“Trump proposes steep cuts to NASA budget as astronauts head for the Moon.”
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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.com).
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Today
President Donald Trump released a budget blueprint on Friday calling for a 23 percent cut to NASA’s budget, two days after the agency launched four astronauts on the first crewed lunar mission in more than 50 years. The spending proposal for fiscal year 2027 is the opening salvo in a multi-month budget process. Both houses of Congress must pass their own appropriations bills, reconcile any differ
Native Americans have been playing with dice in games of chance for more than 12,000 years, according to a new paper published in the journal American Antiquity. And the oldest examples of Native American dice predate the earliest currently known dice in the Old World by millennia. “Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as Old World innovations,” said author Robert Madden , a
As the Artemis II lunar mission moved into its third day on Friday, and with the spacecraft’s big engine firing behind it, the four astronauts on board had a little more downtime. So the four crew members—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—had their first opportunities to speak with their families at length, and also did a couple of media events. They held medical conf
Banks and other firms that want to work on SpaceX’s initial public offering (IPO) are being required to buy subscriptions to the Grok AI service, The New York Times reported today . Elon Musk “is requiring banks, law firms, auditors and other advisers working on the IPO to buy subscriptions to Grok, his artificial intelligence chatbot that is part of SpaceX,” the NYT wrote, citing anonymous sourc
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When it comes to large language model-powered tools, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes faulty service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect reasoning or factual flaws in responses. On the other side are those who routinely outsource their critical thinking to what they see as an all-knowing machine.
Donald Trump is facing significant hurdles after declaring, in a series of executive orders last year, that rapid construction of AI data centers was among his top priorities to ensure the US wins the AI race against China. Perhaps most likely to frustrate the president, his aggressive tariffs on Chinese imports are reportedly hindering most data center projects. Earlier this week, Bloomberg repo
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For more than a month, security practitioners have been warning about the perils of using OpenClaw, the viral AI agentic tool that has taken the development community by storm. A recently fixed vulnerability provides an object lesson for why. OpenClaw, which was introduced in November and now boasts 347,000 stars on Github, by design takes control of a user’s computer and interacts with other app
A Rome court has ruled that the price hikes Netflix imposed on subscribers in Italy in 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2024 were unlawful. The court ordered Netflix to refund affected customers by up to 500 euros (about $576), depending on their plan. The lawsuit was brought by Italian consumer advocacy group Movimento Consumatori, which alleged that the price hikes violate the Consumer Code, Italian legis
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With the war in the Persian Gulf now more than a month old, the effect on fuel prices is plain to see: On average, they’re up almost a dollar per gallon, or 25 percent, according to AAA . For a nation as addicted to the automotive as we are, that’s bad news. Except, of course, for electric vehicles. The last half year has been rough for EV adoption here in the US. At the end of last September, th
OpenAI has struck a deal to acquire TBPN, a technology-focused talk show popular in Silicon Valley, making an unexpected move into broadcasting after pledging to abandon “side quests” and focus on its core business. The ChatGPT maker had purchased the 11-person company in a “low hundreds of millions of dollars” deal, according to a person with knowledge of the terms. TBPN, or Technology Business
Yesterday
The Orion spacecraft successfully fired its main engine for 5 minutes and 50 seconds on Thursday, sending four astronauts on a free-return trajectory around the Moon. For NASA and the Artemis II crew members, this marked a point of no return for more than a week. About three-quarters of the American population has not witnessed humans leaving low-Earth orbit in their lifetimes. The last time this
Perplexity’s AI search engine encourages users to go deeper with their prompts by engaging in chat sessions that a lawsuit has alleged are often shared in their entirety with Google and Meta without users’ knowledge or consent. “This happened to every user regardless of whether or not they signed up for a Perplexity account,” the lawsuit alleged, while stressing that “enormous volumes of sensitiv
Starlink operator SpaceX claims that Amazon violated orbital debris requirements by launching satellites into initial altitudes that are too high, increasing the risk of collision with other satellites and spacecraft. SpaceX, which recently reported two Starlink satellite failures that created new space debris, yesterday accused Amazon and its launch partner Arianespace of negligence that “needle
OpenAI might be pulling back on video generation, but Google is forging ahead with a major AI update to its Vids editing product. The company’s latest video and audio models are now integrated with the tool, and you can choose from various controllable avatars to appear in generated videos. Your creations are also easier to share on YouTube now. Veo 3.1 is the biggest part of the Vids upgrade. Go
Octopuses are one of the most alien creatures on Earth. The lack of bones makes them amazing shapeshifters, most of them can change color like chameleons, and they pump blue copper-based blood through their bodies using three distinct hearts. They rely on a decentralized nervous system, where two-thirds of their neurons reside in their arms, allowing each limb to independently taste, touch, and m
The details of how animal life began are a bit murky. Most of the groups familiar today are present in the Cambrian, a period when they rapidly diversified, with familiar features evolving alongside bizarre creatures with no obvious modern equivalents. There are hints that some forms of present animal life predated the Cambrian. But most of the organisms we’ve found in Ediacaran deposits have no
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The cost of high-performance GPUs, typically $8,000 or more, means they are frequently shared among dozens of users in cloud environments. Three new attacks demonstrate how a malicious user can gain full root control of a host machine by performing novel Rowhammer attacks on high-performance GPU cards made by Nvidia. The attacks exploit memory hardware’s increasing susceptibility to bit flips, in
On Wednesday, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) released its numbers on what was built in 2025. And much as we saw in the US , solar power is the primary driver of change. The numbers show that the world installed an average of 1.4 gigawatts of solar capacity every day last year, for a total of 511 GW. That brings the total solar capacity up to 2.4 Terawatts, making it the largest
Google’s Gemini AI models have improved by leaps and bounds over the past year, but you can only use Gemini on Google’s terms. The company’s Gemma open-weight models have provided more freedom, but Gemma 3, which launched over a year ago , is getting a bit long in the tooth. Starting today, developers can start working with Gemma 4 , which comes in four sizes optimized for local usage. Google has
When it comes to automotive bragging rights, a good Nürburgring Nordschleife lap time is right up there with the best of them. And today, those bragging rights belong to Ford. The automaker revealed that its GT Mk IV, an evolution of the mid-engined supercar it created in 2016, is now the fastest production car to ever lap the 12.9-mile (20.8-km) race track in Germany, with a time of 6 minutes, 1
An Anthropic-backed DMCA effort to remove its recently leaked Claude Code client source code from GitHub this week resulted in the accidental removal of many legitimate forks of its official public code repository. While that overzealous takedown has now been reversed, Anthropic still faces an extreme uphill battle in limiting the spread of its recently leaked code. The DMCA notice that GitHub re
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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—The first time NASA launched humans toward the Moon, in December 1968, the United States was a deeply fractured nation. The historic flight of three people into the unknown brought a measure of solace to a country riven by assassinations, riots, political discord, and a deeply unpopular foreign war. If history does not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes. Today, four hum
This morning, Tesla published its production and delivery results for the first three months of 2026. And for the first time in a while , the news has been largely positive. The automaker built a total of 408,386 electric vehicles, a 12.6 percent increase from Q1 2025 . Almost all of those EVs were Models 3 and Y—the company built 394,611 of these, a 14.2 percent increase compared to the same qua
Amazon is in talks to acquire the satellite telecommunications group Globalstar, a deal that would bolster the e-commerce giant’s effort to build its own low-Earth orbit satellite business. The two sides were still negotiating over some of the complexities of a deal after lengthy
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