Let's start with the basics. What, exactly, is an orbital data center?

On the ground, data centers are typically large, warehouse-sized facilities filled with racks of storage and servers, and usually some high-speed networking gear to connect everything. A data center can be small or large, but the ones SpaceX is looking to supplant are of the big kind—the ones operated by major industry players like Amazon Web Services and Google, which provide most of the online services you use today. These are sprawling buildings, or even campuses of buildings, with redundant connections to the electrical grid, on-site generators, massive banks of batteries, and enormous cooling systems to handle the heat being shed by thousands upon thousands of machines operating around the clock.

An orbital data center replicates all of that, but in space.

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Jupiter's colossal storms generate lightning flashes at least 100 times more powerful than those on Earth, according to scientists analyzing data from NASA's Juno spacecraft.

The findings were published March 20 in the journal AGU Advances. Researchers used data recorded by Juno in 2021 and 2022, after NASA granted an extension to the spacecraft's operations upon completing a five-year science campaign at Jupiter. Juno remains in good health , but NASA officials have not said if they will approve another extension for the mission. The issue is money.

Questions about the future of Juno and more than a dozen other robotic science missions began swirling nearly a year ago, when the Trump administration asked mission leaders to submit "closeout" plans for how to turn off their spacecraft. Ars first reported the news soon after the White House released a budget request that called for slashing NASA's science budget by nearly half.

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President Trump's pick for surgeon general, Casey Means, is in jeopardy, as at least four Republican senators have expressed misgivings over her medical qualifications, views on vaccines, and some dubious advice she's given as a wellness influencer, according to reporting from The Washington Post .

Senators Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) all expressed concern about her potential role in a confirmation hearing last month and appear to remain doubtful. Just one of those senators may be enough to block her nomination from advancing beyond the Senate Health committee.

Means, who was nominated more than 10 months ago, is known as a prominent wellness influencer within the Make America Health Again movement and a close ally of anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who started it. In the hearing, senators pressed Means on her views on vaccines, including shots against the flu and measles and a dose of hepatitis B vaccine for newborns. She largely dodged the questions, refusing to explicitly recommend the life-saving shots and avoided overtly contradicting Kennedy's anti-vaccine views and misinformation.

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Last week, Nvidia's public reveal of DLSS 5—and its "generative AI" enhanced glow-ups of gaming scenes—drew widespread condemnation from the gaming community . In a podcast published Monday, though, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tried to differentiate the technology's optional, artist-guided graphical enhancements from the "AI slop" that Huang says he’s not a fan of.

As part of a nearly two-hour-long interview with the Lex Fridman Podcast , Huang was asked to explain the "drama" around DLSS 5 and "the gamers online [that] were concerned that it makes games look like AI slop." Huang responded that he "could see where they're coming from, because I don't love AI slop myself... all of the AI-generated content increasingly looks similar and they're all beautiful, so... I'm empathetic towards what they're thinking."

At the same time, Huang said DLSS 5 is decidedly separate that kind of "slop," because it "is 3D conditioned, 3D guided." The artists behind a game are still the ones creating the in-game structural geometry and textures that form the "ground truth structure" that DLSS 5 works from, Huang said. "And so every single frame, it enhances but it doesn't change anything," he said.

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Driving after a DUI conviction can be a dicey experience. Many states require drivers, if they want to keep using their cars, to install ignition interlock devices that measure alcohol levels before allowing the vehicle to start.

One of the most common is from Des Moines, Iowa-based Intoxalock, which takes the form of a small box with a plastic tube into which the driver blows. The box then measures the level of alcohol in the breath. You must be below your state's legal limit to start the vehicle. (In some states, the system will also log your location using GPS and/or take a photo of you every time you blow in the tube.)

The interlock device can only be leased, and it costs around $70–$120 per month.

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LG Display is mass-producing laptop screens that automatically change their refresh rate from 1 Hz to up to 120 Hz, based on what’s on-screen, it announced this week. The display supplier said that it’s the first company to mass-produce these 1–120 Hz screens, which are supposed to boost battery life.

According to LG’s announcement, the LCD screens, which it’s calling Oxide 1Hz, will automatically use a 1 Hz refresh rate when detecting a static image on-screen and switch to up to 120 Hz when needed. Without providing more detail, LG said it created proprietary “circuit algorithms and panel design technology” and discovered “new materials and [applies] the oxide with the lowest power leakage during low-refresh-rate mode to the display’s thin-film transistor.”

In its announcement this week, LG said that “when performing tasks involving primarily still images—such as checking emails or reading e-books and research papers—the panel operates at the lowest refresh rate of 1 Hz. Conversely, it runs in high-refresh-rate mode at up to 120 Hz when streaming content such as movies or sports as well as playing games with frequent screen changes.

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On Monday, the Trump administration announced its newest approach to its goal of blocking the development of offshore wind: pay companies to walk away from lease sites they had paid for under the Biden administration. The Department of the Interior, which arranges leases of coastal sites for the development of wind farms, would end up returning about $1 billion to France's TotalEnergies, which has promised both to invest that money in US-based fossil fuel projects and to not do any further offshore wind development in the US.

Rumors of the deal had begun circulating last week . The deal comes in the wake of the administration's repeated failures to block offshore wind projects after construction had started.

The deal would see TotalEnergies invest roughly $1 billion in oil and natural gas projects in the US. Once those commitments are made, the US would pay the company that amount in return for its abandonment of two areas it had leased for offshore wind. One of those areas would have hosted a relatively small project near the Carolinas. But the second project, Attentive Energy , is a large site east of New Jersey that would have the capacity to generate 3 Gigawatts of power—capacity that the nearby states would find difficult to replace with other means.

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An appeals court invalidated the Biden-era Federal Trade Commission's attempt to punish Intuit for allegedly deceptive ads that pitched TurboTax as free.

Under then-Chair Lina Khan, the FTC determined in 2024 that the TurboTax maker violated US law with deceptive advertising and ordered it to stop telling consumers, without more obvious disclaimers, that TurboTax or other products are free. The FTC’s chief administrative law judge had previously found that Intuit's ads violated prohibitions on deceptive advertising because the firm “advertised to consumers that they could file their taxes online for free using TurboTax, when in truth, for approximately two-thirds of taxpayers, the advertised claim was false."

Intuit appealed in the conservative-leaning US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit and got a resounding victory on Friday in a 3–0 ruling issued by a panel of judges. "Following the Supreme Court’s decision in SEC v. Jarkesy , we hold that adjudication of a deceptive advertising claim before an administrative law judge violated the constitutional separation of powers," the 5th Circuit panel said.

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Apple announced today that it would be holding its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) from June 8 to 12 this year, giving both developers and the general public a first look at "incredible updates for Apple platforms, including AI advancements and exciting new software and developer tools." The conference will start with an in-person "special event" at the company's Apple Park headquarters that will also be streamed online via YouTube and Apple's Developer app , among other places.

Apple occasionally introduces new hardware at WWDC, but the presentation is usually dedicated mostly to the major software releases that Apple will test all summer and release alongside new iPhones and other products in the fall. We don't know much for sure about what's coming in the new releases, but we can probably expect iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, and the other new updates to refine the Liquid Glass design language, introduce the promised "AI advancements," and end support for the last remaining Intel Macs .

Like the past few years, Apple will primarily host the developer-centric parts of the conference online. The keynote and the more technical Platforms State of the Union presentation will be live, in-person presentations on the 8th, and Apple says that day will also include opportunities to "meet with Apple engineers and designers, and connect with the worldwide developer community." In-person passes will be handed out via lottery to those who request them.

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