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 graduate student at Colorado State University. “What the archaeological record shows is that ancient Native American groups were deliberately making objects designed to produce random outcomes, and using those outcomes in structured games, thousands of years earlier than previously recognized.”

Madden's interest in Native American gaming started with Maya ballgames and then expanded to include Native American dice and games of chance. These were rudimentary dice with just two sides, rather than the six sides of modern dice, typically described as "binary lots." And Madden found they were common to virtually every Native American tribe. Archaeologists had traced the use of such dice back 2,000 years, but most were hesitant to conclude that dice-like artifacts older than that were, in fact, dice.

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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 conferences with physicians back in Houston, although these were apparently routine since none of the crew members were experiencing space adaptation sickness.

And they had some time to take pictures. Wiseman, the mission's commander, sent a particularly spectacular image on Friday morning that showed our planet's night side (with a relatively long exposure). Among the beautiful details in this image were not one but two auroras, as well as zodiacal light in the bottom right of the image. The Sun is visible in the distance, lighting the far side of the Earth.

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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 sources who are familiar with the confidential negotiations. "Some of the banks have agreed to spend tens of millions on the chatbot and they have already started integrating Grok into their IT systems."

SpaceX reportedly filed IPO paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week. The IPO filing came two months after SpaceX purchased xAI , the Musk company that produces Grok. xAI purchased the X social network in March 2025.

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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.

Recent research goes a long way to forming a new psychological framework for that second group, which regularly engages in "cognitive surrender" to AI's seemingly authoritative answers. That research also provides some experimental examination of when and why people are willing to outsource their critical thinking to AI, and how factors like time pressure and external incentives can affect that decision.

Just ask the answer machine

In "Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender," researchers from the University of Pennsylvania sought to build on existing scholarship that outlines two broad categories of decision-making: one shaped by "fast, intuitive, and affective processing" (System 1); and one shaped by "slow, deliberative, and analytical reasoning" (System 2). The onset of AI systems, the researchers argue, has created a new, third category of "artificial cognition" in which decisions are driven by "external, automated, data-driven reasoning originating from algorithmic systems rather than the human mind."

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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 reported that "almost half of the US data centers planned for this year are expected to be delayed or canceled" because developers can't import enough transformers, switchgear, and batteries to build out the power infrastructure that every data center needs.

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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 apps and platforms to assist with a host of tasks, including organizing files, doing research, and shopping online. To be useful, it needs access—and lots of it—to as many resources as possible. Telegram, Discord, Slack, local and shared network files, accounts, and logged in sessions are only some of the intended resources. Once the access is given, OpenClaw is designed to act precisely as the user would, with the same broad permissions and capabilities.

Severe impact

Earlier this week, OpenClaw developers released security patches for three high-severity vulnerabilities. The severity rating of one in particular, CVE-2026-33579 , is rated from 8.1 to 9.8 out of a possible 10 depending on the metric used—and for good reason. It allows anyone with pairing privileges (the lowest-level permission) to gain administrative status. With that, the attacker has control of whatever resources the OpenClaw instance does.

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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 legislation that aims to protect consumer rights. The Consumer Code says it's unlawful for a “professional to unilaterally modify the clauses of the contract, or the characteristics of the product or service to be provided, without a justified reason indicated in the contract itself,” according to a Google-provided translation.

The court’s April 1 ruling determined that Netflix's contracts were required to explain in advance why prices or other terms might change in the future.

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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, the Trump administration abolished the federal tax credit for both new and used EVs, one of a series of policies that has disincentivized automakers to build EVs and consumers to buy them. Battery factories have been cancelled or repurposed , and EV lineups have been slashed as OEMs write down billions of dollars in the process.

Some analysts have predicted a particularly grim Q1 2026. Cox Automotive, for example, forecast a 6.5 percent overall decrease in new car sales for the first three months of the year but a 28 percent decrease in EV sales for the same period. Without sustained high fuel prices, Stephanie Valdez Streaty, Cox's director of industry insights, expects people to make fewer trips. "To materially change buying behavior and drive a trend toward smaller, more efficient vehicles, consumers would need to believe gas prices will remain elevated for years, not just months," Cox said .

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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 sensitive information from both subscribed and non-subscribed users" are shared.

Using developer tools, the lawsuit found that opening prompts are always shared, as are any follow-up questions the search engine asks that a user clicks on. Privacy concerns are seemingly worse for non-subscribed users, the complaint alleged. Their initial prompts are shared with "a URL through which the entire conversation may be accessed by third parties like Meta and Google."

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