A starry sky can be stunning—even inside a hospital emergency room.

But instead of celestial bodies sparkling in the night, doctors in South Korea were gazing at bright brain lesions punctuating a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan. The resulting pattern, called a "starry sky," meant that their 57-year-old patient had a dangerous form of tuberculosis. The doctors report the case in this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The man had previously been treated for the infection in his lungs but came into the hospital's emergency department after two weeks of unexplained headaches, neck pain, and tingling in his right hand. The MRI and Computed-Tomography (CT) scans clearly revealed the problem: rare nodules and lesions, called tuberculomas, speckling his lungs and central nervous system, including both cerebral hemispheres, the basal ganglia deep inside the brain, the cerebellum at the back of the brain, the brain stem, and the upper spinal cord.

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On Thursday, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University unveiled LegoGPT, an AI model that creates physically stable Lego structures from text prompts. The new system not only designs Lego models that match text descriptions (prompts) but also ensures they can be built brick by brick in the real world, either by hand or with robotic assistance.

"To achieve this, we construct a large-scale, physically stable dataset of LEGO designs, along with their associated captions," the researchers wrote in their paper, which was posted on arXiv, "and train an autoregressive large language model to predict the next brick to add via next-token prediction."

This trained model generates Lego designs that match text prompts like "a streamlined, elongated vessel" or "a classic-style car with a prominent front grille." The resulting designs are simple, using just a few brick types to create primitive shapes—but they stand up. As one Ars Technica staffer joked this morning upon seeing the research, "It builds Lego like it's 1974."

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Fitness tracker company Whoop has upset some long-time customers by ending an upgrade system that promised free hardware upgrades to anyone who had a subscription with the company for at least six months.

Whoop makes fitness tracker bracelets that let users access things like sleep tracking, menstrual tracking, and electrocardiograms (ECGs) via a subscription companion app. Since the first Whoop wearable came out in 2015, the Boston-based company’s business has been built on subscriptions. Whoop has traditionally lured customers in by giving its hardware away for “free” to Whoop app subscribers. Further, customers who subscribed to the Whoop app for at least six months got access to free hardware upgrades.

“Instead of purchasing new hardware every time an updated model is produced, WHOOP members receive the next-generation device for free after having been a member for six months or more,” said a webpage on Whoop’s website that is no longer active but was accessible as recently as March 28, as reported by The Verge and confirmed via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

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Last year, United States District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google violated antitrust law by illegally maintaining a monopoly in search. Now, Google and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have had their say in the remedy phase of the trial, which wraps up today. It will determine the consequences for Google's actions, potentially changing the landscape for search as we rocket into the AI era, whether we like it or not.

The remedy trial featured over 20 witnesses, including representatives from some of the most important technology firms in the world. Their statements about the past, present, and future of search moved markets, but what does the testimony mean for Google?

Everybody wants Chrome

One of the DOJ's proposed remedies is to force Google to divest Chrome and the open source Chromium project. Google has been adamant both in and out of the courtroom that it is the only company that can properly run Chrome. It says selling Chrome would negatively impact privacy and security because Google's technology is deeply embedded in the browser. And regardless, Google Chrome would be too expensive for anyone to buy.

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Intel's i486 was the first "computer number" I ever really understood. Sure, my elementary school computer lab had both the Apple IIGS and Apple IIc, and one of them was slightly more useful, for reasons unexplained to me. But soon after my father brought home his office's discarded Gateway desktop with a 486DX 33 MHz inside, I was catapulted into my first Intel sorting scheme. I learned there was an x86 before this one (i386), and there were models with different trailing numbers (16–100 MHz) and "DX" levels. This was my first grasp of what hardware I was actually using and what could improve inside it.

More than 36 years after the release of the 486 and 18 years after Intel stopped making them, leaders of the Linux kernel believe the project can improve itself by leaving i486 support behind. Ingo Molnar, quoting Linus Torvalds regarding "zero real reason for anybody to waste one second" on 486 support, submitted a patch series to the 6.15 kernel that updates its minimum support features. Those requirements now include TSC (Time Stamp Counter) and CX8 (i.e., "fixed" CMPXCH8B, its own whole thing), features that the 486 lacks (as do some early non-Pentium 586 processors).

It's not the first time Torvalds has suggested dropping support for 32-bit processors and relieving kernel developers from implementing archaic emulation and work-around solutions. "We got rid of i386 support back in 2012. Maybe it's time to get rid of i486 support in 2022," Torvalds wrote in October 2022. Failing major changes to the 6.15 kernel, which will likely arrive late this month, i486 support will be dropped.

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President Donald Trump said he is killing a broadband grant program that was authorized by Congress, claiming that the Digital Equity Act of 2021 is racist and unconstitutional.

"I have spoken with my wonderful Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and we agree that the Biden/Harris so-called 'Digital Equity Act' is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL. No more woke handouts based on race! The Digital Equity Program is a RACIST and ILLEGAL $2.5 BILLION DOLLAR giveaway. I am ending this IMMEDIATELY, and saving Taxpayers BILLIONS OF DOLLARS!" Trump wrote in a Truth Social post yesterday.

The Digital Equity Act provided $2.75 billion for three grant programs. As a National Telecommunications and Information Administration webpage says, the grants "aim to ensure that all people and communities have the skills, technology, and capacity needed to reap the full benefits of our digital economy."

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Schools across the US are warning parents about an Internet trend that has students purposefully trying to damage their school-issued Chromebooks so that they start smoking or catch fire.

Various school districts, including some in Colorado, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Washington, have sent letters to parents warning about the trend that’s largely taken off on TikTok.

Per reports from school districts and videos that Ars Technica has reviewed online, the so-called Chromebook Challenge includes students sticking things into Chromebook ports to short-circuit the system. Students are using various easily accessible items to do this, including writing utensils, paper clips, gum wrappers, and pushpins.

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Alex Mashinsky—the disgraced founder of the Celsius Network cryptocurrency bank who deceived hundreds of thousands into losing billions with the catchy slogan "unbank yourself"—was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Thursday.

In December, Mashinsky pleaded guilty to securities fraud and commodities fraud. Federal prosecutors slammed him for reaping $48 million in profits while causing billions in investor losses by artificially inflating the value of his network's token, Cel. The Department of Justice and dozens of victims urged the court to order a maximum sentence of 20 years, while Mashinsky hoped the court would agree that he had shown remorse and should only serve one year and one day, Reuters reported.

Mashinsky's downfall started in 2022, when the Celsius Network suddenly stopped allowing withdrawals, claiming that "extreme market conditions" were to blame, a shady move that caused some customers to question the crypto bank's financial health. One month later, the bank filed for bankruptcy, exposing a $1.19 billion deficit in its balance sheets and still holding onto customers' funds while scoffing at supposed "misinformation" that their money would be lost.

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Yesterday's naming of Chicago native Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV—the first American-born leader of the Catholic church—has already led to plenty of jokes and memes about his potential interactions with various bits of American pop culture. And that cultural exposure apparently extends to some casual video games, making Leo XIV our first confirmed gamer pope.

Speaking to NBC5 Chicago Thursday, papal sibling John Prevost confirmed that the soon-to-be-pope played a couple of games just before flying to the papal conclave earlier this week. "First we do Wordle, because this is a regular thing," Prevost said. "Then we do Words with Friends. It's something to keep his mind off life in the real world..."

OK, so the pope's love of casual word games doesn't exactly put him in the same category of people who are speedrunning Doom slaughter maps. But it's still striking to realize that the 69-year-old pontiff is among the reported 44 percent of American Baby Boomer men who play video games regularly and the 15 percent of Americans aged 55 and over who have played Wordle specifically.

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The British car industry got a big break from US President Donald Trump yesterday afternoon. Trump and UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer have agreed to a bilateral trade agreement that cuts tariffs on a range of imports from the UK, including pharmaceuticals, aluminum and steel, and cars.

Now, the first 100,000 cars that come to the US from the UK will only be subject to a 10 percent tariff rather than the 27.5 percent they have been under since the start of this trade war in April.

"The car industry is vital to the UK’s economic prosperity, sustaining 250,000 jobs," said Jaguar Land Rover CEO Adrian Mardell. "We warmly welcome this deal which secures greater certainty for our sector and the communities it supports. We would like to thank the UK and US Governments for agreeing this deal at pace and look forward to continued engagement over the coming months," Mardell said.

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For decades now, you could count on there being a certain rhythm to a Doom game. From the ’90s originals to the series’ resurrection in recent years, the Doom games have always been about using constant, zippy motion to dodge through a sea of relatively slow-moving bullets, maintaining your distance while firing back at encroaching hordes of varied monsters. The specific guns and movement options you could call on might change from game to game, but the basic rhythm of that dodge-and-shoot gameplay never has.

Just a few minutes in, Doom: The Dark Ages throws out that traditional Doom rhythm almost completely. The introduction of a crucial shield adds a whole suite of new verbs to the Doom vocabulary; in addition to running, dodging, and shooting, you’ll now be blocking, parrying, and stunning enemies for counterattacks. In previous Doom games, standing still for any length of time often led to instant death. In The Dark Ages, standing your ground to absorb and/or deflect incoming enemy attacks is practically required at many points.

During a preview event earlier this year, the game’s developers likened this change to the difference between flying a fighter jet and piloting a tank. That’s a pretty apt metaphor, and it's not exactly an unwelcome change for a series that might be in need of a shake-up. But it only works if you go in ready to play like a tank and not like the fighter jet that has been synonymous with Doom for decades.

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The European Commission has launched a new initiative to attract researchers and scientists to the European Union—especially those from the United States. The Choose Europe for Science program, backed with more than half a billion dollars, is designed to offer an alternative to researchers who have been forced to seek new opportunities following cuts in scientific funding imposed by President Donald Trump’s administration.

The program will invest €500 million ($568 million) between 2025 and 2027 to recruit specialists in various fields of knowledge to come and work in Europe. The initiative also includes a target for member states to allocate 3 percent of their GDP to R&D projects by 2030.

“The role of science in today’s world is questioned,” warned Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, in a statement on Tuesday. “What a gigantic miscalculation. I believe that science holds the key to our future here in Europe. Without it, we simply cannot address today’s global challenges—from health to new tech, from climate to oceans.”

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Back in 2024, a system set up to identify objects that suddenly brighten found something unusual. Unfortunately, the automated system that was supposed to identify it couldn't figure out what it was looking at. Now, about a year later, we know it's the first tidal disruption event—meaning a star being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole—identified at visual wavelengths. It's also a rather unusual one, in that the supermassive black hole in question does not reside at the center of its galaxy. Instead, there's an even more massive object there, which is feeding on matter at the same time.

A mystery object

The object, now called AT2024tvd, was identified by the Zwicky Transient Facility, which is set up to scan the entire northern sky over a period of just two days, after which it repeats the process. Combined with software that scans the data for changes, these repeated exposures allow the system to identify objects that suddenly brighten (or, potentially, anything that suddenly goes dark). Among the events it can identify are tidal disruption events, where a star gets spaghettified by the enormous gravity of a supermassive black hole.

Normally, supermassive black holes live at the center of galaxies. So, the software that does the scanning will only flag something as a potential tidal disruption event if it coincides with the presence of a previous light source at the same location. And that wasn't the case with AT2024tvd, which appeared to be over 2,500 light-years from the center of the galaxy. As a result, the software didn't flag it as a potential tidal disruption event; people didn't figure out what it was until they looked more closely at it.

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Welcome to Edition 7.43 of the Rocket Report! There's been a lot of recent news in hypersonic testing. We cover some of that in this week's newsletter, which is just a taste of the US military's appetite for fielding its own hypersonic weapons, and conversely, the Pentagon's emphasis on the detection and destruction of an enemy's hypersonic missiles. China has already declared its first hypersonic weapons operational, and Russia claims to have them, too. Now, the Pentagon is finally close to placing hypersonic missiles with combat units. Many US rocket companies believe the hypersonics sector is a lucrative business. Some companies have enough confidence in this emerging market—or lack of faith in the traditional space launch market—to pivot entirely toward hypersonics. I'm interested in seeing if their bets pay off.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Stratolaunch tests reusable hypersonic rocket plane. Stratolaunch has finally found a use for the world's largest airplane. Twice in the last five months, the company launched a hypersonic vehicle over the Pacific Ocean, accelerated it to more than five times the speed of sound, and autonomously landed at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Ars reports. Stratolaunch used the same Talon-A vehicle for both flights, demonstrating its reusability, a characteristic that sets it apart from competitors. Zachary Krevor, Stratolaunch's president and CEO, said his team aims to ramp up to monthly flights by the end of the year.

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Far fewer babies went to the hospital struggling to breathe from RSV, a severe respiratory infection, after the debut of a new vaccine and treatment this season, according to an analysis published today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

RSV, or respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus, is the leading cause of hospitalization for infants in the US. An estimated 58,000–80,000 children younger than 5 years old are hospitalized each year. Newborns—babies between 0 and 2 months—are the most at risk of being hospitalized with RSV. The virus circulates seasonally, typically rising in the fall and peaking in the winter, like many other respiratory infections.

But the 2024–2025 season was different—there were two new ways to protect against the infection. One is a maternal vaccine, Pfizer's Abrysvo, which is given to pregnant people when their third trimester aligns with RSV season (generally September through January). Maternal antibodies generated from the vaccination pass to the fetus in the uterus and can protect a newborn in the first few months of life. The other new protection against RSV is a long-acting monoclonal antibody treatment, nirsevimab, which is given to babies under 8 months old as they enter or are born into their first RSV season and may not be protected by maternal antibodies.

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Kosmos 482, a Soviet-era spacecraft shrouded in Cold War secrecy, will reenter the Earth's atmosphere in the next few days after misfiring on a journey to Venus more than 50 years ago.

On average, a piece of space junk the size of Kosmos 482, with a mass of about a half-ton, falls into the atmosphere about once per week. What's different this time is that Kosmos 482 was designed to land on Venus, with a titanium heat shield built to withstand scorching temperatures, and structures engineered to survive atmospheric pressures nearly 100 times higher than Earth's.

So, there's a good chance the spacecraft will survive the extreme forces it encounters during its plunge through the atmosphere. Typically, space debris breaks apart and burns up during reentry, with only a small fraction of material reaching the Earth's surface. The European Space Agency, one of several institutions that track space debris, says Kosmos 482 is "highly likely" to reach Earth's surface in one piece.

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Using AI can be a double-edged sword, according to new research from Duke University. While generative AI tools may boost productivity for some, they might also secretly damage your professional reputation.

On Thursday, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a study showing that employees who use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini at work face negative judgments about their competence and motivation from colleagues and managers.

"Our findings reveal a dilemma for people considering adopting AI tools: Although AI can enhance productivity, its use carries social costs," write researchers Jessica A. Reif, Richard P. Larrick, and Jack B. Soll of Duke's Fuqua School of Business.

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On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that Instacart CEO Fidji Simo will join the maker of ChatGPT as "CEO of Applications" later this year, according to a company blog post. Simo, who has served on the company's board since March 2024, will oversee business and operational teams while continuing to report directly to Altman in the newly created role. Altman will remain the primary CEO of OpenAI.

According to Reuters, Simo spent a decade at Meta, including a stint serving as the head of Facebook from 2019 to 2021. She also currently sits on the board of e-commerce services site Shopify.

The announcement came earlier than planned due to what Altman described as "a leak" that "accelerated our timeline." At OpenAI, Simo will manage what Altman called "traditional company functions" as the organization enters its "next phase of growth." The applications category at OpenAI includes products like ChatGPT, the popular AI assistant.

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Login credentials belonging to an employee at both the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Department of Government Efficiency have appeared in multiple public leaks from info-stealer malware, a strong indication that devices belonging to him have been hacked in recent years.

Kyle Schutt is a 30-something-year-old software engineer who, according to Dropsite News, gained access in February to a “core financial management system” belonging to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As an employee of DOGE, Schutt accessed FEMA’s proprietary software for managing both disaster and non-disaster funding grants. Under his role at CISA, he likely is privy to sensitive information regarding the security of civilian federal government networks and critical infrastructure throughout the US.

A steady stream of published credentials

According to journalist Micah Lee, user names and passwords for logging in to various accounts belonging to Schutt have been published at least four times since 2023 in logs from stealer malware. Stealer malware typically infects devices through trojanized apps, phishing, or software exploits. Besides pilfering login credentials, stealers can also log all keystrokes and capture or record screen output. The data is then sent to the attacker and, occasionally after that, can make its way into public credential dumps.

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The Trump administration's steep staff cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) triggered shutdowns of several climate-related programs Thursday.

Perhaps most notably, the NOAA announced it would be shuttering the "billion-dollar weather and climate disasters" database for vague reasons. Since 1980, the database made it possible to track the growing costs of the nation's most devastating weather events, critically pooling various sources of private data that have long been less accessible to the public.

In that time, 403 weather and climate disasters in the US triggered more than $2.945 trillion in costs, and NOAA notes that's a conservative estimate. Considering that CNN noted the average number of disasters in the past five years jumped from nine annually to 24, shutting down the database could leave communities in the dark on costs of emerging threats. All the NOAA can likely say is to continue looking at the historic data to keep up with trends.

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