The carbon-fiber aircraft could perform such feats of aeronautical endurance while running solely on renewable energy and batteries because of a 236-foot (72-meter) wingspan—comparable to a Boeing 747 jumbo jet’s wings—covered with more than 17,000 solar cells. The company Skydweller Aero purchased and modified the original Solar Impulse 2 aircraft to become a test platform for “perpetual uncrewed flight” with the capability of carrying up to 800 pounds (363 kilograms) of payload.

Skydweller Aero was conducting test flights for maritime patrol mission scenarios with the US military, and the company also holds contracts with the Navy and Air Force. So the Skydweller drone was operating in that capacity when it took off on its final flight in the early morning hours of April 26.

Read full article

Comments

The orders, issued by the agency's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau and Space Bureau, aren't surprising given that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr essentially forced EchoStar to sell the licenses. Last year, Carr threatened to revoke the licenses after SpaceX alleged that EchoStar subsidiary Dish Network “barely uses” the spectrum to provide mobile service to US consumers.

Dish had obtained a deadline extension for its network deployment obligations from the Biden-era FCC, and Carr objected to the agreement made with the previous administration. After Carr's threat, the Charlie Ergen-led EchoStar struck deals to sell spectrum licenses to SpaceX for $17 billion and to AT&T for $23 billion.

Read full article

Comments

Now, some evidence from ancient proteins suggests that the mystery group was Homo erectus, a species that left Africa over a million years ago and spread throughout Eurasia. And, thanks to the Denisovans, it appears that modern humans inherited some of that Homo erectus DNA.

In the teeth

Without access to all the repair enzymes made by living cells, DNA rapidly degrades. The double helix fragments, and bases change identity or fall off entirely. While cooler, drier environments slow this process, it sets a hard limit on how far back in time we can obtain DNA sequences. So far, it seems that Homo erectus remains on the far side of that time limit.

Read full article

Comments

According to a press release from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Australian Border Force (ABF) today, three men have been sentenced for trying to use five printers to smuggle 22.4 kg (49.4 pounds) of cocaine into Australia.

In 2019, Australian news outlets reported that the printers were Xerox brand and that the drugs had a street value of approximately 9.3 million AUD to over 12.4 million AUD ($6.7 million to over $9 million).

Read full article

Comments

The ultra-elite university has a mere $38 billion in endowment money. Many of its dorms lack air conditioning. And it's in New Jersey.

I kid about New Jersey, of course. Despite not being allowed to pump one's own gas there, the "Garden State" grew on me during three years spent in the Princeton area. I still keep up with its goings-on, which led me to this week's article in the Daily Princetonian on how AI was disrupting the university's long-running traditions.

Read full article

Comments

Joshua Langlois, a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, competes in Strongman competitions as a hobby. He also has friends who compete at the national level in Olympic weight-lifting events. "They told me how they use the whip," Langlois said during a media briefing. "When they dip down, they can feel when the bar flexes back up and use that to accelerate the movement upward to increase the amount they can lift."

Langlois decided to conduct a modal analysis, i.e., how an object moves or vibrates, to quantify the whip and better understand the mechanics, as well as what makes for a good barbell at the elite level. He suspended four 20-kg men's barbells (women use 15-kg barbells)—with 50 kg loaded on each end—from elastic resistance bands so that the bar was essentially floating in space. Then he attached accelerometers at each end of the bar where the vibrational mode patterns occur. Next, he tapped set locations across the bar with a small hammer, measuring the acceleration at the endpoints, which enabled him to map out how the bars moved in response. He compared the vibrations of different barbells, as well as a single barbell loaded with different weights.

Read full article

Comments

The space agency chose the orbit close to Earth—as opposed to a higher orbit—because it would preserve the final remaining Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage for launching the Artemis IV landing mission later this decade. Instead, NASA will use a "spacer" to simulate the mass and overall dimensions of an upper stage but without propulsive capabilities.

The additional information released this week follows a decision made by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman three months ago to shuffle the agency's Artemis plans in order to accelerate a lunar landing.

Read full article

Comments

Gen. Stephen Whiting, the senior officer in charge of Space Command, discussed the new wargame series Tuesday in a discussion hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. Space Command is responsible for military activities in space and is separate from the Space Force, which provides the people and equipment to support those operations.

The new wargames, called Apollo Insight, combine military and commercial expertise to respond to simulated threats in space. Space Command plans to conduct four Apollo Insight "tabletop exercises" this year.

Read full article

Comments

59,000 years ago in what’s now southwestern Siberia, a Neanderthal had a toothache. It must have been a doozy because they were desperate enough to sit still while someone drilled into the tooth with a sharp stone tool, removing the infected tissue and ultimately relieving the pain.

The process left behind a hole in the tooth that paleoanthropologist Alisa Zubova of the Russian Academy of Sciences and her colleagues recognized, tens of millennia later, as dental work. Archaeologists unearthed the tooth at Chagyrskaya Cave in Russia, and it’s now the oldest known evidence of dentistry—or any direct medical treatment.

Read full article

Comments

Musk—who filed the lawsuit alleging that OpenAI under its current leadership has abandoned its nonprofit mission to build AI that benefits humanity and instead serves to enrich people like Altman—spent three grueling days on the stand. At times, he lost his temper, as OpenAI's lawyer, William Savitt, tried to poke holes in Musk's claims that OpenAI executives teamed up with Microsoft to "steal a charity" after duping Musk into donating $38 million in early funding.

On Tuesday, Altman did not face such a grilling from Musk's lawyer, Steven Molo. Instead, Altman appeared jittery at first but steeled his nerves rather quickly. He hopped off the stand after about four hours of rather calmly discussing evidence that he's hoping shows that Musk's claims about OpenAI's for-profit restructuring are disingenuous. Since Musk filed the lawsuit, Altman has insisted that Musk is only after revenge, supposedly stemming from his jealousy that he was not picked as OpenAI's CEO and that his rival company, xAI, now lags behind.

Read full article

Comments

While gamers and other enthusiasts may be in the habit of downloading and installing new driver updates for their systems, most PC users just let Windows Update handle driver installation and updates. PC manufacturers can submit their own tested and validated versions of drivers for distribution via Windows Update, which (at least in theory) should maximize stability and minimize problems.

But mistakes happen, and sometimes a driver update is distributed that causes more problems than it fixes. Normally when this happens, the company either needs to submit an updated fixed driver to Windows Update, or the user is on the hook for either rolling back the update or finding and downloading a better driver themselves.

Read full article

Comments

In an interview published on the Financial Times (FT) today, Panos Panay, Amazon's head of devices and services, said building a new phone isn’t Amazon’s goal.

The company already tried selling a smartphone in 2014, but it discontinued the Fire Phone about a year later following poor sales.

Read full article

Comments

In a recent technical post on Anthropic's Alignment Science blog (and an accompanying social media thread and public-facing blog post), Anthropic researchers lay out their attempts to correct for the kind of "unsafe" AI behavior that "the model most likely learned... through science fiction stories, many of which depict an AI that is not as aligned as we would like Claude to be." In the end, the model maker says the best remedy for overriding those "evil AI" stories might be additional training with synthetic stories showing an AI acting ethically.

"The beginning of a dramatic story..."

After a model's initial training on a large corpus of mostly Internet-derived data, Anthropic follows a post-training process intended to nudge the final model toward being "helpful, honest, and harmless" (HHH). In the past, Anthropic said this post-training has leaned on chat-based reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), which it said was "sufficient" for models used mostly for chatting with users.

Read full article

Comments

In a recent paper in Nature, a team of scientists led by Kimihiko Nakajima, an astronomer at the Kanazawa University, Japan, used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe an ultra-faint galaxy called LAP1-B as it existed roughly 800 million years after the Big Bang. It’s the most chemically primitive galaxy we’ve ever seen.

The magnifying glass

The LAP1-B is 13 billion light-years away from Earth. To observe an object that faint and distant, even the huge, gold-coated beryllium mirrors of JWST were not enough on their own. We spotted it due to a massive cluster of galaxies called the MACS J046, which warps the spacetime between us and the LAP1-B.

Read full article

Comments

Chief Executive Dave Limp told employees at a recent all-hands meeting that the company would require outside investment if it were to significantly increase its launch cadence, according to details of the meeting from two people who attended.

He said it would “take a lot of capital” to achieve the number of rocket launches Blue Origin has targeted—more money than would be available with “just one investor,” the people added.

Read full article

Comments

(Some spoilers below, but we'll give you a heads up before any major S2 reveals.)

From its inception, Daredevil: Born Again was built around the conflict between Matt Murdock/Daredevil (Charlie Cox) and Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D'Onofrio), with Fisk attempting to leave his criminal past behind as the newly elected mayor of New York, and Murdock determined to abandon his vigilante activities as Daredevil to focus full time on his law practice.

Read full article

Comments

In the absence of phone mirroring—and the way it lets you easily use Siri or Google Assistant hands-free while driving—Rivian has now added a new AI digital helper in its latest software update, compatible with both older Gen1 Rivians (model-year 2024 and older) as well as the more recent Gen2 models.

The Rivian Assistant rolled out in its latest software update, 2026.15, to all owners with a subscription or trial for Connect+, Rivian's connectivity services. You activate it like most digital assistants, either with a button on the steering wheel, an icon on the infotainment display, or with a trigger phrase—in this case, "Hey Rivian" or "OK, Rivian."

Read full article

Comments

There have been some notable successes during this timeframe, such as the ability to grow a more uniform crystalline form of the cancer drug Keytruda in 2019. This opened up the possibility of administering the drug via injection rather than requiring a patient to spend hours in a clinic setting to receive the drug intravenously.

NASA subsidized much of this work, typically paying the considerable costs to transport research to the ISS and for astronaut time to conduct research there. There were, however, trade-offs, such as long lead times to get research into space. Nevertheless, it has become clear that there could be some commercial applications for making drugs in space.

Read full article

Comments

The “distributed data center solution” announced by the San Francisco startup SPAN would deploy thousands of XFRA nodes that contain liquid-cooled Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs operating with minimal noise, according to a press release. By harnessing excess power capacity among US households, SPAN aims to quickly expand the available compute for AI workloads without the costs and delays associated with trying to build warehouse-size data centers.

“Data centers are loud, ugly, and often drive up local electricity bills,” said Chris Lander, vice president of XFRA at SPAN, in correspondence with Ars. “[This] is quiet, discreet, and makes energy more affordable for the host and community.”

Read full article

Comments

Trump confirmed Makary's resignation on social media, posting an image that appears to show that Makary resigned from his role over a text message. The text message begins "Dr. President Trump[sic], Please accept my resignation, effective today."

Trump wrote in another social media post that Makary had "done a great job at the FDA," and that he was "a hard worker, who was respected by all, and will go on to have an outstanding career in Medicine."

Read full article

Comments