"To evaluate and manage threats to personal safety, property, and law enforcement, the FBI requires professional service firms that can provide License Plate Readers (LPRs) for tracking subjects on roads and highways over the US and its territories," the FBI said in a Request for Proposals (RFP) published on May 14. The FBI said the winning bidder or bidders "must provide law enforcement and/or commercial license plate reader data provided through the Contractor’s existing platform." The system must cover 75 percent of locations, the FBI said.

The system must offer the ability to search for license plate information "and other descriptive data such as vehicle description information, time/date criteria, and geo-location criteria," the FBI said. "Additionally, the system must provide search result notifications. The Contractor system must have the ability to access and/or query cameras across the United States and its territories. The Contractor system must be capable of providing this data in near real time."

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Prime Video has released one last trailer for its upcoming live action series, Spider-Noir, starring Nicolas Cage, and once again it's been released in two formats: one in black and white (below) and another in color (above), which the showrunners are calling “True Hue.” Seriously, the more footage we see of this series, the more eager we are to find out if the series lives up to its marketing. And the final trailer—which really plays up the deadpan humor and is set to Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black"—is very promising.

As previously reported, Marvel Comics created its “noir” line in 2009, reinterpreting familiar Marvel characters in an alternate universe, usually set during the Great Depression in the US. A version of the Spider-Noir character, voiced by Cage, briefly appeared in the animated masterpieces Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Across the Spider-Verse (2023). (He is set to reprise that role in the upcoming Beyond the Spider-Verse.)

Cage is playing Ben Reilly, a hard-boiled PI with a secret superhero identity, The Spider. Per the official premise: “Spider-Noir tells the story of Ben Reilly, a seasoned, down on his luck private investigator in 1930s New York, who is forced to grapple with his past life, following a deeply personal tragedy, as the city’s one and only superhero.”

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The answer is complex. It is not necessarily the money. The space agency's science budget this year is $7.25 billion, roughly the same as it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation. This is despite attempts by the Trump administration to drastically reduce NASA science funding.

In the early months of his tenure, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman's focus has been on human spaceflight and the Moon. This isn't terribly surprising given NASA's wildly successful Artemis II mission carrying four astronauts around the Moon last month. Since taking office in December, Isaacman has announced an overhaul of the Artemis program, canceling a space station to be built in orbit around the Moon in favor of construction of a base on the lunar surface.

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The new price will not affect current Lifetime Plex Pass holders.

A Lifetime Plex Pass allows you to stream from your own Plex Media Server to a device connected to your own network, to stream from the server remotely, and to allow others to stream remotely from your server.

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While Google says its system will also work for physics, both groups exclusively present biological data, and largely straightforward hypotheses—this drug will work for that. So, this is not an attempt to replace either scientists or the scientific process. Instead, it's meant to help with what current AIs are best at: chewing through massive amounts of information that humans would struggle to come to grips with.

What's this good for?

There are some distinctions between the two systems, but both are what is termed agentic; they operate in the background by calling out to separate tools. (Microsoft has taken a similar approach with its science assistant as well; OpenAI seems to be an exception in that it simply tuned an LLM for biology.) And, while there are differences between them that we'll highlight, they are both focused on the same general issue: the utter profusion of scientific information.

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SynthID is not Google's only AI labeling strategy. It's also committed to the C2PA standard, which tags content with metadata describing how it was created. Google began using C2PA more prominently with its Pixel 10 smartphones. Photos taken with the Pixel 10 include metadata describing how they were processed. If a highly zoomed image includes generative elements, it gets an AI tag, too.

Google now says this same feature is coming to videos recorded on Pixel 8, 9, and 10 phones in an update in the coming weeks. It's also adding C2PA scanning to Gemini, allowing the chatbot to explain a file's providence based on the content labeling. This same capability will come to Chrome and Search in a few months.

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The now-offline public repo—named, somewhat aspirationally, "Private-CISA"—was brought to Krebs' attention by GitGuardian's Guillaume Valadon, who was alerted to the repo's presence by GitGuardian's public code scans. Krebs says that Valadon approached him after receiving no responses from the Private-CISA repo's owner.

In an email to Krebs, Valadon claimed that the repo's commit logs show that GitHub's default protections against committing secrets—protections designed to protect unwitting or unskilled developers against exactly this kind of stupidness—had been disabled by the repo's administrator.

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The charter's revisions under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would have allowed Kennedy to appoint dubiously qualified anti-vaccine allies to advise the CDC. It also would have directed the CDC panel to focus on alleged vaccine injuries and risks and welcomed fringe groups and anti-vaccine organizations to participate in developing federal vaccine policy.

Kennedy's move to reshape the CDC panel—the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP—came amid Kennedy's many other attempts to undermine it, as well as a court order to undo that meddling.

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That has been a trend with Google's tick-tock model updates over the past year, but the team says this release is special. Gemini 3.5 Flash supposedly offers frontier-level intelligence while also being efficient enough that it may finally make complex agentic tasks worth doing at scale. Tulsee Doshi, senior director of product management for Gemini, explains that the innovations of Gemini 3.5 Flash are woven through multiple Google products, and this is just the start.

Credit: Google

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The latest entry in the ultra-fast refresh race is LG's 24.5" UltraGear 25G590B, which the company announced this week as "the world’s first Full HD gaming monitor with a native 1000Hz refresh rate" ahead of a planned launch in "select markets" in the second half of the year. That "Full HD" promise means LG's 1,000 Hz display hits the 1080p threshold that is by far the most common resolution reported by gamers in Steam's regular hardware surveys.

That would represent a decent step up from the likes of Acer's Predator XB273U F6, Samsung's Odyssey G6, or Phillips' EVNIA 27M2N5500XD, all of which have to shift down to a relatively blurry 720p resolution to run at a full 1,000 Hz (but which support 1440p resolutions at a still-quite-fast 500 Hz). LG also notes that its high-end monitor can hit its resolution and refresh rate specs natively, without the need for any "dual mode" rebooting shenanigans to get the fastest performance.

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“I’m extremely proud of the historic level of investment in America’s bridges—at more than $50 billion, it’s the largest such investment in our history. And the BUILD America 250 Act ensures that electric vehicle owners begin paying their fair share for the use of our roads," said committee chairperson Sam Graves (R-Mo.).

Should the bill pass—and it enjoys support from the Democratic Party, too—you will be required to pay a $130 federal registration fee to drive an EV. And starting in 2029, that fee will increase by $5 each year until it reaches $150. Plug-in hybrids don't escape untaxed, either; the fee for a PHEV begins at $35 a year and will escalate by $5 each year until it reaches $50 annually. And if state departments of transport don't collect this federal EV tax, the federal government will "withhold an amount equal to 125 percent of the amount owed from the state’s highway apportionment."

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Civ 7 introduced a new approach to play wherein players would change civilizations from their initial selection twice by the end of a game. Lots of players said, "Wait a minute: we're literally not building a civilization to stand the test of time anymore." After such a negative reception at launch, longtime series fans began to wonder whether the franchise would continue to stand the test of time.

It's clearly not a coincidence that the new, major update for the game reaching players today is titled "Test of Time." It's a major reworking of several of the game's key systems, and it reintroduces the ability to play one civ from beginning to end while retaining some of the big ideas that defined Civ 7 at launch.

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The proposal, announced Monday morning and contingent on state and federal regulatory approval, would result in a company that leads in nearly every aspect of the US power and utility industry, including overall electricity generation, natural gas generation, and renewables.

The $67 billion deal combines NextEra’s size and reach with Dominion’s positioning as the local utility for the world’s largest concentration of data centers in northern Virginia. But the results are likely bad for consumers and the environment, creating a company with enormous financial and political strength that will be difficult to effectively regulate, according to consumer advocates and analysts.

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The mission, which tested power, propulsion, tracking, and a multitude of other technologies needed for Vast's Haven-1 space station, was evidently so successful that the company is ready to use its spaceflight capabilities for other purposes. The Long Beach, California-based company announced Tuesday that it plans to begin selling high-powered satellite buses.

"Every single successful space company is diversified in its products," said Max Haot, chief executive of Vast Space, in an interview. "So for us it really was a question of when, not if."

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The latest assertions of Iranian authority over the Strait of Hormuz were announced in a brief statement by Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesperson for Iran’s military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “We will impose fees on internet cables” Zolfaghari wrote in a May 9 post. It was not immediately clear how Iran might implement such fees or impose its rules on cable projects, given that the majority of routes pass through Oman-controlled waters.

But Tasnim and Fars, both Iranian state-linked media channels, laid out more detailed proposals on how Iran could charge license fees to US tech giants for the use and maintenance of undersea cables carrying regional Internet traffic, according to The Guardian. For example, the Tasnim plan described charging tech companies—specifically naming Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft—license fees for cable usage while also claiming that Iran alone has the right to repair and maintain the subsea cables.

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As of May 17, there were 10 confirmed cases, 336 suspected cases, and 88 deaths in the DRC, as well as two confirmed cases and one death in neighboring Uganda, according to the latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has offices in the region. The numbers already put the outbreak within the top 10 Ebola outbreaks recorded by size, though still far from the worst—the 2014–2016 West African outbreak had over 28,000 cases and 11,000 deaths.

International emergency

On Sunday, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), though it noted that it does not meet the criteria for a pandemic emergency. In making the PHEIC determination, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cited several factors in addition to the immediate large size, including clusters of suspected cases and deaths in multiple DRC health zones, four deaths among healthcare workers, and a lack of apparent links between geographically distant cases and clusters. The features collectively suggest that the outbreak is larger than what is currently being detected and is spreading regionally.

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The case had already been dismissed with prejudice by a district court, which ruled there was no way to amend the complaint to possibly save it. But Nikko D'Ambrosio—who accused more than two dozen women of defaming him and blamed Meta for supposedly boosting the post to profit off its "entertainment value"—appealed anyway.

Perhaps he felt confident despite his likely tough odds because he was relying on MarcTrent.AI, a law firm that claims to use AI to "uncover legal opportunities traditional firms miss" and "increase legal success rates by 35 percent through predictive modeling."

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At issue is $700 million, already appropriated by Congress, to build a spacecraft, launch it to Mars, and once there to serve as a vehicle to relay communications between the red planet and Earth. But the stakes may be even bigger than this, including the possible resurrection of the recently canceled Mars Sample Return mission.

As part of the new solicitation, NASA says it will conduct the acquisition "as a full and open competition." But will it? That's the question that several people involved with this procurement process are asking. And it could turn messy, quickly.

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Archaeologists recently studied the burial in what's now New South Wales, Australia. They found that the Barkindji ancestors had buried the dingo with the same care and ceremony as any beloved human member of the community and looked after the grave for centuries. The burial reveals that dingoes were, as Australian Museum and University of Sydney archaeologist and study co-author Amy Way puts it, “deeply valued and loved” by ancient people in Australia.

The long-lost dingo

Five years ago, Barkindji Elder Uncle Badger Bates and National Parks and Wildlife Service archaeologist Dan Witter saw bones eroding out of a road cut in Kinchega National Park, an area along the Baaka, or Darling River, in New South Wales, Australia. Badger recognized the bones as a dingo, lying on its left side in what was once a carefully built mound of river mussel shells.

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Musk sued OpenAI in 2024 for making a "fool" out of him after Musk donated $38 million to kick-start OpenAI as a nonprofit, only to later be blindsided when OpenAI created a for-profit arm that he felt gutted funding for the charity while enriching executives like Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.

But the jury found that Musk was aware of OpenAI's restructuring plans as early as 2021 and therefore missed the statute of limitations requiring him to bring the lawsuit within three years, The New York Times reported. Because Musk took too long to file the litigation, the jury deemed Altman and Brockman not liable for any of the claims that Musk brought against OpenAI, the NYT reported. The jury also let Microsoft off the hook, finding no liability for the OpenAI investor after Musk alleged they aided OpenAI's get-rich scheme.

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