The Moon has received a lot of attention in recent months, particularly the surface of Earth's cold and dusty companion.

This has largely been driven by a decision from SpaceX founder Elon Musk to pivot, at least in the near term, from Mars to lunar surface activities and the potential for using material there to build large satellites. But there has been a notable shift from NASA, too, which has started talking a lot more about building up elements of a base on the surface rather than an orbiting space station known as the Gateway.

In short, the world's most successful space company and the largest space agency have both increased their lunar ambitions, suggesting a greater frequency of missions to the Moon in the coming years.

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The medical journal The Lancet did not pull any punches in a scathing editorial on Robert F. Kennedy Jr , calling the anti-vaccine activist's first year as US Health Secretary "a failure by most measures, especially his own."

The Lancet is one of the world's oldest academic medical journals still in publication and one of the most cited sources of peer-reviewed medical research. But it is also well-known for publishing an infamous study by prominent anti-vaccine activist and disgraced ex-physician Andrew Wakefield, which falsely claimed to find a link between vaccines and autism. The Lancet retracted the study more than a decade later .

Kennedy is among the prominent anti-vaccine activists who continue to embrace the thoroughly debunked claim, along with other dangerous conspiracy theories. The Lancet assailed Kennedy for spreading misinformation as the country's top health official and politicizing health policy at the expense of vulnerable Americans, including children.

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Burner accounts on social media sites can increasingly be analyzed to identify the pseudonymous users who post to them using AI in research that has far-reaching consequences for privacy on the Internet, researchers said.

The finding, from a recently published research paper , is based on results of experiments correlating specific individuals with accounts or posts across more than one social media platform. The success rate was far greater than existing classical deanonymization work that relied on humans assembling structured data sets suitable for algorithmic matching or manual work by skilled investigators. Recall—that is, how many users were successfully deanonymized—was as high as 68 percent. Precision—meaning the rate of guesses that correctly identify the user—was up to 90 percent.

I know what you posted last year

The findings have the potential to upend pseudonymity, an imperfect but often sufficient privacy measure used by many people to post queries and participate in sometimes sensitive public discussions while making it hard for others to positively identify the speakers. The ability to cheaply and quickly identify the people behind such obscured accounts opens them up to doxxing, stalking, and the assembly of detailed marketing profiles that track where speakers live, what they do for a living, and other personal information. This pseudonymity measure no longer holds.

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It's been nearly 20 years since Google revealed Android, which the company described as the first "truly open" mobile operating system, setting Google-powered phones apart from the iPhone's aggressively managed experience. Over time, though, Android has become more aligned with Apple's approach. For the moment, users still have the final say in what software runs on their increasingly locked-down smartphones. Later this year, though, Google plans to seriously curtail that freedom in the name of security.

In the coming weeks, Google will officially debut Android developer verification , which will require app makers outside the Play Store to register with their real names and pay a fee to Google. Failure to do so will block their apps from installation (sometimes called sideloading) on virtually all Android devices. Google says this is a necessary evolution of the platform's security model, but upending the status quo could push developers away from Android and risk the privacy of those that remain.

This might make your phone a little safer, sure, but it won't stop people from getting scammed. At the same time, it could rob the Android ecosystem of what made it special in the first place.

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Soon after South Korean police posted a press release boasting about seizing $5.6 million worth of cryptocurrency from 124 wealthy tax evaders, cops realized that they had mistakenly posted images that made it possible for a thief to quickly steal most of the seized assets.

Eventually, the press release was removed, but not before it was grabbed by local media outlets and tech publications covering the theft.

Bleeping Computer shared a screenshot of the retracted images, which showed a handwritten note next to a Ledger device that's used as a so-called "cold wallet" to store crypto out of reach of online threats. Clearly legible in the photo, the note contained a complete mnemonic recovery phrase that anyone can use as a master key to move assets off the cold wallet to a new wallet without any additional PIN or permissions required.

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Charter Communications, operator of the Spectrum cable brand, has obtained Federal Communications Commission permission to buy Cox and surpass Comcast as the country's largest home Internet service provider.

Charter has 29.7 million residential and business Internet customers compared to Comcast's 31.26 million . Buying Cox will give Charter another 5.9 million Internet customers . The FCC approved the deal on Friday, but the companies still need Justice Department approval and sign-offs from states including California and New York.

Opponents of Charter's $34.5 billion acquisition told the FCC that eliminating Cox as an independent entity will make it easier for Charter and Comcast to raise prices. But the FCC dismissed those concerns on the grounds that Charter and Cox don't compete directly against each other in the vast majority of their territories.

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PALO, Iowa—There are two restaurants in Palo, not counting the chicken wings and pizza sold at the only gas station in town.

All three establishments, including the gas station, stand on the same half-mile stretch of First Street, an artery that divides the marshy floodplain of the Cedar River to the east from hundreds of acres of cornfields on the west.

During historic flooding in 2008, the Cedar River surged 10 feet above its previous record, cresting at 31 feet and wiping out homes and businesses well outside the floodplain.

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As expected, Apple has announced a mild update for the iPad family's middle child today. The new iPad Air is a lot like the old one, but it replaces the Apple M3 chip with an M4. That M4 also comes with a less-expected upgrade: a jump from 8GB of RAM to 12GB, which should be helpful for those using iPadOS 26's multi-window multitasking features.

The iPad Air still comes in 11-inch and 13-inch versions that start at $599 and $799, respectively; the only disappointment is that these entry-level models still come with 128GB of storage. A 256GB storage upgrade will run you $100, and 512GB (+$300) and 1TB (+$500) versions are also available. Preorders go live on March 4, and the tablet will be available on March 11.

The M4 iPad Air uses the same design as the M2 version from 2024 and the M3 version from last year. The M2 version of the Air was a gently tweaked version of the M1 iPad Air, but it was different enough not to be compatible with all the same accessories; most notably, the M2-and-later Airs use the Apple Pencil Pro accessory and aren’t compatible with the second-generation Pencil.

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It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. February’s list includes the revival of a forgotten battery design by Thomas Edison that could be ideal for renewable energy storage; a snap-on device to turn those boxers into "smart underwear" to measure how often we fart; and a dish of neurons playing Doom , among other highlights.

Reviving Edison's battery design

Credit: Maher El-Kady/UCLA

At the onset of the 20th century, electric cars powered by lead-acid batteries outnumbered gas-powered cars. The internal combustion engine ultimately won out, in part because those batteries had a range of just 30 miles. But Thomas Edison believed a nickel-iron battery could extend that range to as much as 100 miles, while also having a long life and recharging times of seven hours. An international team of scientists has revived Edison's concept of a nickel-iron battery and created their own version, according to a paper published in the journal Small.

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