Slashdot reader Mirnotoriety shared this report from the Register: A proof-of-concept program has been released to demonstrate a so-called monitoring "blind spot" in how some Linux antivirus and other endpoint protection tools use the kernel's io_uring interface.

That interface allows applications to make IO requests without using traditional system calls [to enhance performance by enabling asynchronous I/O operations between user space and the Linux kernel through shared ring buffers]. That's a problem for security tools that rely on syscall monitoring to detect threats... [which] may miss changes that are instead going through the io_uring queues.

To demonstrate this, security shop ARMO built a proof-of-concept named Curing that lives entirely through io_uring. Because it avoids system calls, the program apparently went undetected by tools including Falco, Tetragon, and Microsoft Defender in their default configurations. ARMO claimed this is a "major blind spot" in the Linux security stack... "Not many companies are using it but you don't need to be using it for an attacker to use it as enabled by default in most Linux systems, potentially tens of thousands of servers," ARMO's CEO Shauli Rozen told The Register. "If you're not using io_uring then disable it, but that's not always easy with cloud vendors."

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares an article from Renewables Now: Chinese tech company Leapting has successfully completed its first commercial deployment of photovoltaic (PV) modules with an AI-driven solar module mounting robot in Australia. The Chinese company was tasked with supporting the installation of French Neoen's (EPA:NEOEN) 350-MW/440-MWp Culcairn Solar Farm in New South Wales' Riverina region. Shanghai-based Leapting said this week that its intelligent robot has installed almost 10,000 modules at an "efficient, safe, and stable" pace that has "significantly" reduced the original construction timeline.

Litian Intelligent was deployed at the Australian project site in early February. The machine has a 2.5-metre-high robotic arm sitting on a self-guided, self-propelled crawler. Equipped with a navigation system, and visual recognition technology, it can lift and mount PV panels weighing up to 30 kilograms. By replacing labour-intensive manual operations, the robot shortens the module installation cycle by 25%, while the installation efficiency increases three to five times as compared to manual labour and is easily adapted to complex environments, Leapting says.
Or, as Clean Technica puts it, "Meet the robot replacing four workers at a time on solar projects." This is part of a broader industrial trend. In the United States, Rosendin Electric demonstrated its own semi-autonomous system in Texas that allowed a two-person team to install 350 to 400 modules per day, a clear step-change from traditional methods. AES Corporation has been developing a robot called Maximo that combines placement and fastening with computer vision. Trina Solar's Trinabot in China operates in a similar space, with prototype systems demonstrating 50-plus modules per hour... In an industry where time-to-energy is critical, shaving weeks off the construction schedule directly reduces costs and increases net revenue...

[T]he direction is clear. The future of solar construction will be faster, safer, and more precise — not because of human brawn, but because of robotic repetition. There will still be humans on-site, but their role shifts from lifting panels to managing throughput. Just as cranes and excavators changed civil construction, so too will robots like Leapting's define the next era of solar deployment.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares this excerpt from a new article in Science magazine: At first, astronomers knew of only one cosmic scenario that fit the bill for the violent formation of "jewelry shop" elements [gold and sliver]: the collision of two ultra-dense stellar corpses called neutron stars.

Now, a second has stepped onto the scene.

As they report this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers have discovered signatures of this heavy element formation — called the r-process — in a giant flare first detected from a highly magnetic neutron star in 2004. The flare, which released more energy than our Sun does in a million years as it spewed electrically charged material, has remained shrouded in mystery since its discovery 20 years ago. Researchers quickly traced the outburst to a nearby magnetar, a special breed of neutron star whose magnetic fields are trillions times stronger than Earth's. But ten minutes after the massive flare, a second, fainter signal inexplicably came from the same star.

More r-process sources may still be looming in the dark. The new study accounts for about 10% of the Milky Way's heavy elements, suggesting that astronomers will have to scour the cosmos for even more places where the r-process is hiding. One potential spot is a rare type of supernova that births rapidly rotating neutron stars, says says Anirudh Patel, the new study's lead author and an astronomer at Columbia University. He hopes that with more observations, astronomers will be able to sharpen that picture.... "It's humbling to realize that these were made in such extreme astrophysical environments."

Astronomers may have found the best candidate yet for the elusive Planet Nine: a mysterious object in infrared sky surveys taken 23 years apart that appears to be more massive than Neptune and about 700 times farther from the sun than Earth. Space.com reports: [A] team led by astronomer Terry Long Phan of the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan has delved into the archives of two far-infrared all-sky surveys in search of Planet Nine -- and incredibly, they have found something that could possibly be Planet Nine. The Infrared Astronomy Satellite, IRAS, launched in 1983 and surveyed the universe for almost a year before being decommissioned. Then, in 2006, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched AKARI, another infrared astronomy satellite that was active between 2006 and 2011. Phan's team were looking for objects that appeared in IRAS's database, then appeared to have moved by the time AKARI took a look. The amount of movement on the sky would be tiny -- about three arcminutes per year at a distance of approximately 700 astronomical units (AU). One arcminute is 1/60 of an angular degree.

But there's an extra motion that Phan's team had to account for. As the Earth orbits the sun, our view of the position of very distant objects changes slightly in an effect called parallax. It is the same phenomenon as when you hold your index finger up to your face, close one eye and look at your finger, and then switch eyes -- your finger appears to move as a result of you looking at it from a slightly different position. Planet Nine would appear to move on the sky because of parallax as Earth moves around the sun. On any particular day, it might seem to be in one position, then six months later when Earth is on the other side of the sun, it would shift to another position, perhaps by 10 to 15 arcminutes -- then, six months after that, it would seem to shift back to its original position. To remove the effects of parallax, Phan's team searched for Planet Nine on the same date every year in the AKARI data, because on any given date it would appear in the same place, with zero parallax shift, every year. They then also scrutinized each candidate object that their search threw up on an hourly basis. If a candidate is a fast-moving, nearby object, then its motion would be detectable from hour to hour, and could therefore be ruled out. This careful search led Phan's team to a single object, a tiny dot in the infrared data.

It appears in one position in IRAS's 1983 image, though it was not in that position when AKARI looked. However, there is an object seen by AKARI in a position 47.4 arcminutes away that isn't there in the IRAS imagery, and it is within the range that Planet Nine could have traveled in the intervening time. In other words, this object has moved a little further along its orbit around the sun in the 23 or more years between IRAS and AKARI. The knowledge of its motion in that intervening time is not sufficient to be able to extrapolate the object's full orbit, therefore it's not yet possible to say for certain whether this is Planet Nine. First, astronomers need to recover it in more up-to-date imagery. [...] Based on the candidate object's brightness in the IRAS and AKARI images, Phan estimates that the object, if it really is Planet Nine, must be more massive than Neptune. This came as a surprise, because he and his team were searching for a super-Earth-size body. Previous surveys by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have ruled out any Jupiter-size planets out to 256,000 AU, and any Saturn-size planets out to 10,000 AU, but a smaller Neptune or Uranus-size world could still have gone undetected. Phan told Space.com that he had searched for his candidate in the WISE data, "but no convincing counterpart was found because it has moved since the 2006 position," and without knowing its orbit more accurately, we can't say where it has moved to. "Once we know the position of the candidate, a longer exposure with the current large optical telescopes can detect it," Phan told Space.com. "However, the follow-up observations with optical telescopes still need to cover about three square degrees because Planet Nine would have moved from the position where AKARI detected it in 2006. This is doable with a camera that has a large field of view, such as the Dark Energy Camera, which has a field of view of three square degrees on the Blanco four-meter telescope [in Chile]."

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the nearly two months since former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space, the billionaire has not said much publicly about his plans for the launch company. However, his intentions for Relativity now appear to be increasingly clear: He wants to have the capability to launch a significant amount of computing infrastructure into space.

We know this because Schmidt appeared before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce during a hearing in April, speaking on the future of AI and US competitiveness. Among the topics raised then was the need for more electricity -- both renewable and non-renewable -- to power data centers that will facilitate the computing needs for AI development and applications. Schmidt noted that an average nuclear power plant in the United States generates 1 gigawatt of power.

"People are planning 10 gigawatt data centers," Schmidt said. "Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is. Many people think that the energy demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation. One of the estimates that I think is most likely is that data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027, and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. These things are industrial at a scale that I have never seen in my life."

NASA's SPHEREx space observatory has officially begun its two-year mission to map the entire sky in 102 infrared wavelengths, capturing about 3,600 images daily to create 3D maps of hundreds of millions of galaxies. Its goal is to unlock new insights into cosmic inflation, the origins of galaxies, and the building blocks of life in the Milky Way by using spectroscopy to analyze light and matter across the universe. From a press release: From its perch in Earth orbit, SPHEREx peers into the darkness, pointing away from the planet and the Sun. The observatory will complete more than 11,000 orbits over its 25 months of planned survey operations, circling Earth about 14.5 times a day. It orbits Earth from north to south, passing over the poles, and each day it takes images along one circular strip of the sky. As the days pass and the planet moves around the Sun, SPHEREx's field of view shifts as well so that after six months, the observatory will have looked out into space in every direction.

When SPHEREx takes a picture of the sky, the light is sent to six detectors that each produces a unique image capturing different wavelengths of light. These groups of six images are called an exposure, and SPHEREx takes about 600 exposures per day. When it's done with one exposure, the whole observatory shifts position -- the mirrors and detectors don't move as they do on some other telescopes. Rather than using thrusters, SPHEREx relies on a system of reaction wheels, which spin inside the spacecraft to control its orientation.

Hundreds of thousands of SPHEREx's images will be digitally woven together to create four all-sky maps in two years. By mapping the entire sky, the mission will provide new insights about what happened in the first fraction of a second after the big bang. In that brief instant, an event called cosmic inflation caused the universe to expand a trillion-trillionfold.

The European Space Agency has launched the Biomass satellite to study the world's forests using the first space-based P-band synthetic aperture radar, aiming to accurately measure carbon storage and improve understanding of the global carbon cycle. CBS News reports: Forests on Earth collectively absorb and store about 8 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, the ESA said. That regulates the planet's temperature. Deforestation and degradation, especially in tropical regions, means that stored carbon is being released back into the atmosphere, the ESA said, which can contribute to climate change. There's a lack of accurate data on how much carbon the planet's estimated 1.5 trillion trees store and how much human activity can impact that storage, the ESA said.

To "weigh" the planet's trees and determine their carbon dioxide capacity, Biomass will use a P-band synthetic aperture radar. It's the first such piece of technology in space. The radar can penetrate forest canopies and measure woody biomass, including trunks, branches and stems, the ESA said. Most forest carbon is stored in these parts of the trees. Those measurements will act as a proxy for carbon storage, the ESA said. [...] Once the radar takes the measurements, the data will be received by the large mesh reflector. It will then be sent to the ESA's mission control center.

Firefly Aerospace's sixth Alpha rocket launch failed on April 29, 2025, after an upper-stage anomaly prevented a Lockheed Martin satellite demo from reaching orbit. Both the stage and payload fell into the Pacific Ocean near Antarctica. Space.com reports: The two-stage, 96.7-foot-tall (29.6 meters) Alpha lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base this morning (April 29), carrying a technology demonstration for aerospace giant Lockheed Martin toward low Earth orbit (LEO). But the payload never got there. Alpha suffered an anomaly shortly after its two stages separated, which led to the loss of the nozzle extension for the upper stage's single Lightning engine. This significantly reduced the engine's thrust, dooming the mission, Firefly said in an update several hours after launch.

Today's mission, which Firefly called "Message in a Booster," was the first of up to 25 that the company will conduct for Lockheed Martin over the next five years. The flight aimed to send a satellite technology demonstrator to LEO. This demo payload "was specifically built to showcase the company's pathfinding efforts for its LM 400 mid-sized, multi-mission satellite bus, and to demonstrate the space vehicle's operational capabilities on orbit for potential customers," Firefly wrote in a prelaunch mission description. "Initial indications showed Alpha's upper stage reached 320 km [199 miles] in altitude. However, upon further assessment, the team learned the upper stage did not reach orbital velocity, and the stage and payload have now safely impacted the Pacific Ocean in a cleared zone north of Antarctica," an update reads.

"Firefly recognizes the hard work that went into payload development and would like to thank our mission partners at Lockheed Martin for their continued support," it continues. "The team is working closely with our customers and the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] to conduct an investigation and determine root cause of the anomaly. We will provide more information on our mission page after the investigation is completed."

Kosmos 482, a failed Soviet Venus probe, is expected to make an uncontrolled reentry in mid-May after orbiting Earth for 53 years. Gizmodo reports: The lander module from an old Soviet spacecraft is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere during the second week of May, according to Marco Langbroek, a satellite tracker based in Leiden, the Netherlands. "As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact," Langbroek wrote in a blog update. "The risks involved are not particularly high, but not zero."

Kosmos 482 launched on March 31, 1972 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in Kazakhstan. The mission was an attempt by the Soviet space program to reach Venus, but it failed to gain enough velocity to enter a transfer trajectory toward the scorching-hot planet. A malfunction resulted in an engine burn that wasn't sufficient to reach Venus' orbit and left the spacecraft in an elliptical Earth orbit, according to NASA. The spacecraft broke apart into four different pieces, with two of the smaller fragments reentering over Ashburton, New Zealand, two days after launch. Meanwhile, two remaining pieces, believed to be the payload and the detached upper-stage engine unit, entered a higher orbit measuring 130 by 6,089 miles (210 by 9,800 kilometers).

The failed mission consisted of a carrier bus and a lander probe, which together form a spherical pressure vessel weighing more than 1,000 pounds (495 kilograms). Considering its mass, "risks are similar to that of a meteorite impact," Langbroek wrote. As of now, it's hard to determine exactly when the spacecraft will reenter. Langbroek estimates that the reentry will take place on May 10, but a more precise date will get clearer as the reentry date nears.

Remember First Light Fusion? Founded in 2011, it was a pioneering British startup that in 2022 "successfully combined atomic nuclei, which U.K. regulators called a milestone in the decades-long push for fusion energy.

It's now "pulled the plug on plans to build its first reactor," reports the Telegraph, abandoning its push for a prototype power plant based on its "projectile fusion" technology due to a lack of funding. The technology involves a 5p-sized projectile being fired at a fuel cell at extreme speeds using electromagnets to generate a powerful reaction and simulate collisions at extremely high speeds, such as those in space. Instead of building its own plant, First Light plans to supply other nuclear power companies with one of its inventions, called an "amplifier", which houses a nuclear fuel capsule and boosts the power of fusion reactions.

The group has burned through tens of millions of pounds trying to bring its technology to fruition... The decision to ditch its original plan will allow First Light Fusion to be more "capital light", the nuclear group said in March, while licensing its inventions would generate more revenues. The company said it had recently secured the first tranche of a new funding round. Mark Thomas, First Light Fusion's chief executive, said: "We have been very pleased with the response to our strategy pivot, moving to an enabler of inertial fusion while rapidly accelerating revenues...

First Light Fusion's other investors include Chinese technology giant Tencent.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: The secretive Russian satellite in space that U.S. officials believe is connected to a nuclear anti-satellite weapon program has appeared to be spinning uncontrollably, suggesting it may no longer be functioning in what could be a setback for Moscow's space weapon efforts, according to U.S. analysts... [The Cosmos 2553 satellite launched in 2022] has had various bouts of what appears to be errant spinning over the past year, according to Doppler radar data from space-tracking firm LeoLabs and optical data from Slingshot Aerospace shared with Reuters.

Believed to be a radar satellite for Russian intelligence as well as a radiation testing platform, the satellite last year became the center of U.S. allegations that Russia for years has been developing a nuclear weapon capable of destroying entire satellite networks, such as SpaceX's vast Starlink internet system that Ukrainian troops have been using. U.S. officials assess Cosmos 2553's purpose, though not itself a weapon, is to aid Russia's development of a nuclear anti-satellite weapon. Russia has denied it is developing such a weapon and says Cosmos 2553 is for research purposes....

"This observation strongly suggests the satellite is no longer operational," the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, said of LeoLabs' analysis in its annual Space Threat Assessment published on Friday.

Some patches for Linux 6.15-rc4 (updating the kernel driver for the Bcachefs file system) triggered some "straight-to-the-point wisdom" from Linus Torvalds about case-insensitive filesystems, reports Phoronix.

Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet started the conversation, explaining how some buggy patches for their case-insensitive file and folder support were upstreamed into the Bcachefs kernel driver nearly two years ago: When I was discussing with the developer who did the implementation, I noted that fstests should already have tests. However, it seems I neglected to tell him to make sure the tests actually run... It is _not_ enough to simply rely on the automated tests. You have to have eyes on what your code is doing.
Overstreet added "There's a story behind the case insensitive directory fixes, and lessons to be learned." To which Torvalds replied.... "No."

"The only lesson to be learned is that filesystem people never learn."

Torvalds: Case-insensitive names are horribly wrong, and you shouldn't have done them at all. The problem wasn't the lack of testing, the problem was implementing it in the first place. The problem is then compounded by "trying to do it right", and in the process doing it horrible wrong indeed, because "right" doesn't exist, but trying to will make random bytes have very magical meaning.

And btw, the tests are all completely broken anyway. Last I saw, they didn't actually test for all the really interesting cases — the ones that cause security issues in user land. Security issues like "user space checked that the filename didn't match some security-sensitive pattern". And then the shit-for-brains filesystem ends up matching that pattern *anyway*, because the people who do case insensitivity *INVARIABLY* do things like ignore non-printing characters, so now "case insensitive" also means "insensitive to other things too"....

Dammit. Case sensitivity is a BUG. The fact that filesystem people *still* think it's a feature, I cannot understand. It's like they revere the old FAT filesystem _so_ much that they have to recreate it — badly.
And this led to a very lively back-and-forth discussion.

Slashdot's summary of the highlights:

An anonymous reader shared this report from Business Insider: A Lufthansa flight carrying 461 passengers had to divert after someone's tablet became "jammed" in a business-class seat.

The Airbus A380 took off from Los Angeles on Wednesday, bound for Munich, and had been flying for around three hours when the pilots diverted to Boston Logan International Airport. In a statement to Business Insider, an airline spokesperson said the tablet had become "jammed in a Business Class seat" and had "already shown visible signs of deformation due to the seat's movements" when the flight diverted. [The aviation site] Simply Flying, which first reported the news, said the device was an iPad.

The decision to divert was taken "to eliminate any potential risk, particularly with regard to possible overheating," the spokesperson added, saying that it was the joint decision of the crew and air traffic control. Lithium batteries pose a safety risk if damaged, punctured, or crushed... In a confined space like an aircraft cabin, a lithium battery fire poses a serious hazard to the passengers onboard. Last year, a Breeze Airways flight from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh had to make an emergency landing in Albuquerque after a passenger's laptop caught fire.

"Future moon astronauts may find water more accessible than previously thought," writes Space.com, citing a new NASA-led experiment: Because the moon lacks a magnetic field like Earth's, the barren lunar surface is constantly bombarded by energetic particles from the sun... Li Hsia Yeo, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, led a lab experiment observing the effects of simulated solar wind on two samples of loose regolith brought to Earth by the Apollo 17 mission... To mimic conditions on the moon, the researchers built a custom apparatus that included a vacuum chamber, where the samples were placed, and a tiny particle accelerator, which the scientists used to bombard the samples with hydrogen ions for several days.

"The exciting thing here is that with only lunar soil and a basic ingredient from the sun — which is always spitting out hydrogen — there's a possibility of creating water," Yeo said in a statement. "That's incredible to think about." Supporting this idea, observations from previous moon missions have revealed an abundance of hydrogen gas in the moon's tenuous atmosphere. Scientists suspect that solar-wind-driven heating facilitates the combination of hydrogen atoms on the surface into hydrogen gas, which then escapes into space. This process also has a surprising upside, the new study suggests. Leftover oxygen atoms are free to bond with new hydrogen atoms formed by repeated bombardment of the solar wind, prepping the moon for more water formation on a renewable basis.

The findings could help assess how sustainable water on the moon is, as the sought-after resource is crucial for both life support and as propellant for rockets. The team's study was published in March in the journal JGR Planets .
NASA created a fascinating animation showing how water is released from the Moon during meteor showers. (In 2016 scientists discovered that when speck of comet debris vaporize on impact, they create shock waves in the lunar soil which can sometimes breach the dry upper layer, releasing water molecules from the hydrated layer below...)

"Google-owned YouTube's revenue last year was estimated to be $54.2 billion," reports the Los Angeles Times, "which would make it the second-largest media company behind Walt Disney Co., according to a recent report from research firm MoffettNathanson, which called YouTube 'the new king of all media.'" YouTube, run by Chief Executive Neal Mohan since 2023, accounted for 12% of U.S. TV viewing in March, more than other rival streaming platforms including Netflix and Tubi, according to Nielsen... More people are watching YouTube on TV sets rather than on smartphones and computer screens, consuming more than 1 billion hours on average of YouTube content on TV daily, the company said on its website.
When YouTube first started its founders envisioned it as a dating site, according to the article, "where people would upload videos and score them. When that didn't work, the founders decided to open up the platform for all sorts of videos." And since this was 20 years ago, "Users drove traffic to YouTube by sharing videos on MySpace."

But the article includes stories of people getting rich through YouTube's sharing of ad revenue: Patrick Starrr, who produces makeup tutorial videos, said he made his first $1 million through YouTube at the age of 25. He left his job at retailer MAC Cosmetics in Florida and moved to L.A...

[Video creator Dhar Mann] started posting videos on YouTube in 2018 with no film background. Mann previously had a business that sold supplies to grow weed. Today, his company, Burbank-based Dhar Mann Studios, operates on 125,000 square feet of production space, employs roughly 200 people and works with 2,000 actors a year on family friendly programs that touch on how students and families deal with topics such as bullying, narcolepsy, chronic inflammatory bowel disease and hoarding. Mann made $45 million last year, according to Forbes estimates. The majority of his company's revenue comes through YouTube.
He tells the Times "I don't think it's just the future of TV — it is TV, and the world is catching on."

And then there's this... "My mom would always give me so much crap about it — she would say, 'Why do you want to do YouTube?'" said Chucky Appleby, now an executive at MrBeast. His reply: "Mom, you can make a living from this." MrBeast's holding company, Beast Industries, which employs more than 400 people, made $473 million in revenue last year, according to Business Insider. In the last 28 days, MrBeast content — which includes challenges and stunt videos — received 3.6 billion views on YouTube, Appleby said.

Appleby, 28, said he's since bought a Jeep for his mom.

Initial claims that life-associated gases were detected on exoplanet K2-18b are being challenged, with independent reanalysis by Jake Taylor suggesting the data is too noisy to support such conclusions and that stronger, model-independent evidence is needed. NPR reports: Rather than seeing a bump or a wiggle that indicated a signal, "the data is consistent with a flat line," says Taylor, adding that more observations from the telescope are needed to know what can be reliably said about this planet's atmosphere. "If we want to claim biosignatures, we need to be extremely sure."

What this new work shows is that "the strength of the evidence depends on the nitty gritty details of how we interpret the data, and that doesn't pass the bar for me for a convincing detection," says Laura Kreidberg, an expert on the atmospheres of distant planets at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany who didn't work on the original research team or this new analysis.

She explains that astronomers can make a lot of different choices when analyzing data; for example, they can make different assumptions about the physics and chemistry at play. "Ideally, for a robust detection, we want it to be model-independent," she says -- that is, they want the signal to show up even if the underlying assumptions change from one analysis to another. But that wasn't the case here.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: China will let scientists from six countries, including the U.S., examine the rocks it collected from the Moon -- a scientific collaboration that comes as the two countries remain locked in a bitter trade war. Two NASA-funded U.S. institutions have been granted access to the lunar samples collected by the Chang'e-5 mission in 2020, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said on Thursday. CNSA chief Shan Zhongde said that the samples were "a shared treasure for all humanity," local media reported.

Chinese researchers have not been able to access NASA's Moon samples because of restrictions imposed by U.S. lawmakers on the space agency's collaboration with China. Under the 2011 law, Nasa is banned from collaboration with China or any Chinese-owned companies unless it is specifically authorized by Congress. But John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, told BBC Newshour that the latest exchange of Moon rocks have "very little to do with politics." While there are controls on space technology, the examination of lunar samples had "nothing of military significance," he said. "It's international cooperation in science which is the norm."

The Sydney-based CADA station secretly used an AI-generated host named "Thy" for its weekday shows over six months without disclosure. The Sydney Morning Herald reports: After initial questioning from Stephanie Coombes in The Carpet newsletter, it was revealed that the station used ElevenLabs -- a generative AI audio platform that transforms text into speech -- to create Thy, whose likeness and voice were cloned from a real employee in the ARN finance team. The Australian Communications and Media Authority said there were currently no specific restrictions on the use of AI in broadcast content, and no obligation to disclose its use.

An ARN spokesperson said the company was exploring how new technology could enhance the listener experience. "We've been trialling AI audio tools on CADA, using the voice of Thy, an ARN team member. This is a space being explored by broadcasters globally, and the trial has offered valuable insights." However, it has also "reinforced the power of real personalities in driving compelling content," the spokesperson added.

The Australian Financial Review reported that Workdays with Thy has been broadcast on CADA since November, and was reported to have reached at least 72,000 people in last month's ratings. Vice president of the Australian Association of Voice Actors, Teresa Lim, said CADA's failure to disclose its use of AI reinforces how necessary legislation around AI labelling has become. "AI can be such a powerful and positive tool in broadcasting if there are correct safeguards in place," she said. "Authenticity and truth are so important for broadcast media. The public deserves to know what the source is of what's being broadcast ... We need to have these discussions now before AI becomes so advanced that it's too difficult to regulate."

To celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope's 35th anniversary in orbit, NASA and ESA released a series of new, out-out-of-this-world images spanning planets, nebulae, and galaxies. From a press release: Hubble today is at the peak of its scientific return thanks to the dedication, perseverance and skills of engineers, scientists and mission operators. Astronaut shuttle crews gallantly chased and rendezvoused with Hubble on five servicing missions from 1993 to 2009. The astronauts, including ESA astronauts on two of the servicing missions, upgraded Hubble's cameras, computers and other support systems.

By extending Hubble's operational life the telescope has made nearly 1.7 million observations, looking at approximately 55,000 astronomical targets. Hubble discoveries have resulted in over 22,000 papers and over 1.3 million citations as of February 2025. All the data collected by Hubble is archived and currently adds up to over 400 terabytes. The demand for observing time remains very high with 6:1 oversubscriptions, making it one of the most in-demand observatories today.

Hubble's long operational life has allowed astronomers to see astronomical changes spanning over three decades: seasonal variability on the planets in our solar system, black hole jets traveling at nearly the speed of light, stellar convulsions, asteroid collisions, expanding supernova bubbles, and much more.

Amazon's internet-from-space venture is struggling to ramp up production, jeopardizing its ability to meet a government deadline to have more than 1,600 satellites in orbit by next summer. From a report: Project Kuiper has completed just a few dozen satellites so far, more than a year into its manufacturing program, according to three people familiar with the situation. The slow pace, combined with rocket launch delays, means the company will probably have to seek an extension from the Federal Communications Commission, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential matters.

The agency, which has oversight of transmissions from space, expects the company to have half its planned constellation of 3,236 satellites operating by the end of July 2026. To meet that requirement, Amazon would have to at least quadruple the current rate of production, which has yet to consistently reach one satellite a day, two of the people said.