These days, the hype is all about AI and robots, but almost a decade ago, the tech du jour was self-driving. You couldn't swing a lanyard at CES for the latter half of the last decade without hitting a robotaxi; post-COVID, the number of startups has shrunk, but the technology has definitely matured. Go to the right cities—San Francisco and Austin, Texas, spring to mind—and you might see dozens of sensor-festooned vehicles among the downtown traffic.

The pod-like robotaxis belonging to Zoox stand out. Other robotaxi developers are retrofitting existing vehicles like Hyundai Ioniq 5s with sensors and the computing power necessary for self-driving. Zoox, which was bought by Amazon in 2020 , did that with its test fleet, but as it starts to offer ride-hailing services—currently in Las Vegas and San Francisco—it's doing so with a purpose-built design that looks like it just drove off the set of a big-budget sci-fi production.

"A robotaxi is not a car; it's not a human-driven vehicle, and the requirements are wildly different, although it has to live in that world," explained Chris Stoffel, director of robot industrial design and studio engineering at Zoox.

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If you look at a Neanderthal skull and a Homo sapiens skull, they're visibly different: Neanderthal skulls are lower and longer, whereas ours tend to be rounder. However, those differences probably don’t say much about the brains within them, according to a recent study, which compared MRI scans of modern people’s brains with casts of the inside of Neanderthal skulls.

The results suggest that there’s more variation in brain size among modern people than between Neanderthals and Pleistocene Homo sapiens . And because brain size is actually a terrible way to predict cognitive capability, Neanderthals could have been a lot more like us than some previous studies have claimed, which definitely fits what the archaeological record tells us about how they lived. It would also mean that our species probably didn't out-compete the Neanderthals by being smarter or more adaptable.

Neanderthal brains fit within the modern human range

Years after you die, the inner vault of your skull will hold the shape of your brain; if future archaeologists make a cast of that inner space, they’ll get a neat resin model of the outer contours of your brain, called an endocast. (Sediment that filled the skull of an Australopithecus africanus child who died 2.8 million years ago did this naturally, creating an endocast that’s half rocky brain-sculpture and half sparkling crystal.) For years, researchers have studied endocasts of Neanderthal skulls, trying to piece together how their brains were different or similar to ours. And that has been a matter of some debate.

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NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told lawmakers on Monday that SpaceX and Blue Origin, the agency's two lunar lander contractors, say they could have their spacecraft ready for the next Artemis mission in Earth orbit in late 2027, somewhat later than NASA's previous schedule.

This mission, Artemis III, will not fly to the Moon . Instead, NASA will launch an Orion capsule with a team of astronauts to rendezvous and potentially dock with one or both landers in Earth orbit. The details of the Artemis III flight plan remain under review, with key questions about the orbit's altitude and the configuration of the Space Launch System rocket still unanswered.

A mission to low-Earth orbit, just a few hundred miles in altitude, may not require NASA to use up an SLS upper stage that is already built and in storage, saving the unit for the following Artemis mission to attempt a landing on the Moon. A launch into a higher orbit would require the upper stage, but it would allow NASA to perform tests in an environment more similar to the Moon. NASA is buying a new commercial upper stage , the Centaur V from United Launch Alliance, to pair with the SLS rocket after flying the last of the rocket's existing upper stages.

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Open source software with more than 1 million monthly downloads was compromised after a threat actor exploited a vulnerability in the developers’ account workflow that gave access to its signing keys and other sensitive information.

On Friday, unknown attackers exploited the vulnerability to push a new version of element-data , a command-line interface that helps users monitor performance and anomalies in machine-learning systems. When run, the malicious package scoured systems for sensitive data, including user profiles, warehouse credentials, cloud provider keys, API tokens, and SSH keys, developers said . The malicious version was tagged as 0.23.3 and was published to the developers’ Python Package Index and Docker image accounts. It was removed about 12 hours later, on Saturday. Elementary Cloud, the Elementary dbt package, and all other CLI versions weren't affected.

Assume compromise

“Users who installed 0.23.3, or who pulled and ran the affected Docker image, should assume that any credentials accessible to the environment where it ran may have been exposed,” the developers wrote.

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A hotly anticipated trial starts this week, where Elon Musk will attempt to prove that OpenAI, under Sam Altman, has abandoned its mission to remain a nonprofit in order to ensure that artificial intelligence serves humanity, and not just billionaires.

Many view the lawsuit as a grudge match between Musk—who left OpenAI after serving as an early major donor and advisor—and Altman—who currently runs OpenAI, despite insiders' allegedly growing distrust in his commitment to the dominant AI firm's mission. But the lawsuit is about much more than a couple billionaires' big egos. The outcome could radically change the AI landscape, impacting how OpenAI runs and what resources the firm will have to uphold its mission.

If Musk wins, OpenAI's hopes of growing a for-profit arm that can fund the nonprofit could be dashed. Additionally, Brockman and Altman could be dropped as officers, and Altman risks losing his seat on OpenAI's board.

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Since Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI back in 2019 , the exclusive partnership between the two firms has been one of the strongest and most consequential in the AI industry. Today, though, OpenAI and Microsoft jointly announced an amended agreement that will allow the company to go beyond Microsoft's Azure and "serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider."

The announcement clarifies that Microsoft will continue to have a license for OpenAI's IP and models through 2032 and that Azure will remain the "primary cloud partner" for OpenAI during that time (should Microsoft continue to be able to honor that). But Microsoft's license "will now be non-exclusive," the announcement reads, letting OpenAI make its models available through other major cloud providers going forward.

While OpenAI will continue to make the same 20 percent revenue share payments to Microsoft under the amended deal, that total payment will now be limited to an unspecified cap and is only guaranteed to run through 2030. Importantly, that revenue share is now "independent of OpenAI’s technology progress," an apparent reference to the infamous "AGI clause" in the original partnership that would have scrapped the exclusivity deal if and when OpenAI achieved the hard-to-gauge benchmark of artificial general intelligence.

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In January, the European Commission began an initial investigation, known as a specification proceeding, into how Google has implemented AI in the Android operating system. The results are in, and the EU says Android needs to be more open, which is not surprising. Meanwhile, Google says this amounts to "unwarranted intervention," which is equally unsurprising. Regardless of Google's characterization of the investigation, the commission may force Google to make Android AI changes this summer.

This action stems from the continent's Digital Markets Act (DMA), a sweeping law that designates seven dominant technology companies as "gatekeepers" that are subject to greater regulation to ensure fair competition. Google has consistently spoken against the regulations imposed under the DMA, but it and the other gatekeepers have been subject to the law for several years now, and there's little chance the commission backs away from it.

The issue before the commission currently is the built-in advantage for Gemini on Android. When you turn on any Google-powered Android phone, Gemini is already there and gets special treatment at the system level. The European Commission is taking aim at the lack of features available to third-party AI services. The commission believes that there are too many experiences on Android that only work with Google's Gemini AI, and as a gatekeeper, Google must change that.

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NASA has assigned its first crew to launch on a mission "13" since Apollo 13 "had a problem" on the way to the Moon 56 years ago.

Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney with NASA, Joshua Kutryk with the Canadian Space Agency, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov will lift off for the International Space Station as Crew-13 on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in mid-September. The four will serve as members of the station's Expedition 75 and 76 crews, before returning to Earth about five months later.

"This flight is the 13th crew rotation with SpaceX," NASA's announcement read. "The crew will conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations to help prepare humans for future exploration missions to the moon and Mars, and benefit people on Earth."

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Aficionados of game console emulator history will almost certainly be familiar with ZSNES, an MS-DOS-based (and, later, Windows-based) emulator for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System that originally launched back in 1997. Originally written in x86 assembly code, it was known best for its performance on low-end PCs and was capable of running some games at full speed on chips as slow as a 233 MHz Pentium II, though it usually did so at the expense of emulation accuracy .

ZSNES developed rapidly (alongside the contemporary, competing Snes9x project) throughout the late ’90s and early 2000s. Updates slowed after the original creators left the project, and new releases ceased entirely around 2007.

But a successor to ZSNES has arrived. The project's original creators (who go by the handles zsKnight and _Demo_) have returned 19 years later with a new follow-up project called " Super ZSNES ," an SNES emulator that emphasizes audio-visual upgrades to those aging ’90s-era Super Nintendo games. The only more surprising emulator news would be if NESticle somehow rose from the dead.

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