Rise, the fan-created, flown-to-the-moon plush toy that served as the Artemis II crew's zero-g indicator and mascot, is now available as a NASA-approved collectible . Its sales will benefit the agency's employee morale activities.

"Perfect for display, gifting or inspiring the next generation of explorers, the Official Rise Plush is a fun addition to any space enthusiast's collection," reads the doll's description on the NASA Exchange website.

Designed by Lucas Ye, a 9-year-old Californian who won NASA and Freelancer.com's "Moon Mascot" online challenge , Rise is a tribute to "earthrise"—the iconic scene first seen in person by the Apollo 8 crew in 1968 and recently witnessed by the Artemis II crew . Rise wears a cap that resembles the Earth rising over the Moon.

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It has been a bad six weeks for security firm Checmarx. Over the past 40 days, it has been the victim of at least one supply-chain attack that delivered malware to customers on two separate occasions. Now it has been hit by a ransomware attack from prolific fame-seeking hackers.

The streak of misfortunes started on March 19, with the supply-chain attack of Trivy, a widely used vulnerability scanner. The attackers behind the breach first breached the Trivy GitHub account and then used their access to push malware to Trivy users, one of which was Checkmarx. The pushed malware scoured infected machines for repository tokens, SSH keys, and other credentials.

Both a target and delivery mechanism

Four days later, Checkmarx’s GitHub account was compromised and began pushing malware to the security firm’s users. The company contained and remediated the breach and replaced the malware with the legitimate apps. Or so Checkmarx thought.

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In my misspent youth, I once worked a summer job as a waiter at Shoney's . It is an experience that I do not recommend. But it did teach me two valuable things: 1) How not to drown in a puddle of my own embarrassment when marching around the dining room with my fellow servers and singing a birthday song that began, "Happy, happy birthday, we're so glad you came"; and 2) That when the surly line cooks ran out of chicken fried steak, they would shout "86 the chicken fried steak!" through the pass.

To "86" something, in restaurant slang, is to say that it is out, finished, gone, through, not on the menu anymore. This is the only sense in which I have heard the term used in my entire life.

But according to Wikipedia, which naturally has an entry about the term , two further meanings do exist. "86" can also be applied to people a restaurant refuses to serve, and some slang dictionaries say it can refer to murder.

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A 74-year-old man went to an emergency department in Florida with rapidly rotting limbs after jumping into the waters off Florida's Gulf Coast.

Just three days earlier, the man was otherwise healthy and active on the coast. But at one point when he jumped into the water, he got a cut on his right leg. It quickly became painful and bruised. Two days later, the skin on his right arm also started changing color.

According to a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine , by day three, when he arrived at the hospital, he was in dire shape. The lower half of his leg was darkly colored, indicating bleeding under his skin. Doctors noted a crackling sound, suggesting gases bubbling out of his dying flesh, and some of the outer layers of skin were peeling off. His arm wasn't much better. It appeared red, discolored, and swollen. A large blood blister (a hemorrhagic bulla) had formed, suggesting a severe flesh-eating infection. (You can see a graphic image here , including an end image of his arm.)

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The Federal Communications Commission today opened an unusual review of ABC's broadcast licenses, one day after President Trump and the first lady called on ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel over a recent joke in which he said Melania Trump looked like an "expectant widow."

There are no TV station licenses for any company up for renewal until 2028 , and the legal process for revoking licenses is so difficult that it's been described as nearly impossible. But the FCC today issued an order instructing ABC owner Disney to file early license renewal applications for all of its licensed TV stations by May 28.

"FCC rules provide that whenever the FCC regards an application for a renewal of a license as essential to the proper conduct of an investigation, the FCC has the authority to call the broadcaster’s licenses in for early renewal," the agency said. "Doing so both allows the FCC to conduct its ongoing investigation and enables the FCC to ensure that the broadcaster has been meeting its public interest obligations more broadly."

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In January 2026, during the height of protests against immigration raids in Minneapolis, federal agents shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good . Before even gathering all the facts , the Department of Homeland Security labeled the mother of three an “anti-ICE rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle against law enforcement” in an “act of domestic terrorism.”

Days later, the feds announced a major expansion of “no-fly zones” in the name of national security. While such no-fly zones used to be about controlling aircraft, they now often focus on small drones. The expanded no-fly zones announced on January 16 prohibited such drones from flying within 3,000 lateral feet and 1,000 vertical feet of federal facilities.

But for the first time, the order extended no-fly zones to ground vehicles belonging to the Department of Homeland Security. Even while the vehicles were in motion. Even if they were unmarked. And even if their routes had not been announced.

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Humanoid robots are getting a new gig as baggage handlers and cargo loaders at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport—part of a Japan Airlines experiment to address a human labor shortage as airport visitor numbers have surged in recent years.

The demonstration, set to launch in May 2026, could eventually test humanoid robots in a wide range of airport tasks, including cleaning aircraft cabins and possibly handling ground support equipment such as baggage carts, according to a Japan Airlines press release. The trials are scheduled to run until 2028, which suggests that travelers flying into or out of Tokyo may spot some of the robots at work.

This marks the latest foray for humanoid robots after they have already begun pilot-testing in workplaces such as automotive factories and warehouses. Most robotic productivity so far has relied on robotic arms and similarly specialized robots that perform the same predictable tasks on assembly lines and in warehouses. By comparison, humanoid robots face a much stiffer challenge in dealing with more open and unpredictable work environments, and it remains to be seen whether the latest robotic software and hardware will be up to the task.

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GitHub has announced that it will be shifting to a usage-based billing model for its GitHub Copilot AI service starting on June 1. The move is pitched as a way to "better align pricing with actual usage" and a necessary step to keep Copilot financially sustainable amid surging demand for limited AI computing resources.

GitHub Copilot subscribers currently receive an allocation of monthly "requests" and "premium requests," which are spent whenever they ask Copilot for help from an AI model. But those broad categories cover many different AI tasks with a wide range of total backend computing costs, GitHub says.

"Today, a quick chat question and a multi-hour autonomous coding session can cost the user the same amount," the Microsoft-owned company wrote in its announcement. And while GitHub says it has "absorbed much of the escalating inference cost behind that usage" to this point, lumping all "premium requests" together "is no longer sustainable."

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University of Oregon chemist Christopher Hendon loves his coffee—so much so that studying all the factors that go into creating the perfect cuppa constitutes a significant area of research for him. His latest project: discovering a novel means of measuring the flavor profile of coffee simply by sending an electrical current through a sample beverage. The results appear in a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

We've been following Hendon's work for several years now. For instance, in 2020, Hendon’s lab helped devise a mathematical model for brewing the perfect cup of espresso, over and over, while minimizing waste. The flavors in espresso derive from roughly 2,000 different compounds that are extracted from the coffee grounds during brewing. So it can be challenging for baristas to reproduce the same perfect cup over and over again.

That's why Hendon and his colleagues built their model for a more easily measurable property known as the extraction yield (EY): the fraction of coffee that dissolves into the final beverage. That, in turn, depends on controlling water flow and pressure as the liquid percolates through the coffee grounds. The model is based on how lithium ions propagate through a battery’s electrodes, similar to how caffeine molecules dissolve from coffee grounds.

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