Now, a new paper suggests that the Farallon plate is still making its presence felt far from the coasts, powering one of North America's most distinctive phenomena: the Yellowstone hotspot, which has periodically blanketed much of the continent with ash. The new proposal suggests that the plate's vanishing act has created stresses that have opened paths for molten rock to reach the surface.

Hot spot or not?

Geologic hot spots exist around the globe; they're areas where deep material from the Earth's interior finds its way to the surface far from the edges of plates. In many cases, the heat that powers these hot spots is the product of what's called a mantle plume: a blob of hot molten rock that convection drives to the surface of the mantle. In many cases, the plume appears to stay in place as the plates drift across it, creating a chain of progressively older islands as you move away from the hot spot.

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That should keep the mechanics and engineers quite busy, but in case not, technical representatives from each team as well as the FIA (the sport's governing body) are sitting down throughout the month to try to fix some problems that are a consequence of F1's new technical rules.

This is about hybrids, you say?

From the start of this year, F1 cars have new hybrid power units. There's a 1.6 L turbocharged V6 engine that runs on carbon-neutral gasoline, which generates 400 kW (536 hp). And there's an electric motor-generator unit (or MGU) that outputs up to 350 kW (469 hp) as long as there's charge in the 4 MJ (1.1 kWh) battery pack. As batteries go, that's about the right size for something like a Prius, but in an F1 car at full deployment, it goes from full to empty in little more than 11 seconds.

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The Intercept described the subpoena today. "According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, Reddit has until April 14 to provide a wide range of personal data on one of its users, whom US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been trying unsuccessfully to identify for more than a month," the article said.

The legal saga began in US District Court for the Northern District of California. On March 12, the anonymous Reddit user whose information is being sought filed a motion to quash a summons seeking a host of information from Reddit. The summons was issued by the Department of Homeland Security and directed Reddit to turn information over to an ICE senior special agent.

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The company hinted at this in its "commitment to Windows quality" post last month, and it's announcing details today in another post attributed to Microsoft Principal Group Product Manager Alec Oot.

Since its last reorganization in 2023, the Windows Insider Program has had four testing channels. From least to most stable, these are the Canary channel, the Dev channel, the Beta channel, and the Release Preview channel. Both Canary and Dev are for earlier builds of Windows and new apps, while Beta tends to get things that are closer to finished and much more likely to ship to the general public. The Release Preview channel is a new Windows version's last stop before public release and is usually near-final.

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As previously reported, in an ideal fluid, viscosity largely depends on temperature and pressure: Water will continue to flow regardless of other forces acting on it, such as stirring or mixing. In a non-Newtonian fluid, the viscosity changes in response to an applied strain or shearing force, thereby straddling the boundary between liquid and solid behavior. Stirring a cup of water produces a shearing force, and the water shears to move out of the way. The viscosity remains unchanged. But for non-Newtonian fluids like oobleck, the viscosity changes when a shearing force is applied.

Ketchup, for instance, is a shear-thickening non-Newtonian fluid, which is one reason smacking the bottom of the bottle doesn’t make the ketchup come out any faster; the application of force increases the viscosity. Yogurt, gravy, mud, pudding, and thickened pie fillings are other examples. And so is oobleck.

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YouTube has not posted a standalone blog announcing the change, but existing subscribers are getting email alerts. The higher pricing is also live for new sign-ups in the US as of this writing. Here's the important part of YouTube's email alerts:

To continue delivering great service and features, we’re increasing your price to $15.99/month. We don’t make these decisions lightly, but this update will allow us to continue to improve Premium and support the creators and artists you watch on YouTube.

You will see the change reflected on your June 7, 2026 billing date.

The new $15.99 monthly price is a $2 increase, but if you're on the family plan, the email looks a bit different. For those folks, the price is now $26.99, which is $4 higher. There's also the base Premium Lite subscription that removes most YouTube ads and used to cost $7.99 per month. It's now $1 more.

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To solve this puzzle, Thomas Clements, a paleontologist at the University of Leicester, and his colleagues put this supposed oldest octopus fossil through a series of high-tech imaging tests. They found Pohlsepia was not an octopus at all. Instead, it was a decomposed, squashed nautiloid.

A Rorschach test

The reason a nautiloid managed to masquerade as an octopus for almost a quarter of a century was due to the way that fossils from the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte formed. Around 300 million years ago, this area was a brackish, tidal marine basin that was periodically inundated by massive amounts of iron-rich river mud. When organisms died and were buried in this sediment fan, the high iron content triggered the precipitation of the mineral siderite around their decaying bodies, locking them inside hard geological nodules.

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From the outside, it's hard to tell precisely what form any such "SteamGPT" would take. But looking through variable names and references in the files themselves suggests that Valve may be looking to use AI tools to streamline internal evaluations of in-game incidents and sift through potentially suspicious accounts.

Looking at the variables

As tracked by the automated SteamTracking GitHub project, the term "SteamGPT" appears multiple times in three separate files added in the April 7 Steam client update. In addition to the SteamGPT naming convention—a seemingly obvious reference to the generative pre-trained transformers popularized by ChatGPT and its ilk—the files include mentions of terms like multi-category inference, fine-tuning, and "upstream models" that point to some sort of generative AI system.

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Even if the four astronauts on board the Orion spacecraft discovered a serious flaw in their spacecraft today—and to be clear, from recent images reviewed by NASA experts, everything looks just fine—there is no chance of significantly altering the Artemis II mission’s inexorable return through Earth’s atmosphere on Friday. They're coming back one way or another.

Splashdown is predicted to occur at 8:07 pm ET (00:07 UTC Saturday), a few hundred miles off the coast of Southern California. In large and important ways, this is the most critical phase of the lunar flight. Here, then, is what to expect later today.

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Members of the group known as Explosive Media were putting the finishing touches on their latest AI-generated, Lego-inspired Trump video. The video features a Trump mini-figure colluding with leaders from Gulf states, Iranian officials pressing a big red button labeled “back to the stone age,” and Trump throwing a chair at US generals.

This was the latest of more than a dozen videos the pro-Iran group has released since the beginning of the war in February, many of which have racked up millions of views on mainstream platforms. While Iranian government accounts have posted Lego-style videos in the past, Explosive Media’s content is more sophisticated and scripted. And it's produced by a team of young pro-Iranian creators who appear deeply knowledgeable about the Internet and American culture. Already some critics have alleged the group has ties to the Iranian government.

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When Frey's daughter signed up for Discord, she was 12 and technically not old enough to have an account. But like many kids who, regulators have found, commonly lie about their age to access social media platforms, she didn't want to wait another year to join her friends on the messaging app. Hiding her age, she created an account that listed her as over 18 years old.

Now 13, the teen had been happily using the app for months when she suddenly got locked out of her account after clicking on a link from an attacker posing as Discord support. Since she didn't enable two-factor authentication, the attacker was able to commandeer the account. Frey only found out what was happening when the attacker asked the teen to share her parents' banking information if she wanted to get her account back.

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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.

Alpha rocket may launch offshore. Seagate Space Corporation announced on Monday a "memorandum of understanding" with Firefly Aerospace to explore the development of an offshore launch platform that enables a sea-based launch capability for the Alpha rocket. Seagate Space said it will work closely with Firefly to mature the design of an integrated offshore launch system capable of supporting Alpha.

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But ground controllers revamped the timeline Wednesday as the Artemis II astronauts zoomed toward Earth after a close encounter with the Moon earlier this week. The four astronauts were supposed to take manual control of their Orion spacecraft, named Integrity, for a piloting demonstration Wednesday night.

Instead, mission managers canceled the demo to make time for an additional test of the ship's propulsion system. The goal was to gather data on a "small leak" of helium gas, which Orion uses to push propellant through a series of tanks and pipes to feed the spacecraft's rocket engines, said Jeff Radigan, NASA's lead flight director for the Artemis II mission.

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On Monday, a notice in the Federal Register indicated Kennedy renewed the charter for the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which is done every two years, with the last term having ended April 1. But instead of the usual humdrum renewal process, the notice on Monday indicated big changes were coming to the defining document of the panel, which heavily influences federal vaccine policy that, in turn, influences state requirements and insurance coverage.

The new charter, published Thursday, reveals new responsibilities that redirect advisors toward topics and terms dear to anti-vaccine activists. For instance, ACIP members will now be responsible for "considering analysis of cumulative effects of vaccines and their constituent components." This wording echoes explicit goals of Kennedy's anti-vaccine allies, who aim to pin complex conditions—such as allergies, autism, and neurodevelopmental conditions—on combinations of vaccinations or common ingredients in those shots, such as aluminum adjuvants. This is a pivot from anti-vaccine activists' earlier attacks that focused on individual vaccines, such as the false, fraudulent claim that the measles vaccine is linked to autism—a claim that has been roundly debunked by dozens of high-quality studies.

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Whatever the truth of this claim, the system card is a fascinating document. Anthropic is well-known as one of the more "AI might be conscious!" companies in the industry, and its new system card claims that as models become more powerful, "It becomes increasingly likely that they have some form of experience, interests, or welfare that matters intrinsically in the way that human experience and interests do."

The company isn't sure about this, it makes clear, but it says that "our concern is growing over time."

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Now, following up on that success, a large Chinese collaboration has followed up with a description of an improved gene editing system that produces more focused changes and fewer mistakes. And they've used it to produce a therapy that addresses a disease that's closely related to sickle-cell anemia: β-Thalassaemia.

Gene editing and its limits

The CRISPR/Cas-9 system provides bacteria with a form of immunity. It uses specially structured RNAs (called guide RNAs) that can base-pair with a targeted sequence. The Cas-9 protein then recognizes this structure and cuts the DNA nearby. This is quite effective when the guide RNA can base-pair with a DNA virus, as the resulting cut will inactivate the virus.

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Speaking at a press briefing at Nutanix’s .NEXT conference in Chicago this week, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said that “about 30,000 customers” have migrated from VMware to the rival platform, pointing to customer disapproval over Broadcom’s VMware strategy, SDxCentral, a London-based IT publication, reported today.

“I think there's no doubt that the customer sentiment continues to be negative about Broadcom,” Ramaswami said, per SDxCentral.

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"What's especially striking is that the chimpanzees are killing former group members," said co-author Aaron Sandel, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, Austin. "The new group identities are overriding cooperative relationships that had existed for years. I would caution against anyone calling this a civil war. But the polarization and collective violence that we have observed with these chimpanzees may give us insight into our own species."

The authors analyzed 24 years' worth of data from social networks, 10 years of GPS tracking, and 30 years of demographic data on the Ngogo chimps in Uganda's Kibale National Park. They identified three distinct phases to the split. First there was an abrupt shift as chimp relationships became polarized into two distinct clusters: Western and Central. The chimps then spent the next two years increasingly avoiding those in their rival cluster; there were very few interactions across clusters, and Western male chimps started patrolling their territory, showing increased aggression toward Central males. By 2018, the fissure had become permanent.

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Their memories of Monday's encounter with the Moon are still fresh as they return to Earth, heading for reentry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on Friday evening.

"I'm actually getting chills right now just thinking about it. My palms are sweating," said Reid Wiseman, commander of the Artemis II mission. "But it is amazing to watch your home planet disappear behind the Moon. You can see the atmosphere. You could actually see the terrain on the Moon projected across the Earth as the Earth was eclipsing behind the Moon. It was just an unbelievable sight, and then it was gone. It was out of sight."

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The ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was issued by a panel of three judges appointed by Republicans, including Trump appointees Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao. Katsas previously served as deputy counsel to the president during Trump's first term, while Rao served in the Trump administration's Office of Management and Budget. The judges' decision is a setback for Anthropic, but it's only one of two cases it filed against the Trump administration, and the AI firm has had more success in the other one.

Anthropic says it exercised its First Amendment rights by refusing to let Claude AI models be used for autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of Americans, and that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blacklisted it in retaliation. Trump directed all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic technology, and Hegseth labeled Anthropic a "Supply-Chain Risk to National Security," prohibiting military contractors from doing business with Anthropic.

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