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, beginning a slow climb from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

The main engines, each producing more than a half-million pounds of thrust, accelerated the rocket past the speed of sound in about a minute-and-a-half. Three minutes into the flight, the booster switched off its engines and fell away from New Glenn's upper stage, powered by two BE-3U engines burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

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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 interesting, mostly because both the Series 1 and Series 2 chips were based on Intel's old Raptor Lake architecture. Raptor Lake was the code name for 2023's 13th-generation Core family, and most versions of Raptor Lake were the same silicon used for 2022's 12th-generation Core CPUs.

But the naming and renaming of Raptor Lake apparently couldn't last forever. Intel's new, non-Ultra Core Series 3 processors are new silicon, a return to the days when you could expect high-end and midrange Intel chips to include many of the same advancements despite their performance differences.

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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 Product Lead, said the system was designed to tackle two major roadblocks faced by current biology researchers. One is the massive datasets created by decades of genome sequencing and protein biochemistry, which can be too much for any one researcher to take in. The second is that biology has many highly specialized subfields, each with its own techniques and jargon. So, for example, a geneticist who finds themselves working on a gene that's active in brain cells might struggle to understand the immense neurobiological literature.

Wang said the company had taken an LLM and trained it on 50 of the most common biological workflows, as well as on how to access the major public databases of biological information. Further training has resulted in a system that can suggest likely biological pathways and prioritize potential drug targets. "We're connecting genotype to phenotype through known pathways and regulatory mechanisms, infer likely structural or functional properties of proteins, and really leveraging this mechanistic understanding," Wang said.

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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 surface geology tasks, and doing them well," said Christina Koch, a mission specialist on the Artemis II mission. "(We were) able to complete an entire battery of very challenging surface tasks."

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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 services.

Thunderbolt is built on top of Haystack , an existing open source AI framework that lets users build custom, modular AI pipelines from user-chosen components. Thunderbolt acts as what Mozilla calls a “sovereign AI client” on top of that underlying infrastructure. The combo promises to let users easily plug into any ACP-compatible agent or OpenAI-compatible API (including Claude, Codex, OpenClaw, DeepSeek, and OpenCode).

The system can also integrate with locally stored enterprise data through open protocols and use an offline SQLite database as a local “source of truth” for the model to reference. In conjunction with a locally run model that promises to let users control the entire stack of AI services, which could be an important consideration for businesses concerned about leaking their data to outside providers. Mozilla says Thunderbolt also offers "optional end-to-end encryption, and device-level access controls” for additional security.

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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 demonetize disfavored conservative news and opinion sites by denying them digital advertising revenue." The FTC filed suit in US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, which happens to be Elon Musk's preferred judicial venue .

In a press release, the FTC claimed that starting in 2018, the three firms "unlawfully colluded to impose common 'brand safety' standards across the digital advertising industry... The ad agencies, together with their primary competitors Omnicom and Interpublic Group, operated through trade associations to establish a common 'Brand Safety Floor' to target 'misinformation.'" The FTC also said that "firms like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index used this misinformation designation as a means to promote the demonetization of disfavored political viewpoints."

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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 interfering with what you are doing on your desktop.

OpenAI explained the update in a blog post :

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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 significantly in 2022," the developers said in a first look presentation of the game released today . "The war has shaped us, and we have changed the story to be even more about choices, actions, consequences, and what you have to pay to have a future."

While 4A is officially based in Malta, the studio was founded in Kyiv in 2006. And while 4A says the team working on Metro 2039 spans across 25 countries, the majority of those working on the game are Ukrainian.

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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 deep-sea science expedition involving the Chinese research ship named Haiyang Dizhi 2, according to the South China Morning Post . That ship is equipped with a 150-ton crane, a 10-kilometer fiber optic winch, and a helicopter landing platform. It has shown the capability to deploy deep-sea remotely operated vehicles in previous missions .

The South China Morning Post cited a report in the China Science Daily, an official, Chinese-language news publication run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The latter claimed that “the sea trial has bridged the ‘last mile’ from deep-sea equipment development to engineering application.”

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