Google hasn't actually changed anything about Chrome's on-device AI, but the confusion is understandable, as the company has done a poor job of explaining what it's doing and why. This is, unfortunately, par for the course with Google's AI efforts.

Just this week, someone noticed that Chrome had downloaded a 4GB Gemini Nano model and inferred from its sudden appearance that Google was deploying that AI on all Chrome installs right now. That's not exactly true. Google announced in 2024 that it would begin adding local AI capabilities to Chrome, powering features like Help Me Write, tab organization, and scam detection.

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Ingenuity was a resounding success, becoming the first airborne platform to explore another world. The dual-bladed helicopter made 72 flights, overachieving NASA's original goal of five flights over 30 days, after delivery to Mars by the Perseverance rover. By the time the mission ended with a crash-landing in January 2024, Ingenuity had shown scientists a new way to explore other worlds, using air to travel longer distances and reach locations inaccessible to ground vehicles.

NASA plans to send three more helicopters to Mars on the SkyFall mission, which could launch as soon as late 2028. SkyFall is set to ride to the red planet aboard a nuclear-powered spacecraft named Space Reactor-1, or SR-1, one of the tech demo initiatives announced earlier this year by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.

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As we've reported previously, Franklin’s two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, became icebound in the Victoria Strait, and all 129 crew members ultimately died. It has been an enduring mystery that has captured imaginations ever since. The expedition set sail on May 19, 1845, and was last seen in July 1845 in Baffin Bay by the captains of two whaling ships. Historians have compiled a reasonably credible account of what happened: The crew spent the winter of 1845–1846 on Beechey Island, where the graves of three crew members were found.

When the weather cleared, the expedition sailed into the Victoria Strait before getting trapped in the ice off King William Island in September 1846. Franklin died on June 11, 1847, per a surviving note signed by Fitzjames dated the following April. HMS Erebus Captain James Fitzjames had assumed overall command after Franklin’s death, leading 105 survivors from their ice-trapped ships. It’s believed that everyone else died while encamped for the winter or while attempting to walk back to civilization.

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But Cook also noted that the Mac’s success was being held back somewhat by “supply constraints… on several Mac models,” which was exacerbated by “less flexibility in the supply chain” than Apple was used to; the company also expects to pay “significantly higher” prices for RAM than it has been so far. In other words, shortages of everything from RAM to storage to advanced chipmaking capacity are making it harder for Apple to produce as many Macs as it can sell.

Sites that track Apple news currently post multiple times a month about Mac shortages, noting each time Apple removes a Mac mini model from its online store and religiously reporting on shipping estimates for the MacBook Neo. But because those spot checks only account for Apple’s inventory at a moment in time, I did what I sometimes do when I want to back up vibes with empirical data: I made a big spreadsheet (the full thing is here; only a few representative snippets appear in the article below).

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Climate change is contributing to longer and more severe pollen seasons across the Northern Hemisphere. Dr. Neelima Tummala, an ear, nose, and throat doctor at NYU Langone Health, said her patients tell her every year that their allergies are the worst they’ve ever been—and they might be right.

About a quarter of US adults and 1 in 5 children have seasonal allergies. For those millions of Americans, spring weather brings sniffles, itchy eyes, asthma exacerbation, and other miseries, with effects ranging from mild symptoms to serious medical emergencies.

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In an announcement of the impending price increase today, Nintendo cited "changes in market conditions" and "the global business outlook" that are "expected to extend over the medium to long term." That's likely a reference to the climbing RAM and storage prices that have been impacting all sorts of hardware makers for months.

Nintendo's pricing move means all three current major consoles have now increased in price since launch. Sony's PS5 got its second price increase in March, just eight months after its first price hike. The Xbox Series consoles saw their second price increase in September, five months after an initial price hike. Nintendo also raised the price of the aging original Switch console for the first time last year.

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Over the last decade, since the work of a shadowy government program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was made public in 2017, there has been growing public pressure on the US government to release its files related to aliens. At the same time, UFOs have been rebranded as Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, or UAP.

Amid the growing public outcry, the Pentagon and other officials have repeatedly stated that they have found no confirmed evidence of extraterrestrial beings or their technology visiting Earth. But we live in an era of conspiracy theories and an unbounded and increasingly unhinged Internet. No one trusts anyone. So there are plenty of people who believe aliens are real and the government is covering it all up.

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The free browser-based game challenges players to act as a fictional maritime coordinator by selecting a handful of ships that get to pass through the strait each day. Most decisions come with serious costs or trade-offs, whether it’s paying the toll imposed by the Iranian government that has claimed authority over the strait or antagonizing Iran or the United States while pushing either side toward widening the war. Failure to push through enough specific shipments can spark individual crises involving the price of oil, food, and water security, and a countdown to famine in many countries.

“The game does not ask whether you are smart enough to solve the crisis,” said Jakub Gornicki, the journalist and artist who developed the game, in a post. “It asks what kind of damage you choose when every option has a cost.”

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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.

Firefly readies for upgraded Alpha rocket launch. Firefly Aerospace plans to debut the upgraded version of its Alpha rocket late this summer, Space News reports. In a May 4 earnings call about the company’s first-quarter financial results, Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly, confirmed the company was moving ahead with the Alpha Block 2 rocket after a successful return to flight of the original version of the vehicle in March.

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In a complaint filed in an Illinois district court on Wednesday, protesters arrested at the Broadview ICE facility during "Operation Midway Blitz"—when thousands of federal agents flooded Chicago—demanded an injunction to stop alleged violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, as well as the Administrative Procedure Act.

They have accused the federal government of "wrongfully arresting peaceful protesters, collecting their DNA, uploading their genetic profiles to government databases, and storing their DNA samples in federal labs—permanently."

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Mindful of the skepticism, Mozilla on Thursday provided a behind-the-scenes look into its use of Anthropic Mythos—an AI model for identifying software vulnerabilities—to ferret out 271 Firefox security flaws over two months. In a post, Mozilla engineers said the finally ready-for-prime-time breakthrough they achieved was primarily the result of two things: (1) improvement in the models themselves and (2) Mozilla’s development of a custom “harness” that supported Mythos as it analyzed Firefox source code.

"Almost no false positives"

The engineers said their earlier brushes with AI-assisted vulnerability detection were fraught with “unwanted slop.” Typically, someone would prompt a model to analyze a block of code. The model would then produce plausible-reading bug reports, and often at unprecedented scales. Invariably, however, when human developers further investigated, they’d find a large percentage of the details had been hallucinated. The humans would then need to invest significant work handling the vulnerability reports the old-fashioned way.

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The Fitbit Air itself is a small plastic puck about 1.4 inches long and 0.7 inches wide. It slots into various bands that hold the bottom-mounted sensors against your wrist. There's no display pointing upward, so the entire device is covered by the fabric or plastic of the band. It's a streamlined and potentially stylish look—in uncharacteristic fashion, Google has plenty of colors and style options available, including a special-edition Steph Curry version. You may have heard chatter about Curry being seen teasing a new screenless Fitbit, and this is it.

Smartwatches never quite became a must-have device—plenty of people have them, but we don't all wear them all the time because they need to be charged often and aren't always very comfortable. The screenless Fitbit Air doesn't have those issues. Google says it lasts about a week on a charge, and it does that while collecting continuous health data. It can even store a day of data without being connected to your phone.

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Törnberg's research showed that, while numerous platform-level intervention strategies have been proposed to combat these issues, none are likely to be effective. And it’s not the fault of much-hated algorithms, non-chronological feeds, or our human proclivity for seeking out negativity. Rather, the dynamics that give rise to all those negative outcomes are structurally embedded in the very architecture of social media. So we’re probably doomed to endless toxic feedback loops unless someone hits upon a brilliant fundamental redesign that manages to change those dynamics.

Törnberg has been very busy since then, producing two new papers and one new preprint building on this realization that social media is structured quite differently than the physical world, with unexpected downstream consequences. The first new paper, published in PLoS ONE, specifically focused on the echo chamber effect, using the same combined standard agent-based modeling with large language models (LLMs)—essentially creating little AI personas to simulate online social media behavior.

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Musk, a co-founder of the AI group, proposed bringing Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever to his carmaker, appointing Altman to the board or making OpenAI a Tesla subsidiary, according to evidence in a high-stakes trial between the billionaire and the ChatGPT maker on Wednesday.

The disclosures shed light on a crucial issue in the case, in which Musk has claimed that Altman “stole a charity” by converting the company into a for-profit. OpenAI’s lawyers have argued the Tesla chief executive was happy to commercialize the lab, provided that he remained in charge.

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But for some drivers, those who choose to spend their spare time enjoying track days at places like the legendary Nürburgring Nordschleife in Germany's Eifel Mountains, even cars like the razor-sharp GT3 RS make too many compromises for the road. For those people, there is Manthey Racing.

Based at the industrial estate alongside the ’Ring, Manthey is a highly successful racing team—majority-owned by Porsche since 2013—that applies its years of experience making Porsches go even faster around the 12.9-mile (20.8 km) circuit known as the Green Hell to create upgrade kits that will turn the dials all the way up to 11.

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This week, Bridenstine was named chief executive of a Maryland-based company, called Quantum Space, that builds "advanced maneuverable spacecraft."

"For us, national security space is a priority," said Bridenstine in an interview.

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The decline is modest so far, and it does not signal any problem at SpaceX or with the Falcon 9. Rather, it is a manifestation of SpaceX's eagerness to shift focus to the much larger Starship rocket, an enabler of what the company wants to do in space: missions to land on the Moon and Mars, orbital data centers, and next-gen Starlink.

Elon Musk's SpaceX conducted 165 launches with the Falcon 9 rocket (no Falcon Heavy missions) last year, up from 134 Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches in 2024 and 96 Falcon flights in 2023. The company plans "maybe 140, 145-ish" Falcon launches in 2026, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier this year. "This year we'll still launch a lot, but not as much," she said. "And then we'll tail off our launches as Starship is coming online."

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On stage at the conference, CEO Dario Amodei said the deal was intended to increase usage limits for Anthropic's Pro and Max plan subscribers.

The announcement was accompanied by an increase in those usage limits; Anthropic doubled Claude Code's five-hour window limits for Pro and Max subscribers, removed the peak-hours limit reduction on Claude Code for those same accounts, and raised API limits for its Opus model. The table below outlining the Opus changes was shared in the company's blog post on the topic.

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The chipmaker has signed a 30-year corporate power purchase agreement for 100 percent of the power produced by the Hai Long offshore wind project. The deal between TSMC and Northland Power, a Canada-based global power producer, covers more than 1 gigawatt of power capacity at three offshore wind sites located off the western coast of central Taiwan in the Taiwan Strait, according to an April 30 announcement.

Once completed, the Hai Long offshore wind project would have the capacity to power the equivalent of more than 1 million Taiwanese households. The project’s wind farms began supplying power to Taiwan’s grid in 2025 and are scheduled to become fully operational by 2027.

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The FCC exceeded its legal authority by imposing liability for actions that result in "disparate impact," instead of merely policing "disparate treatment," said a ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit. The FCC also exceeded its authority by applying the rules to entities that don't directly offer Internet service to subscribers, according to the ruling issued unanimously by three judges appointed by Republican presidents.

“Today’s appellate court decision is another common-sense win for nondiscrimination," Carr said today. Carr claimed the rules "would have required broadband providers and many other businesses to discriminate against people based on their race, gender, or other protected characteristics," but did not explain how the rules would have required discrimination. Carr also compared the rules to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies that he has called discriminatory.

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