NASA's inspector general released a new report on Tuesday that examines the space agency's management of the Human Landing System development contracts signed with SpaceX and Blue Origin.

These landers are essential for NASA's program to land humans on the Moon this decade and then establish a long-term settlement on the lunar surface. However, both NASA and the companies developing the landers have largely been silent about their efforts. For this reason the new report on Human Landing Systems (HLS) provides some interesting insights previously unknown to the public.

Overall, the report, signed by Office of Inspector General senior official Robert Steinau, finds that the fixed-price contracting approach has been beneficial for NASA as it seeks to broaden its utilization of the US commercial space industry.

Read full article

Comments

Google didn't waste time integrating Gemini into its popular Workspace apps, but those AI features are now getting an overhaul. The company says its new Gemini features for Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides will save you from the tyranny of the blank page by doing the hard work for you. Gemini will be able to create and refine drafts, stylize slides, and gather context from across your Google account. At this rate, you'll soon never have to use that squishy human brain of yours again, and won't that be a relief?

If you go to create a new Google Doc right now, you'll see an assortment of AI-powered tools at the top of the page. Google is refining and expanding these options under the new system. The new AI editing features will appear at the bottom of a fresh document with a text box similar to your typical chatbot interface. From there, you can describe the document you want and get a first draft in a snap. When generating a new document, you can rope in content from sources like Gmail, other documents, Google Chat, and the web.

This also comes with expanded AI editing capabilities. You can use further prompts to reformat and change the document or simply highlight specific sections and ask for changes. Docs will also support AI-assisted style matching, which might come in handy if you have multiple people editing the text. Google notes that all Gemini suggestions are private until you approve them for use.

Read full article

Comments

Every year, we have a blast covering a fresh crop of winners of the Ig Nobel prizes. After 35 years in Boston, the annual prize ceremony will take place in Zurich, Switzerland, this year and will continue to be held in a European city for the foreseeable future. The reason: concerns about the safety of international travelers, who are increasingly reluctant to travel to the US to participate.

“During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of The Annals of Improbable Research magazine, told The Associated Press . “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the US this year.”

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” As the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit. The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures, in which experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and again in just seven words.

Read full article

Comments

Nokian provided flights from Austin, Texas, to Ivalo, Finland, and accommodation so Ars could visit its test facility. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

IVALO, Finland—In 1987, fictional superspy James Bond careened around a frozen lake in an Aston Martin in the movie The Living Daylights . Bond’s tires were carrying a secret—retractable tire studs that operated with the touch of a button. After cutting a circle in the ice with a wheel to sink the bad guys, Bond deployed his outriggers for balance and his on-demand studs for an impressive getaway.

Nokian Tires played with that idea, presenting a concept in 2014 with similar functionality. However, as Nokian development manager Mikko Liukkula remembers wryly, each tire was so complex that a production set would have cost more than the vehicle itself. Fast-forward to 2026, and Nokian has debuted a giant step forward in studded-tire engineering: a studded winter tire that automatically adjusts to changes in temperature and surface pressure.

I put these new Hakkapeliitta 01 tires through the wringer in and around a frozen-over Lake Tammijärvi at Nokian’s 1,700-acre testing center. After drifting, slaloming, hard braking, and swooshing along snowy trails, I can attest to the quality of the gripping power.

Read full article

Comments

Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.

The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.

Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.”

Read full article

Comments

In 1774, British physician-scientist Charles Blagden received an unusual invitation from a fellow physician: to spend time in a small room that was hotter, he wrote, “than it was formerly thought any living creature could bear.”

Many people may have been appalled by this offer, but Blagden was delighted by the opportunity for self-experimentation. He marveled as his own temperature remained at 98° Fahrenheit (approximately 37° Celsius), even as the temperature of the room approached 200°F (about 93°C).

Today, this ability to maintain a stable body temperature—called homeothermy—is known to exist among myriad species of mammals and birds. But there are also some notable exceptions. The body temperature of the fat-tailed dwarf lemur, for example, can fluctuate by nearly 45°F (25°C) over a single day.

Read full article

Comments

US President Donald Trump announced Friday that he was instructing every federal agency to “immediately cease” use of Anthropic’s AI tools. The move comes after Anthropic and top officials clashed for weeks over military applications of artificial intelligence.

"The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social .

Trump said that there would be a “six month phase out period” for agencies using Anthropic, which could allow time for further negotiations between the government and the AI startup.

Read full article

Comments

Health officials in Illinois turned to an AI chatbot to try to solve a puzzling outbreak linked to a county fair. But whether it was actually helpful or not remains unclear.

According to a report this week in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report , officials in Brown County got the first hint of an outbreak from the county sheriff, who noted on August 5, 2024 that a remarkable number of potential jurors for an upcoming trial said they had a stomach bug. Then, on August 12, the state health department notified the county of a case of Salmonella enterica serotype Agbeni.

With those two tips, county health officials opened an investigation and were able to identify 13 cases—seven laboratory-confirmed cases of S. enterica Agbeni and six probable cases that were in close contact with confirmed cases. The cases spanned five counties, but they all had one thing in common: everyone had gone to the Brown County fair.

Read full article

Comments

Google on Friday unveiled its plan for its Chrome browser to secure HTTPS certificates against quantum computer attacks without breaking the Internet.

The objective is a tall order. The quantum-resistant cryptographic data needed to transparently publish TLS certificates is roughly 40 times bigger than the classical cryptographic material used today. Today’s X.509 certificates are about 64 bytes in size, and comprise six elliptic curve signatures and two EC public keys. This material can be cracked through the quantum-enabled Shor’s algorithm . Certificates containing the equivalent quantum-resistant cryptographic material are roughly 2.5 kilobytes. All this data must be transmitted when a browser connects to a site.

The bigger they come, the slower they move

“The bigger you make the certificate, the slower the handshake and the more people you leave behind,” said Bas Westerbaan, principal research engineer at Cloudflare, which is partnering with Google on the transition. “Our problem is we don’t want to leave people behind in this transition.” Speaking to Ars, he said that people will likely disable the new encryption if it slows their browsing. He added that the massive size increase can also degrade “middle boxes,” which sit between browsers and the final site.

Read full article

Comments