Delta_V

...The orbiter has been in space for nearly 17 years now, the longest of any lunar-orbiting mission. An advantage of always having this spacecraft whizzing around the Moon is that we can see when anything changes on the lunar surface...

...The new crater, measuring 225 meters (738 feet) in diameter, is far larger than other craters discovered by the orbiter...

..."Prior to this discovery, the largest crater found to have formed during the LRO mission had a diameter of 70 m [230 feet],"...

The crater has an average depth of around 43 meters (141 feet), and is surrounded by bright streaks of lunar ejecta, material thrown up following the impact event...

While this is a new crater, as a result of the impact, the Moon's crater tally went down.

"Only two preexisting craters are detectable within two radii (4 and 8 m [13 and 26 feet] diameters), and both occur within 30 m [98 feet] of that limit," the team explains. "All other craters (maximum 40-m [131 feet] diameter) within that limit were obliterated or so degraded that they are no longer detectable...

...Isaacman also confirmed that NASA will no longer build a Lunar Gateway in orbit around the Moon, but would rather focus all of its energy and resources on the lunar surface...

...One of Isaacman’s fundamental beliefs is that NASA does not have a revenue problem. Rather, it has an expense problem.

“For too long we tried to satisfy every stakeholder, and the results of that are very well documented in Office of the Inspector General reports,” he said. “Billions of dollars wasted. Years lost. Hardware that never launched. Fewer flagship science missions. And fewer astronauts in space, which means fewer kids dressing up as astronauts for Halloween...

...the lunar base would be established through three phases...The first of these, running through 2028, is estimated to comprise 21 landings, putting a total of 4 metric tons of payload on the Moon...

Iranian state television says a missile strike on Dimona, home to a nuclear facility in southern Israel, was a "response" to an earlier attack on its Natanz nuclear site.

Iran’s atomic energy organisation said the "Natanz enrichment complex was targeted this morning", adding there was "no leakage of radioactive materials reported", according to local media.

The Israeli army confirmed "a direct impact of an Iranian missile" on a building in the city that houses a nuclear research facility, AFP reported.

In 2020, scientists at Tufts created tiny novel living forms called xenobots from frog cells, capable of traversing a watery environment, healing their own injuries, and even gathering other cells to build xenobot siblings.

Now, researchers at Tufts and the Wyss Institute have taken the quest to reimagine life forms a step further, adding nerve cells and observing how they self-organize and alter xenobot behavior. The resulting neurobots take on new shapes and show unique behaviors...

“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent said in a statement posted on social media...

“They’re not smart people, or they’re not savvy people,” Trump said.

. . .

“It speaks to our hubris,” Kent told reporters while campaigning for Congress. “For us not to have learned from all this just shows that there are people making money and making their careers at the other end of it. They’ve been doing it on the backs and dead bodies of U.S. soldiers.”

During his 2022 congressional campaign, Kent paid Graham Jorgensen, a member of the far-right military group the Proud Boys, for consulting work. He also worked closely with Joey Gibson, the founder of the Christian nationalist group Patriot Prayer, and attracted support from a variety of far-right figures.

Early during his first campaign, Kent acknowledged that a political consultant set up a call that was joined by Nick Fuentes, a popular right-wing influencer who has said that Jews are holding the U.S. “hostage” and once proclaimed that “Hitler was awesome, Hitler was right.”

..."This is what we call Agentic Blabbering: the AI Browser exposing what it sees, what it believes is happening, what it plans to do next, and what signals it considers suspicious or safe."

By intercepting this traffic between the browser and the AI services running on the vendor's servers and feeding it as input to a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), Guardio said it was able to make Perplexity's Comet AI browser fall victim to a phishing scam in under four minutes.

. . .

"If you can observe what the agent flags as suspicious, hesitates on, and more importantly, what it thinks and blabbers about the page, you can use that as a training signal," Chen explained. "The scam evolves until the AI Browser reliably walks into the trap another AI set for it."

Niantic's AI spinout is training a new world model using 30 billion images of urban landmarks crowdsourced from players.

. . .

“Five hundred million people installed that app in 60 days,” says Brian McClendon, CTO at Niantic Spatial, an AI company that Niantic spun out in May last year. According to the video-game firm Scopely, which bought Pokémon Go from Niantic at the same time, the game still drew more than 100 million players in 2024, eight years after it launched.

. . .

Now Niantic Spatial is using that vast and unparalleled trove of crowdsourced data—images of urban landmarks tagged with super-accurate location markers taken from the phones of hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players around the world—to build a kind of world model, a buzzy new technology that grounds the smarts of LLMs in real-world environments.

The company’s latest product is a model that it says can pinpoint your location on a map to within a few centimeters, based on a handful of snapshots of the buildings or other landmarks in view. The firm wants to use it to help robots navigate with greater precision in places where GPS is unreliable. . .

...A mysterious phenomenon known as “red sprites” randomly occur in the mesosphere, hanging like upside-down jellyfish for a scant ten milliseconds. Blue jets spear from cloud tops toward the stratosphere with eerie, silent urgency.

Both events happen so fast and high that capturing their details was nearly impossible. Yet ASIM can spot them from orbit.

One study used its footage and ground instruments to pinpoint the altitude of a single blue jet. This confirmed that these upward bolts really do punch beyond the weather layer we know.

Those measurements feed directly into storm-charging models, which in turn inform aviation guidelines about where dangerous electrical fields might lurk...

Thousands of companies are jockeying for billions of dollars in Defense Department contracts to build a shield designed to intercept and destroy missiles launched against the United States.

But amid the intense competition, a handful of firms have an important inside connection.

At least four of the companies awarded contracts so far are owned by Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm founded by billionaire Steve Feinberg, who until last year ran the company and is now the deputy secretary of defense — the second-highest-ranking official in the Pentagon.

. . .

On his first day back in office, Trump rescinded an executive order signed by President Joe Biden that required his appointees to comply with an ethics pledge. The pledge barred them from working on issues related to their former lobbying topics or clients for two years. Weeks later, Trump fired 17 inspectors general charged with investigating fraud, corruption and conflicts of interest across the federal government. Around the same time, he removed the head of the Office of Government Ethics, the agency that oversees ethics compliance throughout the executive branch. The office is currently without a head or a chief of staff.

. . .

“This is what President Eisenhower worried about in the 1960s” when he railed against the military-industrial complex...

...The administration’s removals to date have included stripping information about climate change, slavery, the civil rights movement, and the mistreatment of Native Americans from national park sites, according to court filings from the National Parks Conservation Association. NPCA sued the Interior Department this month over its decision to remove content from park sites.

The organization said in the suit that the content removals “erase the history of countless people and communities from public spaces” and “limit the availability of scientific information relevant to ensuring the long-term preservation of the parks themselves."

"...we can’t talk about times in American history where people in power hurt other people. We can’t talk about times in American history where people’s civil rights were violated..."

...In at least one report, a park service employee suggested the administration review a sign and possibly change it even though they acknowledged changes could run afoul of legal requirements.

“Text addresses slavery as the primary cause of the American Civil War,” the report from a staff member at Stones River National Battlefield in Tennessee said. “This is both historically correct and legislatively mandated but we ask for further review to confirm it is aligned with SO 3431.”...

Virginia lawmakers on Monday passed a proposal that would require schools, if they teach students about the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to relay the facts of what actually happened, without including misinformation that the 2020 presidential election was stolen or that the attack was just a peaceful protest.

...On March 2, QatarEnergy — the state-owned energy giant responsible for all of the country’s liquefied natural gas exports — announced a complete halt to LNG production...their shutdown effectively removes roughly 20% of the world’s LNG export capacity from the market in one hit...This goes beyond sentiment and sits squarely in the let’s-affect-fundamentals territory...This episode will embed a geopolitical risk premium far deeper into LNG pricing than existed even at the height of the Russia-Ukraine crisis...The long-term impact could be structural and include reconfigured trade flows, geopolitical risk premiums baked into contracts, changes in investment strategies, and a renewed urgency for diversification of supplies.