Austria plans to restrict under-14s from using social media platforms over concerns about addictive algorithms and harmful content. The government says draft legislation should be ready by the end of June, though details around enforcement and age verification have yet to be finalized. The BBC reports: Announcing the plans, Vice-Chancellor Andreas Babler of the Social Democrats said the government could not stand by and watch as social media made children "addicted and also often ill." He said it was the responsibility of politicians to protect children and argued that the issue should be treated no different to alcohol or tobacco: "There must be clear rules in the digital world too." In future, said Babler, children under 14 would be protected from algorithms that were addictive. "Other information providers have clear rules to protect young people from harmful content." These, he said, should now be implemented in the digital space. Yesterday, juries in two separate cases found social media giants liable for harming young people's mental health. The verdicts are being hailed as social media's Big Tobacco moment.

Further reading: California Bill Would Require Parent Bloggers To Delete Content of Minors On Social Media

BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla just teamed up with Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, to push open source AI -- and it feels like a direct response to Big Tech tightening its grip on the space. Instead of relying on closed models, the goal here is to build "sovereign AI" that's more transparent, privacy-focused, and actually under the control of developers and even governments. They're starting with things like private memory for AI agents, which sounds niche but matters if you care about where your data goes. Big question is whether open source can realistically keep up with the billions being poured into proprietary AI, but at least someone's trying to give folks an alternative. "Canada has what it takes to lead on frontier AI that the world can actually trust: the research depth, the values, and the will to do it differently. The next frontier in AI isn't just capability, it is trustworthiness, and Canada is uniquely positioned to lead on both. This partnership is a concrete step in that direction. Open, trustworthy AI isn't a compromise on ambition. It's the higher bar," said Valerie Pisano, president and CEO of Mila.

Thirty years after the alleged 1996 "ET of Varginha" encounter, debate continues to rage over the events that happened in Brazil's self-styled UFO capital. An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from the Guardian: The skies over this far-flung coffee-growing hub went charcoal black, the heavens opened and one of Brazil's greatest mysteries was born. "It really was something unique," recalls Marco Antonio Reis, a zoo director, who was at his ranch outside Varginha one stormy day in January 1996 when, he says, an otherworldly creature came to town. Reis and other locals claim the unusually ferocious downpour heralded a series of disturbing and seemingly paranormal events. At least six of the zoo's animals, including a spider monkey, a tapir and a raccoon, died mysteriously after a horned interloper with bulging red eyes was spotted in the vicinity by a woman who had gone out for a smoke. When a vet examined their corpses, "they were all black inside," Reis claims.

On a nearby wasteland, three young women spotted a peculiar and malodorous being with a heart-shaped face and three lumps on its head cowering beside a wall. "I've seen the devil," one of those witnesses would later tell her mum. Soon afterwards, an unexplained infection was rumored to have killed a strapping police intelligence officer who was said to have grappled with the oleaginous unidentified being. Three decades later, Reis says he is convinced Varginha received a non-human visit. His only doubt was from where it came.

"We don't know if it was extraterrestrial or intraterrestrial," the 71-year-old says as he climbs a staircase to the veranda where the smoker claims to have seen what, in reference to Steven Spielberg's 1982 film, became known as the "ET of Varginha". A 2ft statue of a two-toed alien now marks the spot. "It's possible it was an intraterrestrial, from inside the Earth They don't just come from space," Reis says. "It might have come from the depths of the Earth, too. We don't even know what it's like at the bottom of the sea, do we?"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vanity Fair: Focus Features is releasing The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist in theaters on March 27. If you're even slightly interested in what's going on with AI, it's required viewing: The film touches on all aspects of the technology, from how it's currently being used to how it will be used in the near future, when we potentially reach the age of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. AGI is a theoretical form of AI that supposedly would be able to perform complex tasks without each step being prompted by a human user -- the point at which machines become autonomous, like Skynet in the Terminator franchise. [...]

[Director Daniel Roher] interviews nearly all the major players in the AI space: Sam Altman of OpenAI; the Amodei siblings of Anthropic; Demis Hassabis of DeepMind (Google's AI arm); theorists and reporters covering the subject. Notably absent are Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. "Have you seen that guy speak? He's like a lizard man," Roher says regarding Zuckerberg. "Musk said yes initially, but it was right when he was doing all the stuff with Trump, and we just got ghosted after a while," adds [codirector Charlie Tyrell]. Altman, arguably AI's greatest mascot, is prominently featured in the documentary. But Roher wasn't buying it. "That guy doesn't know what genuine means," he says. "Every single thing he says and does is calculated. He is a machine. He's like AI, and it's in the service of growth, growth, growth. You can be disingenuous and media savvy." [...]

How, exactly, is Roher an apocaloptimist? "We are preaching a worldview," he says, "in a world that's asking you to either see this as the apocalypse or embrace it with this unbridled optimism." He and his film are taking a stance that rests between those two poles. "It's both at the same time. We have to try and embrace a middle ground so this technology doesn't consume us, so we can stay in the driver's seat," says Roher -- meaning, it's up to all of us to chart the course. "You have to speak up," says Tyrell. "Things like AI should disclose themselves. If your doctor's office is using an AI bot, you have to say, I don't like that." The driving message behind the film is that resistance starts with the people. That position is shared by The AI Doc producer Daniel Kwan, who won an Oscar for directing Everything Everywhere All at Once and has been at the forefront of discussions about AI in the entertainment industry. [...]

Roher and Tyrell both use AI in their everyday lives and openly admit to it being a helpful tool. They also agree that this technology can make daily tasks easier for the average consumer. But at the end of our conversation, we get into the economics of AI and how Wall Street is propping up the industry through huge evaluations of these companies -- and Roher gets going yet again. "This is all smoke and mirrors. The entire economy of AI is being propped up by a Ponzi scheme. The hype of this technology is unlike any hype we've seen," he says. "I feel like I could announce in a press release that Academy Award winner Daniel Roher is starting an AI film company, and I could sell it the next day for $20 million. It's fucking crazy." [...] "These people are prospectors, and they are going up to the Yukon because it's the gold rush."

NASA is reportedly halting work on the lunar Gateway in favor of a more direct push to build a lunar base. The new plan would cost tens of billions over the next decade, though the change could face hurdles because Congress previously funded Gateway specifically. SpaceNews reports: "Starting today, we're building humanity's first deep space outpost," said Carlos Garcia-Galan, program executive for NASA's moon base effort. The lunar base will take place in three phases. Phase 1, running from 2026 to 2028, "is all about getting to the moon reliably," he said. That includes a significant increase in the cadence of lander missions through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services and other programs. It will also focus on developing enabling technologies and getting "ground truth" for potential base locations at the lunar south pole.

Phase 2, from 2029 through 2031, starts building the base, he said. That would include building out communications, navigation, power and other infrastructure, developing larges CLPS cargo landers and supporting two crewed missions a year. Phase 3, beginning 2032, will enable "long distance and long duration human exploration" on the moon, he said, with routine logistics missions to the moon and uncrewed cargo return missions from the moon. Garcia-Galan said NASA foresees spending $10 billion each on Phases 1 and 2. Phase 3, lasting to at least 2036, would cost an additional $10 billion or more.

The base would leverage existing programs, although with some changes. NASA is planning to revamp the Lunar Terrain Vehicle program after concluding the current approach would take too long to get a crew-capable rover to the moon. "We were projecting a delivery on the lunar surface by 2030," he said. The agency is instead issuing a draft request for proposals for simplified rovers that could be quicker and easier to develop but could be upgraded later. The base, though, would include some new capabilities and technologies. One example Garcia-Galan provided was MoonFall, a drone that would be able to hop from one location to another on the lunar surface. The drones will be "built on the legacy" of Ingenuity, the small Mars helicopter. "We're going to take everything that we learned from Ingenuity's systems, the avionics, all of that, to build this."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says he understands the concerns about "AI slop" with DLSS 5 but insists the feature preserves a game's underlying geometry and artistic intent. "I think their perspective makes sense, " said Huang during a recent appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast. "And I could see where they're coming from because I don't love AI slop myself. You know, all of the AI-generated content increasingly looks similar, and they're all beautiful... so I'm empathic toward what they're thinking. That's just not what DLSS 5 is trying to do." Tom's Hardware reports: Although Huang is striking a more conciliatory tone, much of his response is similar to what we heard at GTC [where Huang said gamers were "completely wrong."] The artist determines the geometry, we are completely truthful to the geometry... so every single frame, it enhances, but it doesn't change anything." There was some confusion about how DLSS 5 worked when it was first announced, and although the inner workings of it still aren't clear on a technical level, Huang has said that it isn't a general-purpose generative AI model. He describes it as "content-controlled generative AI." On the other end of the spectrum, Huang also said that it isn't a post-processing filter. The technical details of DLSS 5 live somewhere between that space, and we likely won't know them until later this year when the feature is set to release.

"The question about enhancing, DLSS 5... in the future, you could even prompt it. You know, I want it to be a toon shader. I want it to look like this, kind of. You could even give it an example and it would generate in the style of that, all consistent with the artistry, the style, the intent of the artist," Huang continued. "All of that is done for the artist so they can create something that is more beautiful but still in the style that they want." Although the talking points about DLSS 5 remain unchanged, it seems that Huang has at least heard the criticism. "I think that they got the impression that the games are going to come out the way the games are... and then we're going to post-process it. That's not what DLSS is intended to do."

Huang also made assertions that DLSS is "integrated" with the artist, and suggested that it would put the power of generative AI in the hands of artists working in game development [...]. Although DLSS 5 looks like it's doing a lot, Huang said that it's just another tool, not an essential feature. "The gamers might also appreciate that, in the last couple of years, we introduced skin shaders to game developers, and many of those games have skin shaders that include sub-surface scattering that makes skin look more skin-like... [DLSS 5] is just one more tool. They can decide what to use," Huang ended the conversation about DLSS 5. Immediately after, without missing a beat, he said 1993's Doom was the most influential video game ever made.

"Billionaire Elon Musk has announced plans to build a $20 billion chip plant in Austin, Texas" reports a local news station: Musk announced on Saturday night during a livestream on his social media platform X that the plant, called "Terafab," will be built near Tesla's campus and gigafactory in eastern Travis County. The long-anticipated project is a joint venture between Musk-owned properties Tesla, SpaceX and xAI... The Terafab plant is expected to begin production in 2027.
Musk "has said the semiconductor industry is moving too slow to keep up with the supply of chips he expects to need," writes Bloomberg — quoting Musk as saying "We either build the Terafab or we don't have the chips, and we need the chips, so we build the Terafab." Musk detailed some specific plans, including producing chips that can support 100 to 200 gigawatts a year of computing power on Earth, and chips that can support a terawatt in space, but gave no timelines for the facility or its output... The facility is expected to make two types of chips, one of which will be optimized for edge and inference, primarily for his vehicle, robotaxi and Optimus humanoid robots. The other will be a high-power chip, designed for space that could be used by SpaceX and xAI... Musk said he expects xAI to use the vast majority of the chips.

During the presentation, Musk also unveiled a speculative rendering of a future "mini" AI data center satellite, one piece of a much larger satellite system that he wants SpaceX to build to do complex computing in space. In January, SpaceX requested a license from the Federal Communications Commission to launch one million data center satellites into orbit around Earth. Musk said that the mini satellite he revealed would have the capacity for 100 kilowatts of power. "We expect future satellites to probably go to the megawatt range," Musk said.

Raising money to build and launch AI data centers in space is one of the driving forces behind SpaceX's planned IPO later this year. SpaceX is expected to raise as much as $50 billion in a record-setting IPO this summer which could value it at more than $1.75 trillion, Bloomberg News reported earlier.

It was 60 years ago when William Shatner — born in 1931 — portrayed Captain Kirk in the TV series Star Trek. Shatner turns 95 today — and celebrated by posting a picture of himself smoking a cigar.

"At 95, I'm still smokin'!" Shatner joked, adding that in life he'd learned two things. "Never waste a good cigar. Never trust anyone who says you should 'act your age.'"

For more celebrations, Paramount's free/ad-supported streaming platform Pluto TV announced a "Trek TV takeover birthday celebration" that will run through April 3rd, according to TrekMovie.com, with marathon of Star Trek movies and TV shows — and even that time he was roasted on Comedy Central. ("Freeâ½ My favorite price!" Shatner quipped on X.com.)

Shatner still remains a popular celebrity, even travelling to space five years ago on a Blue Origin flight past the Kármán line. Since then he's led a cruise to Antarctica — and even performed an alternate take of Captain Kirk's final scene on the Jimmy Fallon show.

And this week Shatner (along with hundreds of thousands attendees) appeared at Orlando's MegaCon — and shared stories about his life with Orlando Weekly: Shatner: Last month, I was on board a cruise ship, and they said the only thing I had to do over the next three days, "before we let you go home," is sing "Rocket Man." So I thought, "I'm not going to sing 'Rocket Man' the same way that what's-his-name did. ... So, I looked at the song very carefully to see if I could find what actors call a throughline. What is the character singing? What is he singing about? And so I look through all of these weird lyrics, and all of a sudden, the word sticks out to me: "alone." So I say to the band members, "OK, let's make this song about being alone in space." And I work on it with the band and the musicians, and again on a Saturday night, I perform the number, and 4,000 people stand up and applaud "Rocket Man." And they won't let me off the stage, again and again. Four times, I get a standing ovation, wild.

And that's the progression for me, of science fiction for me, as exemplified by this song. The song went from superficial to something of depth and meaning... It touched people enough for them to stand up and applaud, and I realized that is the story of science fiction... Science fiction with all its great technology has evolved into great storytelling that reaches people in a manner that is very difficult for other types of drama to do.
Shatner answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2002 ("My life is my statement...") and again in 2011. ("I used to try to assemble computers way back when and they came out looking like a skateboard...")

And judging by his X.com posts, Shatner is now involved in early testing of the site's upcoming digital payment system X Money.

China's orbital outpost Tiangong was completed in 2022 and is hosting up to three astronauts at a time, reports CNN.

But meanwhile U.S. lawmakers are now signaling there's not time to develop and launch a replacement for the International Space Station — considered the signal most expensive object ever built — before its deorbiting in 2030. A recent Senate bill calls for the U.S. to continue funding it as late as 2032, but that bill still awaits approval from the U.S. Senate and the House.

But some private space companies are already building their alternatives: Private companies that are in the early design and mockup phase of developing these space stations are still waiting on NASA for guidance — and money... [NASA's "Requests for Proposals"] were delayed, in part because it took all of 2025 to cinch a confirmation for Trump's on-again-off-again pick for NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman [confirmed in December]... Similarly, 2025 saw a 45-day government shutdown, the longest in history — adding another hiccup in the space agency's plans to begin formally soliciting proposals from the private sector. Companies now expect that NASA will issue its Request for Proposals in late March or early April, one CEO told CNN...

Several commercial outfits have recently announced big funding influxes aimed at speeding up the development and launch of new orbiting outposts. Houston-based Axiom Space announced a $350 million funding round last month. Its California-based competitor Vast then notched a $500 million raise in early March. Vast is determined to launch a bare-bones station to orbit as soon as possible, with or without federal input, according to the company. "Our approach is to actually not wait for (NASA) and get going and build a minimum viable product, single-module space station called Haven-1, which we're launching into orbit next year," Vast CEO Max Haot told CNN in a phone interview earlier this month. Similarly, Axiom Space is working toward a 2028 launch date for a module that it plans to initially attach to the ISS before breaking off to orbit on its own. A spokesperson told CNN that it the company is "committed" to winning the NASA contract money and may continue pursing such goals even without contract awards.

Still, there's lingering doubt that any of the companies pursuing space stations will be able to stay afloat without securing a coveted NASA contract or at least cinching significant business from the public sector.
The article includes "Another complicating fact: Russia, the United States' primary partner on the ISS, has not pledged to keep operating its half of the space station past 2028." NASA will eventually evaluate proposals for an ISS alternative from Vast, Axiom Space, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, Max Space and several competitors including Voyager Technologies, CNN notes, ultimately handing out an estimated $1.5 billion in contracts between 2026 and 2031.

And while those companies may wait decades before a return on their investment, the article includes this quotes from the cofounder/general partner of Balerion Space Ventures, which led the fundraising for Vast. " What's obvious to us is you're going to have multiple vehicles with myriad companies go into space. You're going to have vehicles leaving from celestial bodies, like the moon. And we need a habitat."

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope unexpectedly captured a rare, early-stage breakup of comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) just days after it first began disintegrating. Phys.org reports: "Sometimes the best science happens by accident," said co-investigator John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama. "This comet got observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal. We had to find a new target -- and right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances."

Noonan didn't know K1 was fragmenting until he viewed the images the day after Hubble took them. "While I was taking an initial look at the data, I saw that there were four comets in those images when we only proposed to look at one," said Noonan. "So we knew this was something really, really special." Hubble caught K1 fragmenting into at least four pieces, each with a distinct coma, the fuzzy envelope of gas and dust that surrounds a comet's icy nucleus. Hubble cleanly resolved the fragments, but to ground-based telescopes, at the time they only appeared as barely distinguishable, bright blobs. [...]

"Never before has Hubble caught a fragmenting comet this close to when it actually fell apart. Most of the time, it's a few weeks to a month later. And in this case, we were able to see it just days after," said Noonan. "This is telling us something very important about the physics of what's happening at the comet's surface. We may be seeing the timescale it takes to form a substantial dust layer that can then be ejected by the gas." The findings have been published in the journal Icarus.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: In The Martian, fictional astronaut Mark Watney survives the wasteland of Mars by growing potatoes in lunar soil -- with a bit of help from human poop. The idea may not be so far-fetched. In a preprint posted this month on bioRxiv, researchers show potatoes can indeed grow in the equivalent of Moon dust, though they need a lot of help from compost found on Earth. To make the discovery, scientists first had to re-create lunar regolith -- the loose, powdery layer that blankets the Moon's surface. To replicate that in the lab, David Handy, a space biologist at Oregon State University (OSU), and his colleagues used a mix of crushed minerals and volcanic ash that matched the chemistry of the Moon.

But lunar regolith is entirely devoid of the organic matter that plants need to grow. "Turning an inorganic, inhospitable bucket of glorified sand into something that can support plant growth is complex," says Anna-Lisa Paul, a plant molecular biologist at the University of Florida not involved with the work. So Handy and his colleagues added vermicompost -- organic waste from worms -- into the regolith. They found that a mix with 5% compost allowed the potatoes to grow while still emulating the stressful conditions of the lunar environment. After almost 2 months of growth, the team harvested the tubers, freeze-dried them, and ground them up for further testing.

Analysis of the potatoes' DNA showed stress-related genes had been activated. The potatoes also had higher concentrations of copper and zinc than Earth-grown ones, which may make them dangerous for human consumption. The plants' nutritional value, though, was similar to traditional potatoes -- a surprise to the scientists, who expected lower levels of nutrition "because the plants might have been working overtime to overcome certain stressors," Handy says.

Nvidia unveiled its Vera Rubin Space-1 system for powering AI workloads in orbital data centers. "Space computing, the final frontier, has arrived," said CEO Jensen Huang. "As we deploy satellite constellations and explore deeper into space, intelligence must live wherever data is generated." CNBC reports: In a press release, the company said that its Vera Rubin Space-1 Module, which includes the IGX Thor and Jetson Orin, will be used on space missions led by multiple companies. The chips are specifically "engineered for size-, weight- and power-constrained environments." Partners include Axiom Space, Starcloud and Planet.

Huang said Nvidia is working with partners on a new computer for orbital data centers, but there are still engineering hurdles to overcome. "In space, there's no convection, there's just radiation," Huang said during his GTC keynote, "and so we have to figure out how to cool these systems out in space, but we've got lots of great engineers working on it."

"There are countless upgrades you could make to your gaming setup," writes PC Gamer's Jacob Ridley. "A wireless this, a bigger that, a faster thing. But how do you know what's going to be a genuine upgrade worth investing in? Personally, I think it might be split spacebars." His argument centers on the fact that spacebars take up a "greedy" amount of keyboard space -- space that could instead be divided into multiple keys for different actions, such as voice chat or melee attacks. From the report: While it's often very easy to reprogram your spacebar to do a different action via your keyboard's software, it's a lot harder to reprogram your brain to hit any other key when you try to jump in game. Spacebar makes you jump. Everyone knows that; it's practically etched onto your brain if you're a long-time mouse and keyboard player. So, why does a split spacebar help with that? It comes down to this: once you know which side of a spacebar you tend to thwack with your thumb, you can program the other side to do whatever you want. I hit the right-side of my spacebar every time when I'm typing. Therefore, when I started using a Wooting 60HE v2 with a split spacebar, I set the left-side to be the delete key; the keyboard lacking a dedicated delete key for its 60% size.

Though for gaming, the split spacebar offers much more varied purpose. People do strange things with the WASD keys that I won't litigate here, but I'm pretty sure most gamers use their left thumb to strike the spacebar for gaming. Right? Right. If you fall into this category, you have the option of using the right-side spacebar for things like a chunky melee key, or, my personal favorite, an in-game voice chat key.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Spending on data center projects in the U.S. has exploded, surpassing offices for the first time at the end of last year. It's a trend Matt Kunz saw early on when Meta built a computing hub outside Columbus, Ohio. Other tech companies soon swarmed into the area, drawn by its stable economy, university talent pipeline and ample power, water and land, said Kunz, vice president and general manager at Turner Construction Co., the firm that led Meta's build-out. Since Meta broke ground in 2017, it's expanded its data center campus, and Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Microsoft Corp. made plans to join it nearby.

"When one shows up, almost all the other ones tend to follow," Kunz said. For Turner, a construction giant responsible for supertall office skyscrapers, sports stadiums and cultural venues around the globe, data centers are commanding more of its bandwidth. The company completed $9.4 billion of the projects last year, more than five times its 2020 total. Last month, Turner announced it was chosen as one of the contractors on a $10 billion data center for Meta in Indiana. Tech companies' needs for AI processing facilities have made data centers the latest darling of the real estate industry. The properties are figuring heavily into portfolios of major investors such as Blackstone, Brookfield Asset Management and KKR, on a bet that long-term demand for computing power will continue to grow. At the same time, office development has slowed as cities across the U.S. contend with vacancies that have piled up since the Covid lockdowns.

Construction spending for data centers has climbed steadily in recent years, while outlays for general office projects headed downward, U.S. Census data show. The two crossed paths in December, with roughly $3.57 billion spent on data centers that month, compared with $3.49 billion for offices, according to preliminary estimates. The shift is likely to continue and "may perpetuate itself even further as AI is utilized for automating day-to-day jobs," said Andy Cvengros, co-lead of U.S. data center markets for the brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. "It's going to directly impact the amount of office space people need." According to Christopher McFadden, senior vice president at Turner, more than a third of the company's backlog is now tied to data centers.

"We're going to be building these at this scale for years to come," McFadden said. "There's a lot of wind in the sail."

sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: Honda is making a monumental shift in its business plans. The automaker is canceling the development and launch of the 0 Series SUV, the 0 Series saloon, and the Acura RSX, and as a result, expects to take a significant financial hit in 2026 [of up to $15.8 billion]. The automaker was blunt in its announcement of the changing plans, citing American tariff policies and the unpredictable nature surrounding American EV incentives and fossil fuel regulations. In its release marking the announcement, Honda made it clear that it expected to incur further financial losses over the long term if it went through with launching the cars.

Honda also called out changing customer values in China, with buyers focusing more on software features and less on things like fuel efficiency and cabin space. In its release regarding the changing product plans, Honda was shockingly blunt about its situation, saying that it was simply unable to deliver products that offer a better value than that of newer Chinese manufacturers.

Van Allen Probe A, a 1,300-pound (600 kg) NASA satellite launched in 2012 to study Earth's radiation belts, is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere this week. While most of it is expected to burn up during descent, "some components may survive," reports the BBC. "The space agency said there is a one in 4,200 chance of being harmed by a piece of the probe, which it characterized as 'low' risk." From the report: The spacecraft is projected to re-enter around 19:45 EST (00:45 GMT) on Tuesday the U.S. Space Force predicted, according to Nasa, though there is a 24-hour margin of "uncertainty" in the timing. [...] The spacecraft and its twin, Van Allen Probe B, were on a mission to gather unprecedented data on Earth's two permanent radiation belts. It was not immediately clear where in Earth's atmosphere the satellite is projected to re-enter. NASA and the U.S. Space Force has said it will monitor the re-entry and update any predictions. [...] Van Allen Probe B is not expected to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere before 2030.

A startup called Reflect Orbital wants to launch thousands of mirror-bearing satellites to reflect sunlight onto Earth at night and "power solar farms after sunset, provide lighting for rescue workers and illuminate city streets, among other things," reports the New York Times. From the report: It is an idea seemingly out of a sci-fi movie, but the company, Reflect Orbital of Hawthorne, Calif., could soon receive permission to launch its first prototype satellite with a 60-foot-wide mirror. The company has applied to the Federal Communications Commission, which issues the licenses needed to deploy satellites. If the F.C.C. approves, the test satellite could get a ride into orbit as soon as this summer. The F.C.C.'s public comment period on the application closes on Monday. "We're trying to build something that could replace fossil fuels and really power everything," Ben Nowack, Reflect Orbital's chief executive, said in an interview. The company has raised more than $28 million from investors.

[...] Reflect Orbital's first prototype, which will be roughly the size of a dorm fridge, is almost complete. Once in space, about 400 miles up, the test satellite would unfurl a square mirror nearly 60 feet wide. That would bounce sunlight to illuminate a circular patch about three miles wide on the Earth's surface. Someone looking up would see a dot in the sky about as bright as a full moon. Two more prototypes could follow within a year. By the end of 2028, Reflect Orbital hopes to launch 1,000 larger satellites, and 5,000 of them by 2030. The largest mirrors are planned to be nearly 180 feet wide, reflecting as much light as 100 full moons. The company said its goal was to deploy the full constellation of 50,000 satellites by 2035.

How much does it cost to order sunlight at night? Mr. Nowack said the company would charge about $5,000 an hour for the light of one mirror if a customer signed an annual contract for 1,000 hours or more. Lighting for one-time events and emergencies, which might require numerous satellites and more effort to coordinate, would be more expensive. For solar farms, he envisions splitting revenue from the electricity generated by the additional hours of light.

After decades of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, the nonprofit SETI Foundation has an announcement. "A new study by researchers at the SETI Institute suggests stellar 'space weather' could make radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligence harder to detect." Stellar activity and plasma turbulence near a transmitting planet can broaden an otherwise ultra-narrow signal, spreading its power across more frequencies and making it more difficult to detect in traditional narrowband searches. For decades, many SETI experiments have focused on identifying spikes in frequency — signals unlikely to be produced by natural astrophysical processes. But the new research highlights an overlooked complication: even if an extraterrestrial transmitter produces a perfectly narrow signal, it may not remain narrow by the time it leaves its home system... "If a signal gets broadened by its own star's environment, it can slip below our detection thresholds, even if it's there, potentially helping explain some of the radio silence we've seen in technosignature searches," said Dr. Vishal Gajjar, Astronomer at the SETI Institute and lead author of the paper.
The researchers created "a practical framework for estimating how much broadening could occur for different types of stars" — and accounting for space weather — by "using radio transmissions from spacecraft in our own solar system, then extrapolated to other stellar environments."

The study's co-author (a SETI Institute research assistant) suggests this coud lead to better-targetted SETI searches. (M-dwarf stars — about 75% of stars in the Milky Way — actually have the highest likelihood that narrowband signals would get broadened before leaving their system...)

Colliding black holes were detected through spacetime ripples for the first time in 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), notes Space.com: Since then, LIGO and its partner gravitational wave detectors Virgo in Italy and KAGRA (Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector) in Japan have detected a multitude of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, merging neutron stars, and even the odd "mixed merger" between a black hole and a neutron star... During the first three observing runs of LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA, scientists had only "heard" 90 potential gravitational wave sources.
But now they've published new data from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration that includes 128 more gravitatational wave sources — some incredibly distant: [Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog-4.0, or GWTC-4] was collected during the fourth observational run of these gravitational wave detectors, which was conducted between May 2023 and Jan. 2024... Excitingly, GWTC-4 could technically have been even larger, as around 170 other gravitational wave detections made by LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA haven't yet made their way into the catalog.

One aspect of GWTC-4 that really stands out is the variety of events that created these signals. Within this catalog are gravitational waves from mergers between the heaviest black hole binaries yet, each about 130 times as massive as the sun, lopsided mergers between black holes with seriously mismatched masses, and black holes that are spinning at incredible speeds of around 40% the speed of light. In these cases, scientists think the extreme characteristics of the black holes involved in these mergers are the result of prior collisions, providing evidence of merger chains that explain how some black holes grow to masses billions of times that of the sun... GWTC-4 also includes two new mixed mergers involving black holes and neutron stars.

[LVK member Daniel Williams, of the University of Glasgow in the U.K., said in their statement] "We are really pushing the edges, and are seeing things that are more massive, spinning faster, and are more astrophysically interesting and unusual." The catalog also demonstrates just how sensitive the LVK detectors have become. Some of the neutron star mergers occurred up to 1 billion light-years away, while some of the black hole mergers occurred up to 10 billion light-years away.
Einstein's theory of general relativity can be tested with these detections, and "So far, the theory is passing all our tests," says LVK member Aaron Zimmerman, of the University of Texas at Austin. "But we're also learning that we have to make even more accurate predictions to keep up with all the data the universe is giving us." And LVK member Rachel Gray, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, says "every merging black hole gives us a measurement of the Hubble constant, and by combining all of the gravitational wave sources together, we can vastly improve how accurate this measurement is."

In short, says LVK member Lucy Thomas of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), "Each new gravitational-wave detection allows us to unlock another piece of the universe's puzzle in ways we couldn't just a decade ago."

Palantir's CEO was blunt. "If Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone's white-collar job... and you're going to screw the military — if you don't think that's going to lead to the nationalization of our technology, you're retarded..."

And OpenAI's Sam Altman is thinking about the same thing, writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland: "It has seemed to me for a long time it might be better if building AGI were a government project," Sam Altman publicly mused last week... Altman speculated on the possibility of the government "nationalizing" private AI companies into a public project, admitting more than once he's wondered what would happen next. "I obviously don't know," Altman said — but he added that "I have thought about it, of course" Altman's speculation hedged that "It doesn't seem super likely on the current trajectory. That said, I do think a close partnership between governments and the companies building this technology is super important."

Could powerful AI tools one day slip from the hands of private companies to be controlled by the U.S. government? Fortune magazine's AI editor points out that "many other breakthroughs with big strategic implications — from the Manhattan Project to the space race to early efforts to develop AI — were government-funded and largely government-directed." And Fortune added that last week the Defense Department threatened Anthropic with the Defense Production Act, which allows the president to designate "critical and strategic" goods for which businesses must accept the government's contracts. Fortune speculates this would've been "a sort of soft nationalization of Anthropic's production pipeline". Altman acknowledged Saturday that he'd felt the threat of attempted nationalization "behind a lot of the questions" he'd received when answering questions on X.com.

How exactly will this AI build-out be handled — and how should AI companies be working with the government? In a sprawling ask-me-anything session on X that included other members of OpenAI leadership, one Missouri-based developer even broached an AGI-government scenario directly with OpenAI's Head of National Security Partnerships, Katherine Mulligan. If OpenAI built an AGI — something that even passed its own Turing test for AGI — would that be a case where its government contracts compelled them to grant access to the Defense Department?

"No," Mulligan answered. At our current moment in time, "We control which models we deploy"
The article notes 100 OpenAI employees joined with 856 Google employees in an online letter titled "We Will Not Be Divided" urging their bosses to refuse their models' use in domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing without human oversight.

But Adafruit's managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone ) sees analogies to America's atomic bomb-building Manhattan Project, and "what happened when the scientists who built the thing tried to set conditions on how the thing would be used." (The government pressured them to back down, which he compares to the Pentagon's designating Anthropic a "supply chain risk" before offering OpenAI a contract "with the same red lines, just worded differently".)

Ironically, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei frequently recommends the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1986 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb...