“Blue Origin’s rocket reuse achievement marred by upper stage failure.”
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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.com).
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Today
The third flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn launcher began Sunday with the company’s first successful reflight of an orbital-class booster, but ended with a setback for Jeff Bezos’ flagship rocket, a key element in NASA’s Artemis lunar program. The 321-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn launch vehicle ignited its seven methane-fueled BE-4 engines at 7:25 am EDT (11:25 UTC) Sunday, beginnin
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If you walk across the open yard in front of the Physics, Math, and Astronomy building at the University of Texas at Austin , you’ll see a 17-story tower and a huge L-shaped building. What you won’t see is what’s underneath you. Two floors below ground, behind heavy double doors stamped with a logo that most students have never noticed, sits one of the most powerful lasers in the United States. I
Yesterday
The evolutionary edge that fueled great white shark dominance for millions of years could soon become its greatest downfall. The ocean’s most iconic predators maintain warmer body temperatures than the surrounding seawater and are paying an increasingly steep price for it. As the oceans warm due to climate change, they now face the risk of potentially fatal overheating, according to a new report
Apr 17, 2026
Grinex, a US-sanctioned cryptocurrency exchange registered in Kyrgyzstan, said it’s halting operations after experiencing a $13 million heist carried out by “western special services” hackers. Researchers from TRM, which has confirmed the theft, put the value of stolen assets at $15 million after discovering roughly 70 drained addresses, about 16 more than Grinex reported. Neither TRM nor fellow
A 25-year-old Tennessee man avoided prison time after pleading guilty to accessing government systems with stolen login credentials and boasting of the deed on an Instagram account with the handle, @ihackedthegovernment. Defendant Nicholas Moore accessed user accounts on the US Supreme Court’s electronic filing system, AmeriCorps, and the Veterans Administration Health System. He then publicly po
President Trump on Thursday announced his third nominee for director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Dr. Erica Schwartz, a well-qualified former public health official and board-certified physician in preventive medicine, who has publicly supported vaccination and followed evidence-based medicine. The uncontroversial pick comes amid concern within the administration that the ag
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Whether you’re considering an electric vehicle because of gas prices or climate change, there has probably never been a better time to buy a used EV, despite that the Trump administration abolished the used clean vehicle tax credit last year. When we started this ongoing series looking at used EV options, the initial idea was to see what was available at bargain-basement prices. But today we’re l
Silicon Valley has been pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building ever-larger AI data centers that require as much electricity as hundreds of thousands of US homes—but that massive buildout faces significant construction and power challenges along with growing local resistance. Now satellite imagery is showing that nearly 40 percent of US data center projects may fail to be completed
The writing was on the wall, and now it’s on Amazon’s website. Newly released Fire Sticks will not support the sideloading of Android apps or any other software from outside Amazon’s official app store. The proof comes from an update to Amazon’s website for developers , which currently reads: Starting with Fire TV Stick 4K Select [which came out in October], all future Fire TV Sticks will run on
Post-apocalyptic scenarios are a longtime staple of science fiction, and director Ridley Scott’s latest film, The Dog Stars , falls firmly into that subgenre. Based on Peter Heller’s critically acclaimed 2012 novel , the story depicts the aftermath of a deadly flu virus that wiped out most of humanity. The studio released the first trailer at CinemaCon, introduced by a video message from Scott, w
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The crew of Artemis II spoke with the media on Thursday, six days after returning to Earth following their mission around the Moon. After a news conference, the astronauts gave a handful of interviews, and Ars was able to speak with Orion’s pilot, Victor Glover. Glover and Ars first connected nearly a decade ago as part of our homage to Apollo, The Greatest Leap . Glover now stands at the vanguar
The rising costs of RAM and other computing components are pushing up the price of Meta’s Quest VR headsets, which the company says will increase by $50–$100 (about 12–20 percent) starting on April 19. In announcing that price increase on Thursday , the company cited the “global surge in the price of critical components—specifically memory chips—[that] is impacting almost every category of consum
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Welcome to Edition 8.37 of the Rocket Report! NASA is still climbing down from the high of the Artemis II mission, the first flight by humans to the Moon since 1972. What a mission it was! Now, attention turns to completing development of a lander to get astronauts down to the Moon’s surface. Among other things, we chronicle the latest progress of NASA’s two lunar lander contractors, SpaceX and B
Sometime around 2010, sophisticated malware known as Flame hijacked the mechanism that Microsoft used to distribute updates to millions of Windows computers around the world. The malware—reportedly jointly developed by the US and Israel—pushed a malicious update throughout an infected network belonging to the Iranian government. The lynchpin of the “collision” attack was an exploit of MD5, a cryp
Apr 16, 2026
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NASA confirmed Thursday that SpaceX will launch the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin Mars rover, perhaps as soon as late 2028, on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. So why is NASA deciding which rocket will launch a flagship European Mars mission? It’s a long story involving the search for extraterrestrial life, crippling political hatchets, and of all things, Russ
Lucasfilm released the final trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu last night at CinemaCon, to much applause. And why wouldn’t there be? The trailer has all the elements that mark the best of the Star Wars franchise. As previously reported , Grogu (fka “Baby Yoda”) won viewers’ hearts from the moment he first appeared onscreen in the first season of The Mandalorian , and the relationship between
Intel’s Core Ultra laptop CPUs have been its flagships ever since it retired the older generational branding scheme and the i3/i5/i7/i9 branding a few years back. The Core Ultra Series 1 , Series 2 , and Series 3 processors been the ones with the newer CPU and GPU designs, and newer manufacturing technology. Intel has also offered non-Ultra Core CPUs, but these have never been particularly intere
On Thursday, OpenAI announced it had developed a large language model specifically trained on common biology workflows. Called GPT-Rosalind after Rosalind Franklin , the model appears to differ from most science-focused models from major tech companies, which have generally taken a more generic approach that works for various fields. In a press briefing, Yunyun Wang, OpenAI’s Life Sciences Produc
NASA is apparently pretty serious about building a base on the Moon, and the astronauts who just flew there say it is “absolutely doable.” Within two days of landing on Earth, the Artemis II astronauts were already back in spacesuits, working as if they had just landed in a gravity well and had ventured outside onto the lunar surface for a spacewalk. “We were in surface spacewalk suits, doing sur
Mozilla is the latest legacy tech brand to make a play for the enterprise AI market. But the company behind Firefox and Thunderbird isn’t releasing its own standalone AI model or agentic browser. Instead, the newly announced Thunderbolt is being sold as a front-end client for users and businesses who want to run their own self-hosted AI infrastructure without relying on cloud-based third-party se
The Federal Trade Commission pressured three advertising firms into settlements that will likely result in more ad spending on conservative media platforms. The FTC and eight US states filed a lawsuit against ad firms Dentsu, Publicis, and WPP yesterday, and simultaneously announced settlements with all three companies. The complaint alleges a conspiracy of “various interested parties to demoneti
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A new version of OpenAI’s Codex desktop app reaches users today. It brings a smorgasbord of new features and changes, ranging from new developer capabilities to expansion into non-developer knowledge work to laying the groundwork for the company’s “super app.” The most interesting for the moment is the ability to perform tasks on your PC in the background; OpenAI claims it can do this without int
It’s been seven long years now since Metro Exodus wowed us with its early RTX-powered ray tracing in a chilling post-apocalyptic setting. A lot has changed in the intervening years, both in the game industry and for many Ukraine-based developers working on the upcoming Metro 2039 at developer 4A Studios. “Everything we had planned for the next chapter of Metro changed in 2020 and more significant
A Chinese ship has tested a new device capable of slicing through submarine data cables thousands of meters beneath the ocean surface. That demonstration may exacerbate security concerns over a spate of suspected sabotage incidents targeting undersea communications and power cables from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. The trial took place at a depth of 11,483 feet (3,500 meters) during a dee
Stellantis, the global car company that owns brands from Alfa Romeo to Vauxhall (including Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram), has begun a five-year partnership with Microsoft. The tech company will use its expertise to help the automaker improve its digital services, beef up its cybersecurity, and enhance its engineering capabilities. And yes, it will do that with the hype-iest of tech trends, AI.
Google began rolling out “personal intelligence” in Gemini early this year , giving AI subscribers the option of a more customized experience when using the company’s chatbot. Today, it’s using personal intelligence to tie its image-generation model to Google Photos . If you opt in, generated images will have access to your photos and associated labels to simplify prompts and produce more accurat
The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday announced meeting dates for advisors to discuss lifting restrictions on 12 unproven peptides that the agency deemed to pose significant safety risks in 2023. The meetings are scheduled for two days in July, with another in February 2027. The scheduled meetings do not appear to be accompanied by any significant new safety or efficacy data for FDA advis
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E-bikes have started to blur what was once a basic feature of cycling: you push the pedals, which turns the wheels. Now, with throttles, you only have to pedal some of the time. And in mid-drive motors, the force you generate through pedaling is routed through a complex set of gearing and is merged with a motor’s output. The once-direct connection between your legs and the rear wheel has become m
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Scientists are often advised to explain their work in terms that a child can understand—a task that is particularly challenging when it comes to such complex topics as quantum mechanics. It’s easier when the interviewer is an actual child, like 9-year-old Kai, aka the Quantum Kid. Kai and his mother, theoretical physicist and science communicator Katia Moskvitch, co-host The Quantum Kid podcast ,
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Later this year, two spacecraft are scheduled for launch on missions to land somewhere near the rim of Shackleton Crater , an impact basin near the Moon’s south pole harboring an immense reservoir of water ice. The two landers will arguably be the most ambitious