The roster of Golden Dome Space-Based Interceptor (SBI) contractors, some of which were previously reported, includes Anduril Industries, Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics Mission Systems, GITAI USA, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Quindar, Raytheon, Sci-Tec, SpaceX, True Anomaly, and Turion Space.

The Space Force made 20 individual awards the 12 companies in late 2025 and early 2026 using an acquisition mechanism known as Other Transaction Authority, or OTA, agreements. OTAs allow the Pentagon to bypass federal acquisition regulations and cast a wide net to attract a larger number of potential contractors, and are especially useful for rapid prototyping. That is exactly what the Space Force wants to see with the first phase of the SBI program.

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The investment follows Amazon's $5 billion initial investment in Anthropic a few days ago; the Amazon deal also leaves the door open to further investment based on performance. Both investments value Anthropic at $350 billion.

Anthropic has seen rapid growth in the use of its Claude models and related products, such as Claude Code, which promises to significantly increase the speed and efficiency with which companies or individuals can develop software. (The reality varies from big improvements to setbacks, depending on the nature of the project and company, how Claude Code is used, and many other factors.)

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This week, the European Commission authorized Moderna to market the vaccine, mRNA-1083 or mCOMBRIAX, making it the world's first authorized combination shot for the two respiratory viruses. The decision follows a positive review in February from a key European Medicines Agency's committee, which paved the way for the approval.

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel welcomed the news. "By combining protection against two significant respiratory viruses in a single dose, our vaccine aims to simplify immunization for adults, particularly those at high risk," Bancel said in a press release. "mCOMBRIAX offers an important new option for Europeans, while also aiming to strengthen the resilience of healthcare systems across Europe."

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The FCC added a new section to an FAQ titled, "Is my device a consumer-grade router under the National Security Determination?" The new FAQ section says this category includes "consumer-grade portable or mobile MiFi Wi-Fi or hotspot devices for residential use." The ban does not cover "mobile phones with hotspot features," the FAQ says.

This means that companies making consumer hotspots need an exemption from the government to import and sell any future hotspots that haven't previously been approved by the FCC. As with routers, devices previously approved for sale in the US can continue to be imported and sold without obtaining a special exemption.

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The sites included berkeley.edu, columbia.edu, and washu.edu, the official domains for the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and Washington University in St. Louis. Subdomains such as hXXps://causal.stat.berkeley.edu/ymy/video/xxx-porn-girl-and-boy-ej5210.html, hXXps://conversion-dev.svc.cul.columbia[.]edu/brazzers-gym-porn, and hXXps://provost.washu.edu/app/uploads/formidable/6/dmkcsex-10.pdf. All deliver explicit pornography and, in at least one case, a scam site falsely claiming a visitor’s computer is infected and advising the visitor to pay a fee for the non-existent malware to be removed. In all, researcher Alex Shakhov said, hundreds of subdomains for at least 34 universities are being abused. Search results returned by Google list thousands of hijacked pages.

Hijacking a university's good name

Shakhov, founder of SH Consulting, said that the scammers—which a separate researcher has linked to a known group tracked as Hazy Hawk—are seizing on what amounts to a clerical error by site administrators of the affected universities. When they commission a subdomain such as provost.washu.edu, they create a CNAME record, which assignes a subdomain to a "cononical" domain. When the subdomain is eventually decommissioned—something that happens frequently for various reasons—the record is never removed. Scammers like Hazy Hawk then swoop in by hijacking the old record.

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For one 15-year-old in Nepal, the misery continued long after the blisters burst. After some of her crusty scabs began to form scars, they mushroomed into large, uncontrolled skin growths, which were also painful and itchy—and permanent. One on her chest, the largest, measured 4 by 4 cm (about 1.6 by 1.6 inches).

These rubbery, firm nodules are called keloids, which are poorly understood skin growths that result from wound healing that goes awry and expands beyond the borders of the original wound. In the teen's case, five large keloids abruptly burst from her chickenpox scars, breaking out in different places on her body—on her right jaw, chest, abdomen, and right flank. The simultaneous emergence of the growths aligns with the diagnosis of "eruptive keloids," an ultra-rare outcome of a chickenpox infection. Only five such cases appear to exist in the scientific literature. Her case, marking the sixth, was published this week in the journal Clinical Case Reports.

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Army soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke made a profit of nearly $410,000 by making bets on Polymarket, and he was indicted on charges of unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction, the Department of Justice announced yesterday.

"As alleged in the indictment, Van Dyke participated in the planning and execution of the US military operation to capture Nicolás Maduro, called 'Operation Absolute Resolve,' and Van Dyke used his access to classified information about that operation to personally profit," the DOJ said.

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However, a new Science paper argues there was another apex predator lurking in the depths, and it didn’t have a single bone in its body. Researchers have uncovered the fossilized remains of ancient, finned octopuses that likely reached lengths of up to 19 meters. They were armed with powerful, hardened beaks and likely had high intelligence.

Reverse 3D printing

"Before this study, Cretaceous marine ecosystems were generally understood as worlds in which large vertebrate predators occupied the top of the food web," said Yasuhiro Iba, a paleontologist at Hokkaido University and co-author of the study. Invertebrates, on the other hand, were seen as prey that evolved protective structures such as hard shells in response to predation. Octopuses were especially difficult to evaluate because they rarely fossilize. “Our study changes that picture,” Iba said.

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According to Money Today (Korean), Samsung MX (mobile experience) head TM Roh has warned company leadership that it could be headed for the first net loss on smartphones in the company's history. Even during times of economic strife or amid pandemic-related supply chain chaos, Samsung still made money on smartphones. The skyrocketing price of DRAM and NAND may be what finally breaks the streak despite strong Galaxy S26 sales.

Shortages of these components have affected all types of computing hardware, from consumer laptops to servers. The LPDDR5x memory found in most mobile devices is increasingly important for AI. Nvidia's Vera AI CPU, which will replace Grace later in 2026, will have up to 1.5 TB of LPDDR5x memory. The company's upcoming rack-scale AI platforms will have 36 Vera CPUs alongside 72 Rubin GPUs. The CPUs in a single server will consume enough RAM for 4,600 Galaxy S26 Ultra devices (12GB each).

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After Neukgu, a 2-year-old wolf, burrowed out of a zoo in Daejeon city, officials launched an all-out effort to bring him back. The third-generation descendant's safe return was deemed critical to a yearslong effort to revive wolf populations after native South Korean wolves became extinct in the wild in the 1960s.

Concern increased nationwide, with animal rights activists worried the wolf would be injured in the wild or perhaps killed during his rescue. South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, promised that rescue teams would prioritize Neukgu's safety, The Guardian reported.

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Like many major space projects, it faced delays. Originally, the first component of the space station was due to launch in 2022. Later, it was decided that this module, to provide power and propulsion, would launch in tandem with a habitable volume known as the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) in 2024. This core was slated to be joined by another pressurized habitation module contributed by international partners I-HAB in 2026.

These dates, of course, have come and gone. And in March, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced that the Gateway was being "paused" so the space agency could focus on the lunar surface.

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Bugatti dates back to 1909, when its eponymous founder Ettore Bugatti started making cars in the Alsace region contested by France and Germany. That incarnation lasted through two world wars but was gone by 1963. The supercar boom of the late 1980s brought Bugatti back for the first time with the high-tech EB110, a car that combined a carbon fiber monocoque built by Aérospatiale (now better known as Airbus) with an F1-sized V12 (with four turbochargers) and all-wheel drive. As spectacular as that sounds, the twin threats of the even more superlative McLaren F1 and an economic downturn saw it fizzle out in the mid-'90s.

The Bugatti you know now returned in 1998, one of a number of projects of Ferdinand Piech, who was then boss of VW Group. Piech wanted to show off the superiority of VW Group's engineering. One project was an ultra-streamlined commuter car, the XL1. Another was the Bugatti Veyron, a hand-built mid-engined two-seater with a thousand metric horsepower and manners so docile his grandmother could drive it to the opera.

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This change had been telegraphed pretty far in advance, both by media reports (Bloomberg's well-connected Mark Gurman flagged Ternus as a frontrunner in May 2024, and The New York Times gave him a glossy profile in January) and by Apple (when it announced the MacBook Neo last month, it was Ternus, not Cook, who delivered the prepared remarks).

I've been covering Apple for various outlets throughout Cook's tenure as CEO, and I've been thinking a lot about how Apple has changed in the 15 years since he formally took over from an ailing Steve Jobs in the summer of 2011. Under Cook, the company has become less surprising but massively financially successful; some of Apple's newer products have flopped or underperformed, but far more have become and stayed excellent thanks to years of competent iteration.

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Republicans in the US House of Representatives abruptly canceled a vote that had been scheduled for Wednesday—Earth Day—on legislation that aims to codify into law many of President Donald Trump’s moves to weaken endangered species protections. Some lawmakers, mostly in tourism-dependent areas along the Gulf of Mexico, expressed concerns about the bill.

“Don’t tread on my turtles. Protected means protected,” US Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) wrote in a social media post on Monday ahead of the then-pending vote.

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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.

Canada's spaceport plans are not without critics. About a month ago, the Canadian National Defense Minister, David McGuinty, announced an “historic investment” of $200 million over 10 years to Maritime Launch Services for the lease of a dedicated “space launch pad” in Nova Scotia. But some local residents, including Marie Lumsden, are pushing back. Writing in the Halifax Examiner, Lumsden shares a photo of a small concrete pad at the end of a gravel road (the entirety of the spaceport). The residents have formed a group, Action Against the Canso Spaceport, because they have "genuine concerns about this project and the people behind it."

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Vast has revealed its astronaut flight suit, a two-piece outfit designed to be worn both on and off the planet. The company also certified a custom-Swiss wristwatch for use aboard its upcoming Haven-1 space station.

"Over the last two decades on the International Space Station, astronauts have moved away from wearing flight suits every day," Drew Feustel, Vast's lead astronaut and former NASA mission specialist who spent 225 days in space, said in a statement. "The environment has become safer and more like how we work on Earth."

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Since the launch of DeepSeek—a Chinese model that OpenAI claimed was trained using outputs from its models—other AI firms have accused global rivals of using a method called distillation to steal their IP. In January, Google claimed that "commercially motivated" actors not limited to China attempted to clone its Gemini AI chatbot by promoting the model more than 100,000 times in bids to train cheaper copycats. The next month, Anthropic accused Chinese firms DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of using the same tactic to generate "over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts." Also in February, OpenAI confirmed that most attacks it saw originated from China.

For the US, these distillation attacks supposedly threaten to help China quickly catch up in the AI race. In a memo that FT reviewed, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios, warned that "the US government has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI systems."

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But then the reality of working with them set in. It was hard to get a pure population of metallic or semiconducting forms. Synthesis techniques tended to produce a tangle of mostly short nanotubes; those that extended for more than a couple of centimeters remain rare. And while the metallic version offered little resistance to carrying electric current, it was hard to send many electrons down the nanotube.

Materials scientists, however, are a stubborn bunch, and they're still trying to get them to work. Today's issue of Science includes a paper describing the addition of a chemical to carbon nanotube bundles to boost their ability to carry current to levels closer to those of copper. While the more conductive nanotubes weren't stable, the discovery may point the way toward something with a longer shelf life.

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The gravitational constant, affectionally known as "Big G," is one of the most fundamental constants of our universe. Its value describes the strength of the gravitational force acting on two masses separated by a given distance—or if you want to be relativistic about it, the amount a given mass curves space-time. Physicists have a solid ballpark figure for the value of Big G, but they've been trying to measure it ever more precisely for more than two centuries, each effort yielding slightly different values. And we do mean slight: The values vary by roughly one part in 10,000.

Still, other fundamental constants are known much more precisely. So Big G is the black sheep of the family and a point of frustration for physicists keen on precision metrology. The problem is that gravity is so weak, by far the weakest of the four fundamental forces, so there is significant background noise from the gravitational field of the Earth (aka "little g"). That weakness is even more pronounced in a laboratory.

In the latest effort to resolve the issue, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) spent the last decade replicating one of the most divergent recent experimental results. The group just announced their results in a paper published in the journal Metrologia. It does not resolve the discrepancy, but it gives physicists one more data point in their ongoing quest to nail down a more precise value for Big G.

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Kyber, as the ransomware is called, has been around since at least last September and quickly attracted attention for the claim that it used ML-KEM, short for Module Lattice-based Key Encapsulation Mechanism and is a standard shepherded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The Kyber ransomware name comes from the alternate name for ML-KEM, which is also Kyber. For the rest of the article, Kyber refers to the ransomware; the algorithm is referred to as ML-KEM.

It's all about marketing

ML-KEM is an asymmetric encryption method for exchanging keys. It involves problems based on lattices, a structure in mathematics that quantum computers have no advantage in solving over classic computing. ML-KEM is designed to replace Elliptic Curve and RSA cryptosystems, both of which are based on problems that quantum computers with sufficient strength can tackle.

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