SpaceX plans to launch the seventh full-scale test flight of its massive Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket Thursday afternoon. It's the first of what might be a dozen or more demonstration flights this year as SpaceX tries new things with the most powerful rocket ever built.

There are many things on SpaceX's Starship to-do list in 2025. They include debuting an upgraded, larger Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2, on the test flight preparing to launch Thursday. The one-hour launch window opens at 5 pm EST (4 pm CST; 22:00 UTC) at SpaceX's launch base in South Texas. You can watch SpaceX's live webcast of the flight here .

SpaceX will again attempt to catch the rocket's Super Heavy booster —more than 20 stories tall and wider than a jumbo jet —back at the launch pad using mechanical arms, or "chopsticks," mounted to the launch tower. Read more about the Starship Block 2 upgrades in our story from last week.

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Are superheroes and supervillains the product of their childhood experiences? Not if they belong to the Marvel Cinematic Extended Universe or DC Universe, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. Canadian researchers watched many hours of those movies and looked at which characters suffered considerable childhood trauma. They concluded that those traumatic experiences were not significant factors in whether those characters turned out to be heroes or villains.

Prior studies have looked at the portrayal of trauma in superheroes , most notably the murder of Batman's parents and Spider-Man's uncle, as well as the destruction of Superman's home planet, Krypton. There has also been research on children sustaining injuries while pretending to be superheroes, as well as on the potential for superhero themes to help children overcome trauma and build self-esteem .

According to co-author Jennifer Jackson of the University of Calgary in Canada, two nursing students (since graduated) came up with the idea during a lab meeting to look at adverse childhood experiences and superheroes. It might seem a bit frivolous as a topic, but Jackson pointed out that Marvel and DC films reach audiences of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. "We also know that things we see in films and other media affects life in the real world," she said. "This influence could be used as a positive factor when supporting children's mental health and wellbeing. There may be shame or fear associated with some of the ACEs, and superheroes may be an effective ice breaker when broaching some difficult topics."

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Just a few days after more than 700 million new users flooded RedNote—which Time noted is "the most apolitical social platform in China"—rumors began swirling that RedNote may soon start segregating American users and other foreign IPs from the app's Chinese users.

In the "TikTokCringe" sub-reddit , a video from a RedNote user with red eyes presumably swollen from tears suggested that Americans had possibly ruined the app for Chinese Americans who rely on RedNote to stay current on Chinese news and culture.

"RedNote or Xiaohongshu released an update in the greater China region with the function to separate out foreign IPs, and there are now talks of moving all foreign IPs to a separate server and having a different IP for those who are in the greater China area," the Reddit poster said. "I know through VPNs and other ways, people are still able to access the app, but essentially this is gonna kill the app for Chinese Americans who actually use the app to connect with Chinese content, Chinese language, Chinese culture."

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AT&T has stopped offering its 5G home Internet service in New York instead of complying with a new state law that requires ISPs to offer $15 or $20 plans to people with low incomes.

The decision was reported yesterday by CNET and confirmed by AT&T in a statement provided to Ars today. "While we are committed to providing reliable and affordable Internet service to customers across the country, New York's broadband law imposes harmful rate regulations that make it uneconomical for AT&T to invest in and expand our broadband infrastructure in the state," AT&T said. "As a result, effective January 15, 2025, we will no longer be able to offer AT&T Internet Air, our fixed-wireless Internet service, to New York customers."

New York started enforcing its Affordable Broadband Act yesterday after a legal battle of nearly four years. Broadband lobby groups convinced a federal judge to block the law in 2021, but a US appeals court reversed the ruling in April 2024, and the Supreme Court decided not to hear the case last month.

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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Wednesday and deployed two commercial lunar landers o n separate trajectories to reach the Moon in the next few months.

The mission began with a middle-of-the-night launch from Kennedy at 1:11 am EST (06:11 UTC) Wednesday. It took about an hour and a half for the Falcon 9 rocket to release both payloads into two slightly different orbits, ranging up to 200,000 and 225,000 miles (322,000 and 362,000 kilometers) from Earth.

The two robotic lunar landers —one from Firefly Aerospace based near Austin, Texas, and another from the Japanese space company ispace—will use their own small engines for the final maneuvers required to enter orbit around the Moon in the coming months.

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Pension funds are dipping their toes into buying bitcoin, in a sign that even typically staid corners of finance are finding it hard to ignore the potential outsized returns from cryptocurrencies.

Pension schemes for the states of Wisconsin and Michigan are among the top holders of US stock market funds devoted to crypto, while some pension fund managers in the UK and Australia have also made small allocations in recent months to bitcoin using funds or derivatives.

Advisers say the surge in bitcoin last year, which more than doubled to touch $100,000, has spurred the interest of conservative trustees.

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Intel's Arc B580 graphics cards have been its best-reviewed to date, maintaining the aggressive pricing of the old A-series Arc cards with fewer driver bugs, fewer weird performance outliers, and fewer caveats all around.

And this appears to be translating to retail success—the B580 is sold out across the board and difficult to find at its $249 MSRP. It's hard to tell if this is because demand has been good or supply was low (Intel says it has been restocking "weekly," for what that's worth). But regardless, there's clearly been some pent-up demand for an inexpensive-but-competent entry-level graphics card with decent ray-tracing performance and power efficiency and more than 8GB of RAM.

The Arc B570 is a less-powerful, less-interesting card than the B580, with fewer of Intel's Xe-cores, less memory bandwidth, and 10GB of RAM instead of 12GB. But it offers performance very similar to the RTX 4060 for $80 less—at least, if Intel and its partners can keep it in stock at that price—which makes it a dramatically more interesting budget option than $200-ish cards like the GeForce RTX 3050 or Radeon RX 6600.

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Making the seventh Civilization game is a tall order. With six prior entries, each with a different flavor, it's challenging to create a unique identity to get people to buy it while ensuring it’s familiar enough that it doesn’t drive long-time fans away.

This week, I spent 15 hours playing Civilization VII —which is slated for release next month—through two of its three ages: Antiquity and Exploration. That’s enough time to know that this is the most radical overhaul yet in a single new release without any expansions.

Regardless, my initial impressions are that this is also a return to form for the series. Like many others, I had many gripes about Civilization VI . To be clear, VII isn’t a reset to pre- VI times; many concepts introduced in VI (like the hex-based city district system) are revisited and refined here.

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After months and years of rumors and official hints , Nintendo has finally pulled back the curtain on the Switch 2 with a first-look trailer (and sparse promo web site ) highlighting many small changes from the old Switch.

The short trailer shows off the Switch 2's larger tablet and screen, and a slightly more rounded edge on the top and bottom. The new system also sports an additional USB-C port on the top (next to a headphone jack) and a wider, U-shaped kickstand along the backside that can support the system at a number of wider angles.

The trailer also shows off black Joy-Cons that are significantly larger than those on the original Switch, with colored accents behind the joystick itself. An extended, colored Joy-Con "rail" on the inner edge features wider shoulder buttons and a new connector in the center. Rather than sliding in vertically, like the plastic rail on the Switch Joy-Cons, the controllers on the Switch 2 snap in horizontally with what appears to be a magnetic connection , and disconnects with the aid of a horizontal lever to the side of the shoulder buttons.

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