KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—This will be the third time I have observed NASA’s Orion spacecraft take flight. But with this one, for the first time, am I genuinely hopeful about the future of the space agency and its plans to build a station on the surface of the Moon.

The two previous flights, in 2014 and 2022, both felt hollow. NASA, an aging bureaucracy, has repeatedly sought to recapture its fading glory while also looking toward a supposedly brighter future. Agency leaders would say things like this, from then-NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, after the first Orion launch in 2014: “This is the beginning of the Mars era.”

It wasn’t. No one who was paying attention believed it. But it was the kind of thing you had to say, I guess.

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A proposed class action has accused Costco of unjust enrichment after the retail giant allegedly made customers pay for tariffs, then planned to pocket the full refund after they were deemed unlawful .

Costco "collected the tariff costs from consumers through elevated pricing, while simultaneously seeking refunds of the same tariff payments from the federal government," the complaint alleged. Unless the court intervenes, "Costco stands to recover the same tariff payments twice."

Filed in a US District Court in Washington, the lawsuit points to public statements from Costco executives that customers said made it clear that the company had raised prices on some goods while the tariffs were in effect. But the company has since offered "no legally binding commitment to return tariff-related overcharges to the consumers who actually paid them."

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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires that, in the event of an emergency, all airplane passengers must be able to evacuate any aircraft within a 90-second window. But is that a realistic requirement, particularly given the increasing number of elderly passengers who might need more time and assistance? According to a new paper published in the journal AIP Advances, it is not. Various simulated scenarios showed evacuation times significantly higher than the 90-second requirement.

This isn't the first time scientists have puzzled over this kind of optimization problem. Back in 2011 , Jason Steffen, now a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, became intrigued by the question of the most efficient boarding method; he applied the same optimization routine used to solve the famous traveling salesman problem to airline boarding strategies. Steffen fully expected that boarding from the back to the front would be the most efficient strategy and was surprised when his results showed that strategy was actually the least efficient.

The most efficient, aka the “Steffen method,” has the passengers board in a series of waves. Field tests bore out the results , showing that Steffen’s method was almost twice as fast as boarding back-to-front or rotating blocks of rows and 20–30 percent faster than random boarding. The key is parallelism: The ideal scenario is having more than one person sitting down at the same time.

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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—The two-day countdown for the launch of NASA's Artemis II mission began Monday evening, with clocks timed for the first of six opportunities in early April to send a crew of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon.

Liftoff from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida is scheduled for a two-hour launch window opening at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC) on Wednesday. NASA has backup launch opportunities each day through Monday, April 6, or else the mission will have to wait until the end of the month.

Mission managers said Monday that all systems were looking good for launch this week. The weather forecast is favorable, with an 80 percent chance of acceptable conditions for liftoff Wednesday. The only weather concern at the launch site in Florida is a low chance of rain showers and cloud cover that could present a risk of lightning. But with a two-hour launch window, there should be plenty of time to wait out any scattered storms.

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The Volvo factory outside Charleston, South Carolina, will get even busier this year. Formerly the site that built the S60 sedan, in recent years it shifted to building big electric SUVs, the EX90 and closely related Polestar 3 . Today, Volvo and Polestar announced that Charleston will now be the sole production site for the Polestar 3; until now, it was also being built at a factory in Chengdu, China.

"The move to consolidate global Polestar 3 production in Charleston help[s] generate efficiencies for both companies, whilst also underscoring our confidence in the plant and the role it plays in our manufacturing footprint," said Håkan Samuelsson, chief executive of Volvo Cars. "The US is a very important market for Volvo Cars, both to support our growth ambitions as well as a strategic production site to meet regional and export demands."

Volvo had a challenging 2025, with sales falling by 7 percent. Meanwhile, Polestar, which was spun out from the Swedish OEM's performance arm into a standalone startup in 2017 , had a rather good 2025, seeing a 34 percent increase in sales. So increasing the proportion of Polestar 3s to come out of South Carolina seems sensible.

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If you follow the ongoing debate over AI's growing economic impact, you may have seen the graphic below floating around this month. It comes from an Anthropic report on the labor market impacts of AI and is meant to compare the current "observed exposure" of occupations to LLMs (in red) to the "theoretical capability" of those same LLMs (in blue) across 22 job categories.

While the current "observed exposure" area is interesting in its own right, it's the blue "theoretical capability" that jumps out. At a glance, the graph implies that LLM-based systems could perform at least 80 percent of the individual "job tasks" across a shockingly wide range of human occupations, at least theoretically. It looks like Anthropic is predicting that LLMs will eventually be able to do the vast majority of jobs in broad categories ranging from "Arts & Media" and "Office & Admin" to "Legal, Business & Finance," and even "Management."

Digging into the basis for those "theoretical capability" numbers, though, provides a much less chilling image of AI's future occupational impacts. When you drill down into the specifics, that blue field represents some outdated and heavily speculative educated guesses about where AI is likely to improve human productivity and not necessarily where it will take over for humans altogether.

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As missile sirens wailed over Israel earlier this month, thousands of Israelis received texts claiming to be from their military, encouraging them to download a fake shelter app, which could have stolen reams of personal data.

Others received a mass text saying: “Netanyahu is dead. Death is approaching you and soon the gates of hell will open before you. Before the fire of Iranian missiles destroys you, leave Palestine.”

The messages, cyber security experts say, are the most visible end of a vast war being waged in the far reaches of the Internet between Iran, Israel and the US, and their online sympathisers.

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After getting a little overoptimistic about the speed and nature of electric vehicle adoption here in the US, automakers are now scaling back their production plans. The imposition of tariffs and the abolishment of federal EV incentives are mostly to blame, although the domestic OEMs' attempt to easily transition their full-size truck customers into all-electric versions has stumbled thanks to a mix of range and towing anxiety.

General Motors has been well represented in the large electric vehicle segment by Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC with a mix of pickup trucks and SUVs. But the plant that assembles them—Factory Zero in Hamtramck, Michigan—was idled two weeks ago. Thirteen hundred workers have been temporarily laid off until it restarts on April 13, resuming production of the Escalade IQ , Chevrolet Silverado EV, GMC Sierra EV , and the GMC Hummer EVs .

In late October last year , GM permanently laid off 1,700 workers in Michigan and Tennessee at EV and battery plants, including Factory Zero. Then, it also idled the production line for the big EVs for about a month before restarting with just a single shift. At least production will restart at all. In December Ford canceled its F-150 Lightning pickup truck, and Ram never even got a battery EV truck into production.

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Residents of Birmingham, Alabama, were abruptly informed earlier this month that their water utility had decided to stop adding fluoride to city water. Then, days later, they learned that the utility had actually stopped adding fluoride years ago.

On March 20, Central Alabama Water (CAW) made an announcement that it had discontinued water fluoridation. The announcement cited "aging equipment" and "increasing maintenance and component replacement" as justifications for the removal of fluoride, which it indicated had already occurred. But the water utility also highlighted unsubstantiated health concerns and noted that people can buy toothpaste and mouthwash that contain fluoride to protect their teeth.

Emphasizing that there are "questions about the long‑term health effects," CAW said, "ending drinking water fluoridation allows customers and their health care providers to make more individualized decisions about fluoride use."

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