The US Space Force announced Friday it selected SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin for $13.7 billion in contracts to deliver the Pentagon's most critical military to orbit into the early 2030s.
These missions will launch the government's heaviest national security satellites, like the National Reconnaissance Office's large bus-sized spy platforms, and deploy them into bespoke orbits. These types of launches often demand heavy-lift rockets with long-duration upper stages that can cruise through space for six or more hours.
The contracts awarded Friday are part of the next phase of the military's space launch program once dominated by United Launch Alliance, the 50-50 joint venture between legacy defense contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
AI image generator Midjourney released its first new model in quite some time today; dubbed V7, it's a ground-up rework that is available in alpha to users now.
There are two areas of improvement in V7: the first is better images, and the second is new tools and workflows.
Starting with the image improvements, V7 promises much higher coherence and consistency for hands, fingers, body parts, and "objects of all kinds." It also offers much more detailed and realistic textures and materials, like skin wrinkles or the subtleties of a ceramic pot.
After The New York Times sued OpenAI in December 2023βalleging that ChatGPT outputs violate copyrights by regurgitating news articlesβthe ChatGPT maker tried and failed to argue that the claims were time-barred.
According to OpenAI, the NYT should have known that ChatGPT was being trained on its articles and raised its lawsuit in 2020, partly because of the newspaper's own reporting. To support this, OpenAI pointed to a single November 2020 article, where the NYT reported that OpenAI was analyzing a trillion words on the Internet. But on Friday, US district judge Sidney Stein disagreed, denying OpenAI's motion to dismiss the NYT's copyright claims partly based on one NYT journalist's reporting.
In his opinion, Stein confirmed that it's OpenAI's burden to prove that the NYT knew that ChatGPT would potentially violate its copyrights two years prior to its release in November 2022. And so far, OpenAI has not met that burden.
"There are so many devices we play video games on," ESA senior vice president Aubrey Quinn said in an interview with IGN just as Nintendo's preorder delay news broke. "There are other consoles... VR headsets, our smartphones, people who love PC games; if we think it's just the Switch, then we aren't taking it seriously.
"This is company-agnostic, this is an entire industry," she continued. "There's going to be an impact on the entire industry."
A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned.
The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day or two; in other cases, they change almost hourly. The constant flux complicates the task of isolating the true origin of the infrastructure. It also provides redundancy. By the time defenders block one address or domain, new ones have already been assigned.
A significant threat
βThis technique poses a significant threat to national security, enabling malicious cyber actors to consistently evade detection,β the NSA, FBI, and their counterparts from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand warned Thursday. βMalicious cyber actors, including cybercriminals and nation-state actors, use fast flux to obfuscate the locations of malicious servers by rapidly changing Domain Name System (DNS) records. Additionally, they can create resilient, highly available command and control (C2) infrastructure, concealing their subsequent malicious operations.β
On this day in 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded a company called Micro-Soft in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The two men had worked together before, as members of the Lakeside Programming group in the early 70s and as co-founders of a road traffic analysis company called Traf-O-Data. But Micro-Soft, later renamed to drop the hyphen and relocated to its current headquarters in Redmond, Washington, would be the company that would transform personal computing over the next five decades.
I'm not here to do a history of Microsoft, because Wikipedia already exists and because the company has already put together a gauzy 50th-anniversary retrospective site with some retro-themed wallpapers. But the anniversary did make me try to remember which Microsoft product I consciously used for the first time, the one that made me aware of the company and the work it was doing.
Google was caught flat-footed by the sudden skyrocketing interest in generative AI despite its role in developing the underlying technology. This prompted the company to refocus its considerable resources on catching up to OpenAI. Since then, we've seen the detail-flubbing Bard and numerous versions of the multimodal Gemini models. While Gemini has struggled to make progress in benchmarks and user experience, that could be changing with the new 2.5 Pro (Experimental) release. With big gains in benchmarks and vibes, this might be the first Google model that can make a dent in ChatGPT's dominance.
We recently spoke to Google's Tulsee Doshi, director of product management for Gemini, to talk about the process of releasing Gemini 2.5, as well as where Google's AI models are going in the future.
Welcome to the vibes era
Google may have had a slow start in building generative AI products, but the Gemini team has picked up the pace in recent months. The company released Gemini 2.0 in December, showing a modest improvement over the 1.5 branch. It only took three months to reach 2.5, meaning Gemini 2.0 Pro wasn't even out of the experimental stage yet. To hear Doshi tell it, this was the result of Google's long-term investments in Gemini.
European Union regulators are preparing major penalties against X, including a fine that could exceed $1 billion, according to a New York Times report yesterday.
The European Commission determined last year that Elon Musk's social network violated the Digital Services Act. Regulators are now in the process of determining what punishment to impose.
"The penalties are set to include a fine and demands for product changes," the NYT report said, attributing the information to "four people with knowledge of the plans." The penalty is expected to be issued this summer and would be the first one under the new EU law.
When Francesca Mani was 14 years old, boys at her New Jersey high school used nudify apps to target her and other girls. At the time, adults did not seem to take the harassment seriously, telling her to move on after she demanded more severe consequences than just a single boy's one or two-day suspension.
Mani refused to take adults' advice, going over their heads to lawmakers who were more sensitive to her demands. And now, she's won her fight to criminalize deepfakes. On Wednesday, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed a law that he said would help victims "take a stand against deceptive and dangerous deepfakes" by making it a crime to create or share fake AI nudes of minors or non-consenting adultsβas well as deepfakes seeking to meddle with elections or damage any individuals' or corporations' reputations.
Under the law, victims targeted by nudify apps like Mani can sue bad actors, collecting up to $1,000 per harmful image created either knowingly or recklessly. New Jersey hopes these "more severe consequences" will deter kids and adults from creating harmful images, as well as emphasize to schoolsβwhose lax response to fake nudes has been heavily criticizedβthat AI-generated nude images depicting minors are illegal and must be taken seriously and reported to police. It imposes a maximum fine of $30,000 on anyone creating or sharing deepfakes for malicious purposes, as well as possible punitive damages if a victim can prove that images were created in willful defiance of the law.
Board game designer and entrepreneur Jamey Stegmaier has published hit games like Scythe and Wingspanβthe latter a personal favorite of mine, with a delightfully gentle theme about birdsβbut this week found him in a gloomy mood.
"Last night I tried to work on a new game I'm brainstorming," he wrote in a blog post yesterday, "but itβs really hard to create something for the future when that future looks so grim. I mostly just found myself staring blankly at the enormity of the newly announced 54 percent tariff on goods manufactured in China and imported to the US."
Most US board games are made in China, though Germany (the home of modern hobby board gaming) also has manufacturing facilities. While printed content, such as card games, can be manufactured in the US, it's far harder to find anyone who can make intricate board pieces like bespoke wooden bits and custom dice. And if you can, the price is often astronomical. "I recall getting quoted a cost of $10 for just a standard empty box from a company in the US that specializes in making boxes," Stegmaier notedβthough a complete game can be produced and boxed in China for that same amount.
Plant cells are surrounded by an intricately structured protective coat called the cell wall. Itβs built of cellulose microfibrils intertwined with polysaccharides like hemicellulose or pectin. We have known what plant cells look like without their walls, and we know what they look like when the walls are fully assembled, but weβve never seen the wall-building process in action. βWe knew the starting point and the finishing point, but had no idea what happens in between,β says Eric Lam, a plant biologist at Rutgers University. Heβs a co-author of the study that caught wall-building plant cells in action for the first time. And once we saw how the cell wall building worked, it looked nothing like how we drew that in biology handbooks.
Camera-shy builders
Plant cells without walls, known as protoplasts, are very fragile, and it has been difficult to keep them alive under a microscope for the several hours needed for them to build walls. Plant cells are also very light-sensitive, and most microscopy techniques require pointing a strong light source at them to get good imagery.
Then there was the issue of tracking their progress. βCellulose is not fluorescent, so you canβt see it with traditional microscopy,β says Shishir Chundawat, a biologist at Rutgers. βThat was one of the biggest issues in the past.β The only way you can see it is if you attach a fluorescent marker to it. Unfortunately, the markers typically used to label cellulose were either bound to other compounds or were toxic to the plant cells. Given their fragility and light sensitivity, the cells simply couldnβt survive very long with toxic markers as well.
The white-necked jacobin (Florisuga mellivora) is a jewel-toned hummingbird found in the neotropical lowlands of South America and the Caribbean. It shimmers blue and green in the sunlight as it flits from flower to flower, a tiny spectacle of the rainforest.
Jay Falk, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama, expected to find something like that when he sought this species out in Panama. What he didnβt expect was a caterpillar in the nest of one of these birds. At least it looked like a caterpillarβit was actually a hatchling with some highly unusual camouflage.
The chick was covered in long, fine feathers similar to the urticating hairs that some caterpillars are covered in. These often toxic barbed hairs deter predators, who can suffer anything from inflammation to nausea and even death if they attack. Falk realized he was witnessing mimicry only seen in one other bird species and never before in hummingbirds. It seemed that the nestlings of this species had evolved a defense: convincing predators they were poisonous.
Will this Chevrolet Silverado EV be the biggest electric vehicle we test this year? Almost certainly. Fractionally narrower and less tall than a Hummer EV pickup at more than 18 feet (just under 6 m) long and with a curb weight of 8,532 lbs (3,870 kg), the Silverado EV is what happens when Chevy's electric vehicle engineers get tasked with making their rivals over at Ford feel like they didn't try hard enough with the electric F-150.
Now that production has been ongoing for a while, Chevy is filling out the lower trim levels. For commercial customers, there's a Work Truck, but for normies, the entry point is now the LT trim, at a tax credit-friendlyβif still wallet-munchingβ$75,195 (for as long as the tax credit still lastsΒ and until the effect of pointless and damaging trade tariffs make themselves known, of course).
The 645 hp (481 kW), 756 lb-ft (1,037 Nm) Silverado EV LT comes with the smaller of the two battery packs offered to non-commercial customers. That adjective is doing a lot of work there; a useable 170 kWh is indeed smaller than the 200 kWh you can find in the more expensive RST Max Range, but it's also more than double the capacity of something like a Hyundai Ioniq 5. The range estimate is a commensurate 408 miles (657 km), or "just" 390 miles (628 km) if, as in our test pickup, the premium package has been fitted.
Nintendo Switch 2 preorders, which were due to begin on April 9, are being delayed indefinitely amid the financial uncertainty surrounding Donald Trump's recent announcement of massive tariffs on most US trading partners.
"Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions,β Nintendo said in a statement cited by Polygon. "Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged."
Outside of several mentions in the Rocket Report newsletter dating back to 2018, Ars Technica has not devoted too much attention to covering a novel California space company named SpinLaunch.
That's because the premise is so outlandish as to almost not feel real. The company aims to build a kinetic launch system that spins a rocket around at speeds up to 4,700 mph (7,500 km/h) before sending it upward toward space. Then, at an altitude of 40 miles (60 km) or so, the rocket would ignite its engines to achieve orbital velocity. Essentially, SpinLaunch wants to yeet things into space.
But the company was no joke. After being founded in 2014, it raised more than $150 million over the next decade. It built a prototype accelerator in New Mexico and performed a series of flight tests. The flights reached altitudes of "tens of thousands" of feet, according to the company, and were often accompanied by slickly produced videos.
For two decades, farmer John Burk has been working to improve the soil on his farm in Michigan, taking a few extra steps to make it more resilient and productive. His efforts have paid off.
βWhen we have the dry, hot summers or lack of rainfall, our crops can sustain the dry spells better. We donβt have huge yield decreases,β Burk said. βAnd when it rains and we have the freak storms, like it seems to do so much now, we donβt have the ponding and all the runoff.β
An added bonus: He needs less fertilizer, a major operating expense.
Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon's WoT TV series. Now we're back in the saddle for season 3βalong with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory.
These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We'll do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there's always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.
New episodes of The Wheel of Time season 3 will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers episode six, "The Shadow in the Night," which was released on April 3.
Welcome to Edition 7.38 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX test fired a Super Heavy booster that launched in January on Thursday, in South Texas. This sets up the possibility of a reused Super Heavy rocket launching within the next several weeks, and would be an important step forward in the Starship launch program. It's also a bold step given that there is a lot riding on this Starship launch, given that the last two have failed due to propulsion issues with the rocket's upper stage.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.
European commercial launch industry joins the space race. The first flight of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket didn't last long on Sunday, Ars reports. The booster's nine engines switched off as the rocket cartwheeled upside-down and fell a short distance from its Arctic launch pad in Norway, ending the abbreviated test flight with a spectacular, fiery crash into the sea. However, it marked the beginning of something new in Europe as commercial startups begin launching rockets.
It's well-established that, on the whole, Americans die younger than people in most other high-income countries. For instance, an analysis from 2022 found that the average life expectancy of someone born in Switzerland or Spain in 2019 was 84 years. Meanwhile, the average US life expectancy was 78.8, lower than nearly all other high-income countries, including Canada's, which was 82.3 years. And this was before the pandemic, which only made things worse for the US.
Perhaps some Americans may think that this lower overall life-expectancy doesn't really apply to them if they're middle- or upper-class. After all, wealth inequality and health disparities are huge problems in the US. Those with more money simply have better access to health care and better health outcomes. Well-off Americans live longer, with lifespans on par with their peers in high-income countries, some may think.
It is true that money buys you a longer life in the US. In fact, the link between wealth and mortality may be stronger in the US than in any other high-income country. But, if you think American wealth will put life expectancy in league with Switzerland, you're dead wrong, according to a study in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
As AI hype permeates the Internet, tech and business leaders are already looking toward the next step. AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to a machine with human-like intelligence and capabilities. If today's AI systems are on a path to AGI, we will need new approaches to ensure such a machine doesn't work against human interests.
Unfortunately, we don't have anything as elegant as Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. Researchers at Google DeepMind have been working on this problem and have released a new technical paper (PDF) that explains how to develop AGI safely, which you can download at your convenience.
It contains a huge amount of detail, clocking in at 108 pages before references. While some in the AI field believe AGI is a pipe dream, the authors of the DeepMind paper project that it could happen by 2030. With that in mind, they aimed to understand the risks of a human-like synthetic intelligence, which they acknowledge could lead to "severe harm."
