During most of the Artemis II mission, the crew of four astronauts beamed back low-definition video, both from inside the spacecraft and from exterior views of the Moon. It was exhilarating stuff, but in a world in which we're all watching HDTVs, it also felt a little flat.

This is because Orion largely communicated with Earth via radio waves, picked up by large dishes sprinkled around the world. This is pretty much the same way the Apollo spacecraft talked to Earth more than half a century ago.

However, unlike Apollo, the astronauts on Orion would periodically send batches of much higher-resolution data, including the stunning photographs of the far side of the Moon and the Solar eclipse observed from there. This was made possible by optical laser communications, and not just those built by NASA. The mission included a commercial component that could pave the way for vastly more data returning to Earth from space than ever before.

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Microsoft released an emergency patch for its ASP.NET Core to fix a high-severity vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to gain SYSTEM privileges on devices that use the Web development framework to run Linux or macOS apps.

The software maker said Tuesday evening that the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-40372, affects versions 10.0.0 through 10.0.6 of the Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection NuGet, a package that’s part of the framework. The critical flaw stems from a faulty verification of cryptographic signatures. It can be exploited to allow unauthenticated attackers to forge authentication payloads during the HMAC validation process, which is used to verify the integrity and authenticity of data exchanged between a client and a server.

Beware: forged credentials survive patching

During the time users ran a vulnerable version of the package, they were left open to an attack that would allow unauthenticated people to gain sensitive SYSTEM privileges that would allow full compromise of the underlying machine. Even after the vulnerability is patched, devices may still be compromised if authentication credentials created by a threat actor aren’t purged.

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Anthropic caused a stir among developers with what appeared to be a surprise change to its pricing plan: The company signaled that Claude Code, the popular agentic development tool, would no longer be available to subscribers on the $20-per-month Pro plan.

Users took to Reddit and X to point out that Anthropic's pricing page for Claude explicitly showed Claude Code as not supported in the Pro plan. (It remained in the $100/month+ Max plan.) New users signing up for Pro subscriptions were unable to access Claude Code. Meanwhile, existing subscribers saw no interruption.

After speculation and frustration spread, Anthropic's head of growth, Amol Avasare, took to social media to clarify that this was a "small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups." As for the reasoning, he explained:

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Warner Bros.' bizarre 2023 decision to shelve its live-action/animated film, Coyote vs. Acme , sparked outrage both in the industry and among fans online. But the film is finally being released, and Ketchup Entertainment, its new distributor, recently released the trailer. All I can say after watching that trailer is, what the heck was Warner Bros. even thinking? Granted, a killer trailer doesn't automatically mean it's a great film, but all the winning elements are here.

The concept alone is sheer brilliance: Wile E. Coyote, after decades of ACME equipment failing him in his efforts to catch that darned Road Runner, decides to sue the corporation. It's based on a well-known satirical piece by Ian Frazier (also titled "Coyote vs. Acme") published in The New Yorker in 1990. Development of a film version didn't start until 2018, but some pretty talented people worked on the script, including James Gunn. Big stars signed on for the main cast, and the film was completed and slated for release in July 2023.

Then Warner Bros. changed its mind and scheduled Barbie in that slot. Now, Barbie is a brilliant film, and that decision gave us the summer of " Barbenheimer ," so it's hard to argue with the marketing strategy there. But rather than simply rescheduling Coyote vs. Acme , the studio canceled it to take a tax write-off. (The same fate befell two other Warner films, Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt .)

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Most of the companies that have fully committed to building AI models are gobbling up every Nvidia AI accelerator they can get, but Google has taken a different approach. Most of its cloud AI infrastructure is based on its line of custom Tensor processing units (TPUs). After announcing the seventh-gen Ironwood TPU in 2025, the company has moved on to the eighth-gen version , but it's not just a faster iteration of the same chip.

The new TPUs come in two flavors, providing Google and its customers with an AI platform that is faster and more efficient, the company says. Google is pushing the idea that the "agent era" is fundamentally different from the AI systems that came before, necessitating a new approach to the hardware. So engineers have devised the TPU8t (for training) and the TPU 8i (for inference).

Before AI models become something you can use to analyze data or make silly memes, they need to be trained. The TPU 8t was designed specifically for this part of the AI lifecycle to reduce the training time for frontier AI models from months to weeks.

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The US is investigating a possible conspiracy after at least 10 scientists connected to US nuclear secrets and rocket technology went missing or died under shadowy circumstances over the past few years.

Pointing to tabloid reports from The Daily Mail and The New York Post, Republican members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sought information about each missing or departed scientist. In letters to the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Reps. James Comer (R-Ky.) and Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) said the tabloid reports had raised "questions about a possible sinister connection between a string of mysterious deaths and disappearances."

"If the reports are accurate, these deaths and disappearances may represent a grave threat to US national security and to US personnel with access to scientific secrets," the letters said.

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Physicists have spent the last 20 years pondering an apparent discrepancy between experimental results and theoretical predictions for the magnetic properties of the muon, the electron's heavier cousin—a mismatch that hinted at a possible fifth force. But according to a new paper published in the journal Nature, the discrepancy is due to a calculation fluke, not exciting new physics, so the Standard Model of particle physics is still holding strong.

“There were many calculations in the last 60 years or so, and as they got more and more precise, they all pointed toward a discrepancy and a new interaction that would upend known laws of physics,” said co-author Zoltan Fodor , a physicist at Penn State. “We applied a new method to calculate this discrepancy quantity, and we showed that it’s not there. This new interaction we hoped for simply is not there. The old interactions can explain the value completely.”

As previously reported , the muon (a member of the lepton classification) is the heavier second-generation cousin of the electron—the tau is the third-generation cousin—and that makes muons particularly sensitive to virtual particles popping into and out of existence in the quantum vacuum, since they can briefly interact with those virtual particles. Muons are special to physicists because they are light enough to be plentiful yet heavy enough to be used experimentally to probe the accuracy of the Standard Model of particle physics.

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On Tuesday, the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction blocking the US government from applying a range of restrictions on renewable power development, at least for the parties in the suit. The ruling expands on another that was issued late last year , applying similar logic to a broader set of federal restrictions and an expanded group of renewable energy developers.

While the ruling is good news for companies looking to develop non-polluting energy sources, it leaves intact one of the only attempts the government has made to rationalize its animosity toward renewable power.

Arbitrary and capricious again

In December, a different judge in the same court ruled that the federal government's decision to withdraw all areas of the continental shelf from potential offshore wind development violated the Administrative Procedures Act. The problem, the court determined, was that the rules were arbitrary and capricious; the only justification the government offered was that they implemented a Trump executive order.

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Like many medical school students, Sam was broke.

The 22-year-old aspiring orthopedic surgeon from northern India got some money from his parents, but he says he spent most of it subsidizing his licensing exams, and he’s still saving up to hopefully emigrate to the US after graduation. So he started searching for ways to make additional money online.

Sam, who requested a pseudonym to avoid jeopardizing his medical career and immigration status, tried a few things, with varying degrees of legitimacy and success. He made YouTube shorts and sold study notes to other med students. It wasn’t until he started scrolling through his Instagram feed that he landed on an idea: Why not make an AI-generated girl using Google Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro and sell bikini photos of her online?

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