When we reviewed the Switch 2 just after its launch last year, we warned that interested customers might want to buy in early, as the launch price could go up. That potential price hike became a reality today, as Nintendo announced the Switch 2's MSRP will increase to $499.99 on September 1, a $50 (and about 11 percent) increase from the $449.99 launch price.

In an announcement of the impending price increase today, Nintendo cited "changes in market conditions" and "the global business outlook" that are "expected to extend over the medium to long term." That's likely a reference to the climbing RAM and storage prices that have been impacting all sorts of hardware makers for months .

Nintendo's pricing move means all three current major consoles have now increased in price since launch. Sony's PS5 got its second price increase in March , just eight months after its first price hike . The Xbox Series consoles saw their second price increase in September , five months after an initial price hike . Nintendo also raised the price of the aging original Switch console for the first time last year.

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There have been supposed alien sightings for centuries. These observations of "unidentified flying objects," or UFOs, have periodically surged, such as during the late 1940s and early 1950s as the Cold War began. There have been more sightings since the early 2000s, driven by advances in sensors and cameras that capture images in real time.

Over the last decade, since the work of a shadowy government program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was made public in 2017, there has been growing public pressure on the US government to release its files related to aliens. At the same time, UFOs have been rebranded as Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, or UAP.

Amid the growing public outcry, the Pentagon and other officials have repeatedly stated that they have found no confirmed evidence of extraterrestrial beings or their technology visiting Earth. But we live in an era of conspiracy theories and an unbounded and increasingly unhinged Internet. No one trusts anyone. So there are plenty of people who believe aliens are real and the government is covering it all up.

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It’s no fun living through the global energy shock and growing economic crisis that has ensued since the conflict choked off shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. But it can be enlightening to play through the new game Bottleneck that forces players to choose among the 2,000 ships still stuck in and around the strait—all while actual news reports and real maritime transit data help tell the story of the unfolding events.

The free browser-based game challenges players to act as a fictional maritime coordinator by selecting a handful of ships that get to pass through the strait each day. Most decisions come with serious costs or trade-offs, whether it’s paying the toll imposed by the Iranian government that has claimed authority over the strait or antagonizing Iran or the United States while pushing either side toward widening the war. Failure to push through enough specific shipments can spark individual crises involving the price of oil, food, and water security, and a countdown to famine in many countries.

“The game does not ask whether you are smart enough to solve the crisis,” said Jakub Gornicki , the journalist and artist who developed the game, in a post . “It asks what kind of damage you choose when every option has a cost.”

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Welcome to Edition 8.40 of the Rocket Report! One of the remarkable things about SpaceX is that, after a quarter of a century and becoming the most important launch company of this era, it remains a disruptive force. Even though the Falcon 9 is the most used rocket of the world, and groundbreaking in its reuse capabilities, SpaceX is actively seeking to make it obsolete with the Starship program. Stephen has a great story in this week's newsletter highlighting the fact that we're probably past the peak of the Falcon era of flight.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Firefly readies for upgraded Alpha rocket launch . Firefly Aerospace plans to debut the upgraded version of its Alpha rocket late this summer, Space News reports . In a May 4 earnings call about the company’s first-quarter financial results, Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly, confirmed the company was moving ahead with the Alpha Block 2 rocket after a successful return to flight of the original version of the vehicle in March.

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Four protesters are suing to stop the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from seizing DNA samples from Americans arrested while peacefully protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity.

In a complaint filed in an Illinois district court on Wednesday, protesters arrested at the Broadview ICE facility during "Operation Midway Blitz"—when thousands of federal agents flooded Chicago—demanded an injunction to stop alleged violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, as well as the Administrative Procedure Act.

They have accused the federal government of "wrongfully arresting peaceful protesters, collecting their DNA, uploading their genetic profiles to government databases, and storing their DNA samples in federal labs—permanently."

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The disbelief was palpable when Mozilla’s CTO last month declared that AI-assisted vulnerability detection meant “ zero-days are numbered ” and “defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively.” After all, it looked like part of an all-too-familiar pattern: Cherry-pick a handful of impressive AI-achieved results, leave out any of the fine print that might paint a more nuanced picture, and let the hype train roll on.

Mindful of the skepticism, Mozilla on Thursday provided a behind-the-scenes look into its use of Anthropic Mythos—an AI model for identifying software vulnerabilities—to ferret out 271 Firefox security flaws over two months. In a post , Mozilla engineers said the finally ready-for-prime-time breakthrough they achieved was primarily the result of two things: (1) improvement in the models themselves and (2) Mozilla’s development of a custom “ harness ” that supported Mythos as it analyzed Firefox source code.

"Almost no false positives"

The engineers said their earlier brushes with AI-assisted vulnerability detection were fraught with “unwanted slop.” Typically, someone would prompt a model to analyze a block of code. The model would then produce plausible-reading bug reports, and often at unprecedented scales. Invariably, however, when human developers further investigated, they’d find a large percentage of the details had been hallucinated. The humans would then need to invest significant work handling the vulnerability reports the old-fashioned way.

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Wearables have really come full circle. The early Fitbits didn't have screens, but the move to smartwatches put a screen on everyone's wrist. Now, devices like Whoop and Hume are designed as data trackers first and foremost without so much as a clock. Google's newest wearable jumps on that trend: The Fitbit Air doesn't have a screen, but it does have a suite of health sensors that pipe data into the new Google Health app. And if you want, Google has a new AI-powered health coach in the app ready to tell you what that data means (maybe).

The Fitbit Air itself is a small plastic puck about 1.4 inches long and 0.7 inches wide. It slots into various bands that hold the bottom-mounted sensors against your wrist. There's no display pointing upward, so the entire device is covered by the fabric or plastic of the band. It's a streamlined and potentially stylish look—in uncharacteristic fashion, Google has plenty of colors and style options available, including a special-edition Steph Curry version. You may have heard chatter about Curry being seen teasing a new screenless Fitbit, and this is it.

Smartwatches never quite became a must-have device—plenty of people have them, but we don't all wear them all the time because they need to be charged often and aren't always very comfortable. The screenless Fitbit Air doesn't have those issues. Google says it lasts about a week on a charge, and it does that while collecting continuous health data. It can even store a day of data without being connected to your phone.

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Last fall, we featured an extensive interview with Petter Törnberg of the University of Amsterdam, who studies the underlying mechanisms of social media that give rise to its worst aspects: the partisan echo chambers, the concentration of influence among a small group of elite users (attention inequality), and the amplification of the most extreme divisive voices. He wasn't optimistic about social media's future.

Törnberg's research showed that , while numerous platform-level intervention strategies have been proposed to combat these issues, none are likely to be effective. And it’s not the fault of much-hated algorithms, non-chronological feeds, or our human proclivity for seeking out negativity. Rather, the dynamics that give rise to all those negative outcomes are structurally embedded in the very architecture of social media. So we’re probably doomed to endless toxic feedback loops unless someone hits upon a brilliant fundamental redesign that manages to change those dynamics.

Törnberg has been very busy since then, producing two new papers and one new preprint building on this realization that social media is structured quite differently than the physical world, with unexpected downstream consequences. The first new paper , published in PLoS ONE, specifically focused on the echo chamber effect, using the same combined standard agent-based modeling with large language models (LLMs)—essentially creating little AI personas to simulate online social media behavior.

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Elon Musk tried to hire OpenAI’s founding team, including Sam Altman, to lead a new AI lab within Tesla in 2018, as the AI start-up’s leaders grappled over who should control the company and its direction.

Musk, a co-founder of the AI group, proposed bringing Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever to his carmaker, appointing Altman to the board or making OpenAI a Tesla subsidiary, according to evidence in a high-stakes trial between the billionaire and the ChatGPT maker on Wednesday.

The disclosures shed light on a crucial issue in the case, in which Musk has claimed that Altman “stole a charity” by converting the company into a for-profit. OpenAI’s lawyers have argued the Tesla chief executive was happy to commercialize the lab, provided that he remained in charge.

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