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Fourth of July celebrations across the United States this weekend could be accompanied by light shows in the night skies, as a string of powerful solar eruptions appear set to strike Earth.

The sun has been especially hyperactive over the past few days — firing off 10 M-class solar flares over 24 hours that have been accompanied by multiple coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are set to slam into Earth on July 3 and July 5.

CMEs are large, fast-moving clouds of magnetized plasma and solar radiation that occasionally get flung into space with solar flares when kinks in the sun's magnetic field snap. If CMEs smash into Earth, they cause disturbances in Earth's magnetic field, called geomagnetic storms, that can trigger partial radio blackouts and produce vibrant aurora displays farther away from Earth's magnetic poles than usual.

"Machine-Gun Sun! More than 5 storms on their way to Earth and 3 of them offer good chances for aurora views," Tamitha Skov , a space weather physicist at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a July 2 post on the social platform X . "NOAA and NASA model predictions do not show all the storms yet (it's hard to keep up with the rapid-fire storm launches!) but the first should hit before noon July 3 UTC."

The CMEs are expected to give a glancing blow to our planet, creating conditions for a moderate (G2) geomagnetic storm , according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center. It's also possible that these storms will strengthen to become strong (G3), depending on how they interact with Earth's magnetic field.

Auroras resulting from G3-class geomagnetic storms are often visible in northern parts of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York and Maine, according to NOAA. Skywatchers farther south in Oregon, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire will also have a chance of catching the light show. In any case, skywatchers interested in seeing or photographing the auroras will need to get as far from artificial light sources as possible.

The weekend storms might not be the last activity we see from the sun in the coming days, as two gigantic sunspots currently pimpling its face are displaying "beta-gamma-delta" magnetic fields — the most tangled and unstable type. This means these sunspots harbor the potential to launch powerful X-class flares, according to spaceweather.com .

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The last few years have seen a record number of powerful X-class flares explode from the sun's surface, hitting Earth with several major solar storms, including 2024's Mother's Day storm . This record comes partly from improvements to scientists' solar monitoring technologies, but also due to the sun reaching its 11-year peak in sunspot production, or solar maximum, in 2024.

Following this peak, the sun has now entered a period known as the "battle zone," a relatively understudied solar phase where instabilities across our star's newly flipped magnetic field ramp up the production of solar holes, gigantic, highly-tangled sunspots and subsequent geomagnetic storms.

The worst-case scenario for a solar storm is a superstorm like the 1859 Carrington Event , which released roughly the same energy as 10 billion 1-megaton atomic bombs. After slamming into Earth, the powerful stream of solar particles set telegraph systems around the world on fire and caused auroras brighter than the light of the full moon to appear as far south as the Caribbean.

The Carrington Event unleashed a roughly X45 magnitude solar flare that remains a record, yet it's likely far from the worst the sun can muster — with ancient tree rings harboring evidence of even more powerful blasts that occurred long before humans existed.

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Somehow, someway, the Super Mario 64 speedrunning scene miraculously finds a way to outdo itself time and time again. A three-year-old record was just beaten, by a true expert of the classic platformer who's still finding ways to be the most efficient jumping Italian plumber around.

The record-setter in question here is Suigi, a name you'll be familiar with if you know Super Mario 64 speedrunning at all, and just a few years after he crushed a time for 16 star completion, he's managed to do it again. This go around, he somehow found a way to shave a few seconds off, for a truly astounding finish of 14 minutes and 32 seconds.

"I wasn't done," he says in a post on Twitter. "FIRST 16 STAR WORLD RECORD IN OVER 3 YEARS."

i wasnt done... FIRST 16 STAR WORLD RECORD IN OVER 3 YEARS https://t.co/iDRhEYGs06 pic.twitter.com/Y9DbdjygMG July 3, 2026

The record prior was 14 minutes and 35 seconds, set in March 2023. While this mightn't seem like a huge jump, when you're talking about relays this small, even getting a full second lower is an achievement. Suigi's leapfrogged significantly more than that.

It mightn't shock you to hear he beat his own record in March 2023 as well. A dominant force when it comes to Mario's big out on the Nintendo 64, Suigi is top of the leaderboards on speedrun.com for every major, full-game category on the platform.

Outside of 16 star, those are 120 star, 70 star, one star, and zero, and Suigi's the man to beat across them all. Again, these are all on native hardware as well, in this instance on Japanese copies of the game as they're the fastest in terms of loading times and text and the like.

In speedrunning, every little helps. Seeing this, I have to wonder how long it'll be before the threshold of 14 minutes and 30 seconds will be reached. It might be a while considering the minute ways runs can be tightened further, but I wouldn't discount Suigi at all. Let's reconvene in three years and see where we're at.

Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy maestro Tetsuya Nomura says Super Mario 64 "truly shaped my current guiding principle" when moving to 3D JRPGs.

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Scale in the universe is hard to understand from a purely human perspective. Many times the math just doesn’t sit well with our brains that evolved to capture and process data about the world around us rather than groking the complexities of stellar dynamics and galaxy mergers. But every once in a while astronomers find something that, if we can wrap our heads around the numbers, gives a sense of just how big the universe is. That is precisely what a new paper, available in preprint on arXiv from a group of astronomers led by Z.L. Wen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, hopes to do when it describes a merger of not one, not two, but six supermassive galaxies and the active dynamics they’re subject to.

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Credit: Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority

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Google is tightening the screws on Chrome extensions with stricter policies that limit data collection, boost transparency, and target abusive behavior.

Extensions can only collect the data they actually need—developers can no longer gather extra user information for future or unrelated features.

AI bypass tools are officially off-limits, as Google cracks down on extensions designed to circumvent AI platform safeguards and usage limits.

Google is drawing a firmer line around what Chrome extensions can and can’t do. The company announced a new set of policy changes for the Chrome Web Store that are designed to cut down on unnecessary data collection, increase transparency and close loopholes that bad extensions could leverage.

The privacy rules in place are more difficult to misinterpret, and the rules for new kinds of services are more challenging than ever before (though the Chrome Web Store already has strict policies in place to keep extensions safe). One of the biggest changes is around user data. In the future, Google says Chrome extensions will be required to collect only the minimum amount of data necessary for their stated purpose (via PiunikaWeb ). In simple terms, developers can’t hoard more user data just because it might be useful later on or help with other features.