, most players will interact with Chrono Tokens, the purple currency, as it’s available to free-to-play Marvel Rivals players. These tokens unlock rewards on the battle pass. Whereas most games have experience points that unlock battle pass tiers, Chrono Tokens are a currency that disappears at the end of a season.

Units and Lattice are the current premium currencies in Marvel Rivals. Lattice is the gold coin that you directly pay — most microtransactions convert your money into this currency to spend in-game, at a rate of $1 to 100 Lattice.

Units, the blue currency, are what you need to buy most of the premium costume bundles in the game — so you need to convert your Lattice to Units at a one-to-one exchange rate when you’re buying costumes.

That brings us to the new cosmetics system. As if that wasn’t overly complicated enough, costume customization now requires a new currency: Unstable Molecules. Unstable Molecules aren’t Units, but they might as well be. You exchange Lattice to Unstable Molecules at the same one-to-one rate.

The only difference between these currencies is that you use Units to purchase costumes, emotes, sprays and account name changes, and you use Unstable Molecules to purchase the costume customization feature for skins you already own.

The decision to add another currency for no reason needlessly complicates Marvel Rivals’ microtransactions — and the system was already pretty opaque as it stands. Maybe that’s by design, as trading in multiple fictional currencies helps obscure the real dollar cost that players are sinking into their in-game cosmetics.

The addition of Unstable Molecules feels like an anti-consumer move. The costume customization prices are fair when you compare them with the competition’s asking prices for similar cosmetic tweaks, but the new feature should be bought and paid for with Units. There’s no need to add another currency to Marvel Rivals, unless the entire point is to create another way to obfuscate and inflate player spending.

How to unlock costume customization in Marvel Rivals

You can rock palette-swapped versions of some of your favorite Marvel Rivals costumes right now. Costume customization is live in Marvel Rivals — for a handful of skins. Here are the skins the new feature is compatible with right now:

Magik Punkchild: Rosy Resilience skin variant
Psylocke Vengeance: Phantom Purple skin variant
Luna Snow Mirae 2099: Plasma Pulse skin variant
Winter Soldier Blood Soldier: Winter’s Wrath skin variant

Each costume customization is available for purchase for 600 Unstable Molecules. The customizations are purchasable as part of the costume’s listing under the store tab in the main menu. You need to own the base skin before you can purchase the costume customization color variants.

Unstable Molecules are currently only available in a one-to-one exchange with the Lattice premium currency, but the costume customization announcement in the official Marvel Rivals Discord server mentioned that there will be new ways to earn Unstable Molecules in Season 3.