The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues to spread wildly, outpacing the international response efforts sprinting to catch up to the deadly Bundibugyo virus strain. The outbreak was first announced May 15 and is already the third largest recorded. The World Health Organization's latest numbers as of May 24 are 1,018 cases (906 suspected, 112 confirmed) with 234 deaths (223 suspected, 11 confirmed). But these are known to be a significant undercount of the true spread and are also likely out of date by now.

The WHO and other national health agencies are calling for international support and collaboration to bring the outbreak under control. But it appears that the US is instead choosing to try to wall itself off—even to its own citizens and lawful residents.

On Friday, the Trump administration announced it was escalating its controversial travel ban , now barring even lawful permanent residents (green card holders) from entering the country if they have traveled to the DRC, Uganda, or South Sudan in the 21 days prior. The move is in addition to already barring non-US passport holders with such a travel history. Notably, Uganda has only reported seven cases and one death in the outbreak; there have been no reported cases in South Sudan.

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was designed to give us the ability to look at one of the earliest periods in the evolution of the Universe, a time when some of the earliest stars were putting out enough light to ionize the hydrogen that accounted for almost all of the normal matter present at the time. There were lots of ideas about what we might see, but the Universe is full of surprises.

One of the first surprises was the existence of what picked up the moniker "little red dots," which are exactly what their name suggests. After some initial arguments, it became clear that these were early versions of the supermassive black holes that presently sit at the center of almost every galaxy. Now, gravitational lensing has allowed astronomers to confirm that a little red dot is little more than a supermassive black hole without much in the way of a galaxy around it.

Making a little red dot bigger

The little red dot in question is called Abell 2744−QSO1, and gravitational lensing has both magnified it and caused it to appear three times in the vicinity of the galaxy cluster that did the lensing. Based on details in its spectrum, we're looking at the object as it appeared just 700 million years after the Big Bang.

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SpaceX has won a lucrative contract to provide the US military with a means of distributing space-based sensing and targeting data, forming the "backbone" of a rearchitected network after separate Pentagon initiatives stalled, officials announced Tuesday.

Space Systems Command, the Space Force's primary procurement and acquisition center, announced the $2.29 billion firm-fixed-price agreement, confirming long-simmering reports that the Pentagon was likely to tap SpaceX for a new communications network in low-Earth orbit. SpaceX's selection for the Space Data Network (SDN) Backbone contract "accelerates the delivery of a resilient, high-speed communications network in space," Space Systems Command said in a statement.

The network will be based on technology originally developed for SpaceX's Starlink global Internet constellation. SpaceX already builds and launches specially designed satellites, called Starshield, for military applications. The SDN Backbone network in low-Earth orbit (LEO) will presumably use the Starshield platform.

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Universal Pictures has released one last trailer for Disclosure Day , director Steven Spielberg’s hotly anticipated return to his “aliens are among us” summer blockbuster roots. And the director features prominently, offering his thoughts on the existence of aliens in between footage from the film.

Per the official logline: “If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? This summer, the truth belongs to 7 billion people. We are coming close to… Disclosure Day.”

David Koepp, who has worked with Spielberg on numerous projects (including Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds ), wrote the screenplay, while John Williams composed the score. Emily Blunt stars as a TV meteorologist in Kansas City. Her co-stars include Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, Wyatt Russell, Elizabeth Marvel, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Michael Gaston, and Mckenna Bridger. Professional wrestlers Chavo Guerrero Jr., Lance Archer, and Brian Cage will also appear.

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AI content creation tools like Google's new Omni model threaten to make reality even harder to discern from AI fantasy, but YouTube is taking an important step toward verifying video origins. After debuting wishy-washy AI content labeling in 2024, Google will begin using more prominent labeling for AI videos, and the site will no longer rely entirely on uploaders to divulge when they use AI tools to create a video.

When YouTube first attempted to tackle the identification of AI videos in 2024, it was almost gratuitous. AI videos at the time nearly always outed themselves by looking bizarre or disjointed. In just a few years, AI models like Seedance, Runway, and Google's own Veo have raised the bar for realism and consistency in AI video— the spaghetti is more accurate than ever.

Recognizing that, YouTube is making the AI labels more prominent and automating part of the process. Creators are still required to indicate when uploading videos if they were created with the help of AI tools. However, uploaders didn't have any incentive to be honest about that before. Starting this month, YouTube will use "new internal signals" to flag AI content. This will apparently apply to videos that show "significant photorealistic AI use."

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Smart lighting manufacturer Govee is apologizing after a pair of books showing only the words “white supremacy” were featured in a marketing image on its website.

The books were visible in an image (shown above) on Govee’s US website for bedroom lighting. Disturbingly, the books sat under toy animals on a shelf just above a child’s bed. Only the books’ spines were visible.

The Verge was the first to report on the controversy after a reader contacted the publication. The publication reported that it contacted Govee, which subsequently removed the image but didn’t respond to the site's queries before it published its initial report.

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Shiny new Nvidia apps like the GeForce Experience and the "Nvidia app" have come and gone, but the old Nvidia Control Panel and its rotating green Nvidia logo have existed as an option for managing basic settings since it was originally introduced in 2006.

That's ending with version 610.47 of Nvidia's Game Ready and Studio drivers for GeForce GPUs. Nvidia says the old Control Panel will no longer be installed by default, since "all actively supported Nvidia Control Panel features for GeForce users have been modernized and transitioned" to the new Nvidia app.

"The NVIDIA app contains all of the modern functionality of the NVIDIA Control Panel available for GeForce RTX GPUs, and much more, while running faster and more efficiently," writes Nvidia Technical Marketing Content Editor Andrew Burnes in the drivers' release notes .

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Volvo Cars got some welcome news from the US Department of Commerce yesterday. The government has told the Swedish automaker, which is partly owned by China's Zhejiang Geely Holding, that it may import connected cars into the US, despite a ban on such vehicle software with Chinese links from model year 2027 onward.

Protectionism is nothing new to the US automotive segment; the absence of foreign-built pickup trucks on US roads is still a consequence of 1964's "chicken tax," for example. More recently, in a rare example of bipartisanship, the focus has been on keeping China out. In 2024, then-President Biden first levied a 100 percent tariff on Chinese imports, followed by a new Commerce rule that prohibited imports of any connected vehicles built by companies owned by or with links to China.

The following year, the Trump administration entered office with very different overall priorities, but there was little daylight between the two on the topic of Chinese cars; the ban would go into effect for software from model year 2027 as planned, with connected vehicle hardware forbidden from model year 2030 onward. Automakers can petition the government for an exemption, though, and it seems they will be granted.

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For the last several years, Motorola's smartphone headliners were the Razr flip phones, but 2026 is different. This time around, Moto's first tablet-style foldable, the Razr Fold , somewhat overshadows the flip phones, but a bulky $2,000 folding phone that isn't made by Samsung occupies the smallest niche in the smartphone market. A Razr flip phone is much more practical, both financially and logistically. But are these phones actually worth buying over a flat phone?

Smartphones are no longer something you need to convince people to buy. Unless you're going out of your way to exclude technology from your daily life, a smartphone is just a necessary convenience. The way some companies market their phones—making relatively boring phones look like a lifestyle choice—doesn't really take this into account. However, Motorola knows what a Razr is.

All the Razrs are big phones when you open them up (Razr Ultra seen here). Credit: Ryan Whitwam

These phones are first and foremost about vibes. They're fun and colorful; there are desk clock displays, mini apps for the outer display, and a quirky camcorder camera mode. Foldables are universally gadgety and visually interesting, but the Razrs take this to the extreme with unique textures and Pantone-certified colorways. That gives the Razrs a selling point before you even get to the specs or hardware. And they need that because the speeds and feeds are nothing special.

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