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"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/does-anyone-actually-want-to-win-the-medium-lift-race-in-the-united-states/

It has been 13 years since the debut of a new medium-lift rocket in the United States, the Antares vehicle developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation.

The initial 100-series variant of the Antares rocket was kind of a hot mess. The rocket used old Soviet engines built during the era when Apollo astronauts were landing on the Moon. Decades later, in the 1990s, Aerojet acquired the engines and refurbished them for a rocket that would launch in the 2010s. Predictably, on the fifth launch of an Antares rocket in 2014, it exploded.

The Antares vehicle is the last of a dying breed of medium-lift rockets—defined as having a lift capacity of 2 to 20 metric tons—in the United States. Nearly a decade and a half later there is a new generation of medium-lift vehicles coming online, and they are starkly different from Antares, which had not just Russian engines but a core stage manufactured in Ukraine.

Four forthcoming rockets all have engines built by the rocket's manufacturer in the United States. Each of these companies has taken various lessons from SpaceX's successful Falcon 9 rocket, arguably the most important of which is to build as much of one's rocket, and particularly the engines, in-house as possible to control timelines and costs.

Now, with SpaceX pulling the Falcon 9 rocket from the commercial market as soon as 2028, the "race" to bring new medium-lift capacity into service is for more than bragging rights. There are fortunes to be made, and commercial space startups to be saved.

Satellite operators legitimately don't know who to book launches with in the 2027 to 2030 timeframe because of uncertainty over which rockets will be available. The Falcon 9 is no longer for sale. The larger Vulcan and New Glenn rockets have stacked manifests and are expensive for small- and medium-sized satellites. And no one really knows which new medium-lift vehicles will be ready and capable of scaling up their launch cadence.

With all of this in mind, Ars Technica is here to help with a guide to the medium-lift space race in the United States, along with some (almost certainly wrong) predictions on when the rockets may debut. The list below is in our expected order of launch. Disagree? Feel free to shame us in the comments. And if you're an engineer or technician working on one of these projects, keep going. This stuff is really hard and we salute your dedication. Prove us wrong!

The smallest of the medium-lift rockets under development, with a capacity of 3 tons in fully reusable mode and 7 tons in expendable mode, the Nova rocket is also arguably the most ambitious.

That's because the rocket aims for full reusability, with a novel upper stage thruster design and heat shield to solve the difficult problem of protecting a vehicle reentering at orbital velocity. Additionally, the first-stage engines are full-flow staged combustion, which is ambitious for a first engine design.

hubie writes:

Study answers longstanding habitability question:

Scientists have helped solve a longstanding mystery about how Earth remained habitable after oxygen first accumulated in its atmosphere more than 2 billion years ago, providing evidence that an ancient ocean chemistry sustained life-friendly conditions.

The study, published in Nature Communications, was led by researchers including UC Riverside geologist Andrey Bekker. They found that changes in ancient ocean chemistry created a self-sustaining cycle that helped keep oxygen levels high after they first rose. The cycle depended on phosphorus recycling, which fueled biological productivity and helped maintain oxygen in the atmosphere.

Scientists have long known that oxygen became a permanent part of Earth's atmosphere about 2.3 billion years ago during the Great Oxidation Event. Less clear was how oxygen levels then remained high enough over millions of years to support increasingly complex forms of life.

"Living things cannot grow or function properly without phosphorus," Bekker said. "Once more of it became available in the oceans, it allowed more organic carbon to be buried. A side effect of that process is that more oxygen continued to be released into the atmosphere."

The researchers found that as oxygen entered Earth's oceans, sulfate concentrations also increased. Microbes used the sulfate to break down organic matter more efficiently, releasing phosphorus back into seawater, where it fueled new biological growth. More life meant more organic carbon was buried, allowing additional oxygen to accumulate in the atmosphere and reinforcing the cycle.

To test this idea, Bekker and collaborators analyzed ancient rocks from South Africa using a new technique that separates phosphorus based on different types of minerals it is attached to. By dissolving each type of mineral one at a time, the technique shows the researchers whether the phosphorus was available for biological functions or was tied to minerals that made it unavailable for living systems.

Until now, scientists could measure only the total amount of phosphorus preserved in rocks, making it difficult to determine how much had actually been available to support life in ancient oceans.

"We can now separate the phosphorus that was available to organisms from phosphorus that was essentially locked away," Bekker said. "That gives us a much clearer picture of nutrient levels in ancient oceans than we had before."

The findings suggest oxygen levels fluctuated more dramatically after the Great Oxidation Event than scientists once believed. Those swings likely reshaped ocean chemistry over tens of millions of years and influenced how nutrients cycled through the environment.

The research could also reshape ideas about the evolution of early life. If oxygen remained abundant for extended periods, Bekker said, then other environmental or biological factors, not just a severely limited amount of oxygen, may have slowed the emergence of more complex organisms dependent on oxygen for their metabolism.

Today, climate change is causing parts of the ocean to lose oxygen. If that trend continues, phosphorus could once again become less available, reducing marine productivity and making marine ecosystems less resilient.

The work could also aid the search for life beyond Earth. Understanding how oxygen, nutrients, and life evolved together on our planet may help scientists recognize similar conditions on ocean-bearing worlds elsewhere in the universe.

"Earth's history shows that oxygen, nutrients, and life evolved together," Bekker said. "Understanding those connections gives us a more nuanced perspective on our own planet's future and what we might look for on other planets."

Journal Reference: Alcott, L.J., Mills, B.J.W., Bekker, A. et al. A nutrient control on oxygenation dynamics during Earth's Great Oxidation Episode. Nat Commun 17, 10294 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-76597-y

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

They might earn more than $200k but who do they work for? Tech buyers need to put some checks in place on FDEs :

During a flight on Marc Benioff's private jet last year, the Salesforce CEO apparently subjected his company's senior execs to a four-hour montage of Palantir CEO Alex Karp holding forth on the value of forward-deployed engineers (FDEs).

The experience — which might have led anyone else to seek the emergency exit — was a lesson for Michael Spencer, Salesforce veep for finance and strategy, about the value of FDEs in boosting sales at Palantir, whose mantra is "land and expand."

He shared the anecdote with the Deutsche Bank 2026 Technology Conference in August, just as the FDE boom was reaching fever pitch.

For the uninitiated, vendors send FDEs to clients without tying them to a project. Effectively consultants-without-portfolio, they are expected to build something valuable, at speed, using their technology. The term is not new — Palantir claimed to have come up with it in 2007 — but the explosive growth of investment in FDEs, and their attachment to AI implementation, provokes questions about the benefits  and risks involved for tech buyers.

Earlier this month, AWS announced a $1 billion investment in a new Forward Deployed Engineering unit which aims to help customers build and deploy AI systems. AI poster-child Anthropic has also announced a $100 million investment in training FDEs. SAP, Salesforce and Workday — in partnership with Accenture — are heavily invested in the idea too. 

Salaries are on a commensurate upward trajectory. According to Levels.fyi's Forward Deployed Engineer salary data, the US median annual total compensation was $216,250, with the 25th percentile at $180,000 and the 75th percentile at $290,000.

The tech industry has an obvious problem to solve with FDEs. It spent around $1 trillion on AI last year, according to Gartner, and is set to see that figure grow by 34.7 percent in 2026. Broadly speaking, it expects to claw at least some of that money back from customers. 

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Whitehall wants tougher penalties and new powers over telecoms operators as Russian activity raises alarm:

Britain is threatening subsea cable saboteurs with up to 14 years in prison and unlimited fines, having apparently decided that Victorian-era laws aren't quite up to the job of keeping Russian submarines away from critical infrastructure.

The government on Thursday set out plans to overhaul legislation dating back to 1885 and introduce tougher penalties for damaging the underwater cables and pipelines that keep Britain's internet and energy supplies running.

According to Whitehall, subsea cables carry around 99 percent of the UK's international data traffic, while underwater pipelines account for 74 percent of its gas supply. Yet much of this infrastructure is protected by laws written when the telegraph was cutting-edge technology.

The Submarine Telegraph Act 1885 originally imposed a £100 maximum fine for damaging a cable through culpable negligence. That might have been a reasonable deterrent back then, but it's unlikely to give today's would-be saboteurs much pause.

Under the proposals, those who intentionally damage critical subsea energy or telecoms infrastructure could face up to 14 years behind bars. The proposals also set tougher penalties, including unlimited fines, for reckless or negligent damage.

Subsea telecoms operators would face new legal duties to identify and manage security risks, while ministers would gain powers to direct companies and cable repair providers to take action where necessary and proportionate to protect national security.

The government also wants to regulate fiber-optic sensing technology, which uses subsea cables to detect activity at sea but could pose a security risk if sensitive data falls into hostile hands.

"mrpg" writes:

The crew's observations highlight what human eyes can add to lunar exploration:

Six months after the Artemis II mission sent four astronauts around the moon, the value of their closeup view is coming into focus. The first science results, released on October 7, reveal details of the moon's array of colors, how often it gets hit by tiny rocks and lessons for squeezing as much science as possible out of future human lunar missions.

"We worked extremely hard to make sure we were able to maximize lunar science return from wherever we could in this mission," said Artemis II flight science operations lead Kelsey Young at a virtual Lunar Surface Science Workshop meeting on October 7. "This is creating yet another tool in our toolbox as planetary scientists to understand our moon, our solar system, even our own planet."

[...] With three days to spare, the team released three reports and a massive data archive on October 7, the 67th anniversary of when the Soviet Luna 3 spacecraft took the first photograph of the farside of the moon. The results offer a rare test of what trained human observers can add to lunar research and what NASA can learn for future missions to the lunar surface.

"We're really excited to release all of this data," earth scientist Sara Schmidt of NASA Johnson Space flight Center in Houston said during the meeting. After six months of hard work, "this is enabling science to happen for the next, I don't know, 60 years, if not more."

Surprisingly, the most valuable data from the mission were not the mind-blowingly gorgeous photos, but the astronauts' verbal and written descriptions of what they were seeing.

[...] During the flyby, the astronauts worked in pairs. Two of them spoke to mission control on the ground, giving periodic updates to the science team on what they were seeing. The other two recorded themselves describing their observations and reactions and used a stylus to annotate specially made maps of the moon that had been uploaded to their tablets during flight. Those notes, doodles and recordings were not made public until now.

The idea was to give the crew high tech field notebooks, Young says.

"If you have any field experience, you know your field notebook is your best friend," she said in the meeting. On Earth, geologists capture nuance and context in written and spoken words, as well as sketches, she said. "We wanted to provide the ability to capture that nuanced information from the crew."

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

It was identified in Euclid telescope imagery using software designed to detect moving objects:

Approximately 40 to 70 new comets are discovered every year, most of which are found by astronomers actively looking for comets or at least new celestial bodies in general. But at least one comet discovered in 2026 doesn’t have that distinction. It was discovered entirely by accident by a telescope that was not actively looking for comets.

Say hello to C/2026 S1 (Euclid), a brand new comet that was just discovered by the European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope. The comet is located about 1.3 billion kilometers away from Earth, which is roughly the distance between the sun and the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. It was discovered by Mikko Pöntinen of the University of Helsinki, together with the Solar System Objects Science Working Group, who were using the Euclid telescope at the time of discovery. 

What makes this one weird, among the thousands of other comets humans have named, is how they found it. The group was intentionally pointing the telescope away from the elliptical plane, a band in the sky where the solar system's planets, most of its asteroids and a significant number of its comets reside. The idea was to avoid the cosmic dust and debris left behind by those celestial bodies, allowing the group to take clearer pictures of distant galaxies in deep space.

While doing this, a comet zipped through. It could have gone entirely unnoticed, but Pöntinen had written software to identify moving objects, which flagged images where the comet appeared. Pöntinen was then able to use its speed and trajectory to find it in other images and report it as a new comet. 

"I was excited to see my software flag a 'streak' smeared across several images," Pöntinen said in a statement. "Further inspection revealed that it had a fuzzy cloud around it, indicative of an active object like a comet that is shedding dust and gas."

The unexpected comet was reported to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, where ground-based astronomers confirmed its existence and gave it a name. 

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

Years of promises, but officials unable to put a figure on investment:

The UK government says its finance systems cannot produce consistent annual figures showing how much departments and public bodies spend on digital transformation.

The Science and Technology Committee's June report warned that spending was fragmented and the government lacked a clear plan for a digital state. The UK public sector spends more than £26 billion annually on digital technology, but that broad estimate does not provide a comparable departmental breakdown.

Responding to the committee, the government agreed with the "intent to publish annual data on digital and data-driven spending" but said it did not "believe this is currently practicable." Existing finance systems could not "provide consistent, reliable and comparable data across departments."

"The government is open to this as a direction of travel and will work with HM Treasury to consider how this could be developed over time," the response said.

Committee chair Dame Chi Onwurah, who is due to address Parliament on Thirsday, said: "There's no shortage of hype about how technology can improve public services and reduce costs. Yet, frustratingly, the government cannot provide a clear picture of how much is being spent on digital transformation across departments and public bodies.

"At a time when ministers are asking taxpayers to fund significant investment in technology, it's concerning that they cannot show where the money is going or how value for money is being measured. This must be addressed as a matter of urgency."

fliptop writes:

The internet is a vast and confusing place no matter your age. Trying to help youth engage with it safely and privately is a complicated topic that touches on many different skillsets and ideas. But just because it's complicated doesn't mean it's impossible. We've launched our Online Privacy for Parents and Youth Surveillance Self-Defense guide in hopes to provide a framework for finding solutions that work for you:

EFF rolls out this crucial resource as state and local governments consider ill-advised laws that cut young people off from essential information and experiences. This particularly harms vulnerable youth and marginalized groups who often find safety in supportive online communities they can't access offline. Such laws also entail age gating, which compromises the privacy of all internet users and stifles young users' ability to learn, grow, and express themselves.

[...] We used a security plan as our foundation for this guide because deciding what is and isn't important is the first step we should all take when assessing our privacy risks. But this isn't a place for quick fixes, and every young person has their unique needs and considerations. There is no single tool or technology fix that can substitute for spending time learning, and then teaching a young person, how the internet works, how to use it, what sorts of harms exist, and how to navigate those harms.

Original Submission

"fab23" writes:

This is not just a rant, this is a serious call and warning to every company or project developing software:

While we could discuss the obvious moral and ethical problems regarding the usage of Big Tech "AI" (see the recommended reading section), this post is not about that.

With the recent improvements in "AI" technology and the following inhumane and greedy push by software companies forcing software developers to use Big Tech "AI" products for development, a new and very serious problem is beginning to surface.

Previously, before the "AI" chaos arose, the modern software industry was already in pretty bad shape. Due to the almost frantic usage of too many levels of abstractions , and due to the incomprehensible lack of courage to think independently and the lack of push back against the blind following of hype and trends, many developers only had a superficial understanding of the technology they were working on.

With "AI" this problem is now getting much worse.

Everywhere many software developers are in distress. And I am not talking about psychological distress, even though that is definitely also a problem. No, I am talking about the problems that developers are facing with the new way of producing and shipping code with "AI". The developers are not producing the code, the "AI" is. And even when it's the developer who is telling the "AI" how to design the system, much of the code is not understood.

Just reading lines of lines of code you have not yourself produced or participated in producing (by actually doing coding and not just prompting an "AI"), is meaningless to a software engineer. Rather, it is impossible to review thousands of new or changed lines of code each week. As this becomes the "new standard" eventually nobody will understand anything and nobody will care.

I thought that when we got to GPT 4, which was back in 2023 I think, that very quickly after that, that there was going to be much more disruption in software business being up for graps, right away than turned out to be. — Sam Altman

The whole point with Big Tech "AI" is to disrupt not only the software industry, but as many industries as possible, and then make everyone completely and heavily dependent upon Big Tech "AI".

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/tp-link-tries-to-appease-trump-admin-with-pledge-to-assemble-routers-in-us/

TP-Link yesterday announced plans to assemble Wi-Fi routers in the US, as the company attempts to get the Trump administration's approval to sell its newest routers to American consumers.

The timing is uncertain, as TP-Link's press release said it expects US-based assembly to begin "as early as" 2027. TP-Link's application to sell new routers in the US could be rejected by the Trump administration or remain pending long enough to push the US-based assembly to 2028.

"Pending US regulatory approval, TP-Link expects domestic assembly of its groundbreaking Wi-Fi 8 home networking product line to begin as early as next year," the company said. TP-Link said it signed a Letter of Intent with US company Keytronic, which agreed "to become a primary domestic manufacturing partner for TP-Link, supporting assembly of the company's advanced networking portfolio in Corinth, Mississippi."

TP-Link can't sell its Wi-Fi 8 routers in the US because of the Federal Communications Commission ban on consumer-grade routers produced wholly or partly in other countries. Previous TP-Link routers that were already approved for import and sale are still available.

The FCC has given exemptions to a number of prominent router makers, but TP-Link's history as a Chinese company is making it difficult to obtain FCC clearance. Founded in China in 1996, TP-Link moved its headquarters to California in October 2024. It says that "TP-Link Systems devices sold in the US are manufactured in Vietnam and TP-Link Systems is an independent, US company that is not owned or controlled by any foreign government."

While TP-Link assembles routers in Vietnam, most of the components are reportedly imported from China. TP-Link's plan to assemble routers in the US will still require it to import components, but the company hopes investment in the US will help it gain the Trump administration's favor.

While the FCC is urging router makers to move more of their operations to the US, a TP-Link official said the government has provided no clear guidance on how much US manufacturing is enough to obtain an exemption from the foreign router ban.

"There are no published guidelines that say, 'Well, it could be 25 percent US, or it could be 15 percent US,'" TP-Link corporate affairs officer Steve Kovsky told PCMag. Kovsky said that many components "are just not available from a domestic source, and this is not a TP-Link issue. This is an issue for all manufacturers that are trying to onshore manufacturing."

In a letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and the agency's commissioners last week, Kovsky said TP-Link is proposing "a nearly $1 billion investment in America that would result in equipping existing US factories, and ultimately building new, highly automated manufacturing facilities, to start assembling next-generation Wi-Fi 8 routers in the United States as soon as next year, creating hundreds of new jobs."

TP-Link's letter said it will make the proposed investment if it receives approval to sell Wi-Fi 8 routers in the US. "This investment would build upon TP-Link's existing US footprint, which includes a global headquarters in Irvine, Calif., and more than 700 US employees," TP-Link told the FCC. "As part of this investment, TP-Link would begin assembling these Wi-Fi 8 devices in the United States by next year, and the devices will incorporate software and firmware developed, written, and stored in the United States by TP-Link's US engineering organization."

shrewdsheep writes:

theglobeandmail

Canada's official maple syrup reserve is sitting near empty, the result of a strong surge in demand that has drained supply to levels not seen in more than a decade.

The Quebec industry, worth about $1.2-billion a year to the province's GDP, produces most of the world's maple syrup. And its stockpile is maintained by a government-sanctioned cartel called the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, known by its French acronym PPAQ.

"At the end of next February, all the remaining syrup sold under contract will be gone," said Simon Doré-Ouellet, deputy director-general at PPAQ. "Our warehouses will be at zero."

The PPAQ sets minimum prices for bulk shipments, regulates production volumes through quotas, and monitors safety and quality standards.

Maple syrup that's not sold goes to three warehouses in Quebec with a combined capacity of 133 million pounds (218,000 barrels worth $400-million if the space is all full) that can be drawn on when weather conditions yield a lower crop. The aim is to have a greater stability in supply and pricing from season to season.

At the moment, demand from consumers is simply outstripping supply. Bulk buyers and processors, such as Rogers Sugar Inc. and Les Industries Bernard & Fils, are snapping up higher volumes of syrup to meet that demand and sell to retail customers. Increasing their stocks also gives them more operational flexibility in the context of trade tension with the U.S., when they might need to make quick shipments on a timely basis.

"This is the first time we're seeing a situation like this. There's much more inventory in the hands of our big buyers than in the past," Mr. Doré-Ouellet said.

Original Submission

"mrpg" writes:

Japan's sample return mission to Phobos may also collect some Mars dust:

For decades, scientists have dreamed of getting Martian rocks into Earth's laboratories — a Herculean feat that would revolutionize our knowledge of the Red Planet. An audacious mission from the Japanese space agency might offer the next best thing: rocks from Mars' larger moon, Phobos.

That's the task confronting the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) spacecraft. The mission, which launched October 19, aims to crack the long-standing mystery of how Mars got its two odd moons by delivering a sample of Phobos to Earth in 2031. These rocks are no substitute for true Martian material — but given that NASA's plans to fetch the Perseverance rover's prized samples are in limbo, scientists are eager for even an indirect glimpse of Mars.

"It's a chance to get a totally different sample and view of Martian materials," says planetary scientist Briony Horgan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., who is not involved in the MMX mission. "It'll be a great contribution to our sample collection back here on Earth."

If it's successful, MMX will be the first mission to reach Phobos. Three previous spacecraft from Russia failed.

The MMX itinerary is action-packed: The spacecraft will spend about one year cruising out to Mars, then slip into orbit around Mars alongside Phobos for about three years. During its stay, the spacecraft will deploy a small rover named Idefix to scout the moon for good sampling sites. The main spacecraft will then make two landings to grab 10 grams of sample, about the weight of four U.S. pennies. It will use two different devices to snag the sample: One will drill two centimeters down into the rock, while the other will blow pressurized gas at the surface to collect loose material.

Once loaded up, MMX will zip past the smaller moon Deimos before making the one-year trek home to drop its cargo in Australia's outback, just as Japan's two previous asteroid sample-return missions have done. After the Japanese space agency JAXA sorts and catalogs the samples, it will share portions of them with other institutions.

Such a small handful of rock may not sound impressive, but it's enough to thrill researchers. "A few grams of sample are going to be a real bonanza for scientists," says planetary scientist Michael Zolensky of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where 15 percent of the sample will eventually end up.

MMX is designed to reveal the enigmatic origins of Phobos and Deimos — the only moons in the inner solar system besides our own. "The Martian moons are so different from [the] terrestrial moon: They are two, very small [and] very dark," says planetary scientist Tomoki Nakamura of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan.

The strange objects look like rocks that wandered in from the outer asteroid belt and got trapped around Mars. But their tidy circular orbits suggest they coalesced after a massive collision tore material off the Red Planet. Or perhaps they came about some other way that scientists simply haven't imagined, says planetary scientist Kiyoshi Kuramoto of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. "The natural world often reveals aspects that exceed our expectations," he says.

Studying the features and composition of Phobos' surface could solve the mystery. But although MMX carries sophisticated instruments to explore Phobos, those observations may not suffice. Hence bringing rock back to Earth's labs, where scientists can enlist equipment far too large or delicate to ever send to space.

Although sample analysis will focus on understanding Phobos, researchers will also be able to use the rocks to fine-tune our understanding of Mars. For example, pinpointing the material's age will allow scientists to calibrate the chronology of cosmic collisions in the neighborhood of Mars. Currently, scientists estimate ages on Mars based on a timeline based on our moon, which may not apply at the Red Planet.

Scientists even have reason to hope that stray grains from Mars will be hidden amid the MMX treasure. This material could be ancient relics of the two bodies mixing during a moon-forming process, potentially including grains that hail from deeper in the Martian crust than scientists have seen so far in rare meteorites the cosmos has delivered us. No matter how Phobos formed, the material could also include fresher debris flung off the Red Planet by cosmic collisions.

The biggest challenge may be positively identifying which grains came from Mars. Such lucky samples would lack valuable geologic context and be far from pristine. "They're material that's been blasted off Mars from some unknown location, micron-sized things, sitting on the airless body Phobos, getting irradiated by space," says planetary scientist Nancy Chabot of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. Nonetheless, scientists are prepared to get creative and use the latest technology to tease out every secret they can manage in any sample they can snag.

MMX offers a very different type of sample return than what NASA has initiated with the Perseverance rover, which has spent years squirreling away fresh material drilled from the most interesting outcrops it can find. That's all in hopes of a future mission ferrying the rock to Earth for scientists to hunt for signs of ancient microbes. But the U.S. Congress has axed funding for that successor due to spiraling costs and concerns about feasibility — particularly of accomplishing the first ever launch from Mars.

Even if MMX can't give scientists the satisfaction of an ultimate Mars sample return, there's still plenty to learn, says planetary scientist Vicky Hamilton of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who is not involved in the mission. "It's always a happy day when we're getting a sample from another object in space and bringing it back to Earth to study," she says.

Original Submission

Rich writes:

Youtuber Patrick Craenen, on his Happy Little Diodes channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiW3P1rJRMc), has announced that he was able to obtain a stash of development documents from former UK electronics company Ferranti. These documents contain a vast treasure of information about the custom ULA (Uncommited Logic Array) chips used in the ZX81 and Spectrum computers that defined much of the 1980's UK computing scene. Starting with the ZX81, a ULA replaced great numbers of individual logic ICs, reducing the chip count to a fraction and enabling a two-figure price for the machine. On the Spectrum, they enabled colour graphics with the lower development effort for a gate array, where US competitors Commodore and Atari were using full custom layout ICs, and Apple was using none, relying on NTSC artifacts until the Mac II.

The Ferranti Files contain detailed schematics for many of the ULA revisions, which will be of great interest to computer historians. As Ferranti is no longer existent, and the Sinclair rights have, via Amstrad, gone to Sky, Craenen cleared the release with their lawyers, who agreed under the condition that personal information is redacted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

Commission opens DSA probe into fake listings and phishing on the platform, says its fraud defenses 'absolutely substandard'>/a>:

The European Commission has opened an investigation under the Digital Services Act into whether Booking.com is doing enough to stop fraudsters running scams, phishing and smishing on its platform.

Officials told The Register the probe, which opened Wednesday, covers a very large online platform (one with more than 45 million EU users) and has three strands.

The first is whether Booking.com is failing to prevent fraudulent and non-compliant listings. "This is very much about people portraying themselves as the owner of premises and putting it up for rent while they are not the real owner,"  an EC spokesperson said.

The second is whether it does enough to counter phishing and smishing (SMS phishing), and social engineering. "Scammers take over the account of a property owner and... portray themselves as the property owner, but also take over the contact details," she said. "So they start sending messages that people need to pay additional amounts."

The Commission also suspects Booking.com is not sufficiently protecting the data of its consumers and business users.

The third strand is advertising transparency: whether the platform clearly distinguishes ads from organic results, and whether it is clear about boosted listings, where property owners pay for higher ranking.

Officials cited Booking.com's own admission in June 2024 of a 500-900 percent jump in travel scams over the previous 18 months. "What made us concerned is the very high figures," an official said.

In the Netherlands alone, more than 1,000 fraud notifications were made in the first part of 2026, causing damage of €82,000, a tenfold increase on the previous year. "This is a real problem, and this is only the Dutch element," the official said. "We have reports like that almost from all member states... So, we have clear elements where we find that the risk assessment was not sufficient, and as you know, the risk assessment is a key tool for us."

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

https://www.engadget.com/2292027/google-brings-gemini-personal-intelligence-to-android-auto/

At the start of the year, Google debuted Personal Intelligence, a Gemini feature that allows the chatbot to pull information from your other Google apps to generate more personalized responses. An expansion in March brought Personal Intelligence to free accounts after it was previously only available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. And now Google has begun rolling out the feature to Android Auto users.

In practice, the company says today's update will improve Gemini's reasoning capabilities in cars. It will also make the assistant capable of delivering more specific details as they relate to your questions and prompts. For example, if you're driving to the airport, Google suggests Gemini with Personal Intelligence will be able to answer questions like "what's my flight gate?" and "is my flight on time?" Provided you've linked your Gmail account, it can do all this without you needing to pull over to find a confirmation email.

More broadly, Google says Personal Intelligence makes it easier to interact with Gemini more naturally. For instance, if you need directions to your doctor's office, you can just say "take me to my doctor's appointment," instead of speaking a specific address. Recommendations are also improved. If you're in a new city, Google suggests you can ask for dinner spots along your driving route and Gemini will generate suggestions while factoring in preferences and restrictions, like if you're a vegetarian.

As before, enabling Personal Intelligence is optional, and you can turn it off at any point if you don't want Gemini pulling your data. You can also control what apps Gemini can access. Google is starting to roll out Personal Intelligence to Android Auto users globally starting today (with the exception of those living in Switzerland, the European Economic Area, UK and Nigeria). In the coming months, the company plans to bring the feature to cars with Google built-in too.

Original Submission