Mike M.

A WB-57 pilot just made a heroic landing in Houston after its landing gear failed

emergency landing, NASA, Space, wb-57 / Mike M. / January 27, 2026

One of NASA’s three large WB-57 aircraft made an emergency landing at Ellington Field on Tuesday morning in southeastern Houston.

Video captured by KHOU 11 television showed the aircraft touching down on the runway without its landing gear extended. The pilot then maintains control of the vehicle as it slides down the runway, slowing the aircraft through friction. The crew was not harmed, NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens said.

WB-57 landing.

“Today, a mechanical issue with one of NASA’s WB-57s resulted in a gear-up landing at Ellington Field,” she said. “Response to the incident is ongoing, and all crew are safe at this time. As with any incident, a thorough investigation will be conducted by NASA into the cause. NASA will transparently update the public as we gather more information.”

The B-57 line of aircraft dates back to 1944, when the English Electric Company began developing the plane. After the Royal Air Force showcased the B-57 in 1951 by crossing the Atlantic in a record four hours and 40 minutes and becoming the first jet-powered aircraft to span the Atlantic without refueling, the United States Air Force began buying them to replace its aging Douglas B-26 Invader.

Now used for science

The aircraft performed bombing missions in Vietnam and other military campaigns, and a variant that later became the WB-57 was designed with longer wings that could fly even higher, up to 62,000 feet. This proved useful for weather reconnaissance and, around the world, to sample the upper atmosphere for evidence of nuclear debris where US officials suspected the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.

A WB-57 pilot just made a heroic landing in Houston after its landing gear failed Read More »

“IG is a drug”: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial

child safety, facebook, Instagram, Meta, Policy, Social Media, social media addiction, tiktok, youtube / Mike M. / January 27, 2026

Social media addiction test case

A loss could cost social media companies billions and force changes on platforms.

Mark Zuckerberg testifies during the US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis,” in 2024.

Anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and death. These can be the consequences for vulnerable kids who get addicted to social media, according to more than 1,000 personal injury lawsuits that seek to punish Meta and other platforms for allegedly prioritizing profits while downplaying child safety risks for years.

Social media companies have faced scrutiny before, with congressional hearings forcing CEOs to apologize, but until now, they’ve never had to convince a jury that they aren’t liable for harming kids.

This week, the first high-profile lawsuit—considered a “bellwether” case that could set meaningful precedent in the hundreds of other complaints—goes to trial. That lawsuit documents the case of a 19-year-old, K.G.M, who hopes the jury will agree that Meta and YouTube caused psychological harm by designing features like infinite scroll and autoplay to push her down a path that she alleged triggered depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality.

TikTok and Snapchat were also targeted by the lawsuit, but both have settled. The Snapchat settlement came last week, while TikTok settled on Tuesday just hours before the trial started, Bloomberg reported.

For now, YouTube and Meta remain in the fight. K.G.M. allegedly started watching YouTube when she was 6 years old and joined Instagram by age 11. She’s fighting to claim untold damages—including potentially punitive damages—to help her family recoup losses from her pain and suffering and to punish social media companies and deter them from promoting harmful features to kids. She also wants the court to require prominent safety warnings on platforms to help parents be aware of the risks.

Platforms failed to blame mom for not reading TOS

A loss could cost social media companies billions, CNN reported.

To avoid that, platforms have alleged that other factors caused K.G.M.’s psychological harm—like school bullies and family troubles—while insisting that Section 230 and the First Amendment protect platforms from being blamed for any harmful content targeted to K.G.M.

They also argued that K.G.M.’s mom never read the terms of service and, therefore, supposedly would not have benefited from posted warnings. And ByteDance, before settling, seemingly tried to pass the buck by claiming that K.G.M. “already suffered mental health harms before she began using TikTok.”

But the judge, Carolyn B. Kuhl, wrote in a ruling denying all platforms’ motions for summary judgment that K.G.M. showed enough evidence that her claims don’t stem from content to go to trial.

Further, platforms can’t liken warnings buried in terms of service to prominently displayed warnings, Kuhl said, since K.G.M.’s mom testified she would have restricted the minor’s app usage if she were aware of the alleged risks.

Two platforms settling before the trial seems like a good sign for K.G.M. However, Snapchat has not settled other social media addiction lawsuits that it’s involved in, including one raised by school districts, and perhaps is waiting to see how K.G.M.’s case shakes out before taking further action.

To win, K.G.M.’s lawyers will need to “parcel out” how much harm is attributed to each platform, due to design features, not the content that was targeted to K.G.M., Clay Calvert, a technology policy expert and senior fellow at a think tank called the American Enterprise Institute, wrote. Internet law expert Eric Goldman told The Washington Post that detailing those harms will likely be K.G.M.’s biggest struggle, since social media addiction has yet to be legally recognized, and tracing who caused what harms may not be straightforward.

However, Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center and one of K.G.M.’s lawyers, told the Post that K.G.M. is prepared to put up this fight.

“She is going to be able to explain in a very real sense what social media did to her over the course of her life and how in so many ways it robbed her of her childhood and her adolescence,” Bergman said.

Internal messages may be “smoking-gun evidence”

The research is unclear on whether social media is harmful for kids or whether social media addiction exists, Tamar Mendelson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Post. And so far, research only shows a correlation between Internet use and mental health, Mendelson noted, which could doom K.G.M.’s case and others’.

However, social media companies’ internal research might concern a jury, Bergman told the Post. On Monday, the Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit working to rein in Big Tech, published a report analyzing recently unsealed documents in K.G.M.’s case that supposedly provide “smoking-gun evidence” that platforms “purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing”—while putting increased engagement from young users at the center of their business models.

In the report, Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project, accused social media companies of “gaslighting and lying to the public for years.”

Most of the recently unsealed documents highlighted in the report came from Meta, which also faces a trial from dozens of state attorneys general on social media addiction this year.

Those documents included an email stating that Mark Zuckerberg—who is expected to testify at K.G.M.’s trial—decided that Meta’s top priority in 2017 was teens who must be locked in to using the company’s family of apps.

The next year, a Facebook internal document showed that the company pondered letting “tweens” access a private mode inspired by the popularity of fake Instagram accounts teens know as “finstas.” That document included an “internal discussion on how to counter the narrative that Facebook is bad for youth and admission that internal data shows that Facebook use is correlated with lower well-being (although it says the effect reverses longitudinally).”

Other allegedly damning documents showed Meta seemingly bragging that “teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to” and an employee declaring, “oh my gosh yall IG is a drug,” likening all social media platforms to “pushers.”

Similarly, a 2020 Google document detailed the company’s plan to keep kids engaged “for life,” despite internal research showing young YouTube users were more likely to “disproportionately” suffer from “habitual heavy use, late night use, and unintentional use” deteriorating their “digital well-being.”

Shorts, YouTube’s feature that rivals TikTok, also is a concern for parents suing, and three years later, documents showed Google choosing to target teens with Shorts, despite research flagging that the “two biggest challenges for teen wellbeing on YouTube” were prominently linked to watching shorts. Those challenges included Shorts bombarding teens with “low quality content recommendations that can convey & normalize unhealthy beliefs or behaviors” and teens reporting that “prolonged unintentional use” was “displacing valuable activities like time with friends or sleep.”

Bergman told the Post that these documents will help the jury decide if companies owed young users better protections sooner but prioritized profits while pushing off interventions that platforms have more recently introduced amid mounting backlash.

“Internal documents that have been held establishing the willful misconduct of these companies are going to—for the first time—be given a public airing,” Bergman said. “The public is going to know for the first time what social media companies have done to prioritize their profits over the safety of our kids.”

Platforms failed to get experts’ testimony tossed

One seeming advantage K.G.M. has heading into the trial is that tech companies failed to get expert testimony dismissed that backs up her claims.

Platforms tried to exclude testimony from several experts, including Kara Bagot, a board-certified adult, child, and adolescent psychiatrist, as well as Arturo Bejar, a former Meta safety researcher and whistleblower. They claimed that experts’ opinions were irrelevant because they were based on K.G.M.’s interactions with content. They also suggested that child safety experts’ opinions “violate the standards of reliability” since the causal links they draw don’t account for “alternative explanations” and allegedly “contradict the experts’ own statements in non-litigation contexts.”

However, Kuhl ruled that platforms will have the opportunity to counter experts’ opinions at trial, while reminding social media companies that “ultimately, the critical question of causation is one that must be determined by the jury.” Only one expert’s testimony was excluded, Social Media Victims Law Center noted, a licensed clinical psychologist deemed unqualified.

“Testimony by Bagot as to design features that were employed on TikTok as well as on other social media platforms is directly relevant to the question of whether those design features cause the type of harms allegedly suffered by K.G.M. here,” Kuhl wrote.

That means that a jury will get a chance to weigh Bagot’s opinion that “social media overuse and addiction causes or plays a substantial role in causing or exacerbating psychopathological harms in children and youth, including depression, anxiety and eating disorders, as well as internalizing and externalizing psychopathological symptoms.”

The jury will also consider the insights and information Bejar (a fact witness and former consultant for the company) will share about Meta’s internal safety studies. That includes hearing about “his personal knowledge and experience related to how design defects on Meta’s platforms can cause harm to minors (e.g., age verification, reporting processes, beauty filters, public like counts, infinite scroll, default settings, private messages, reels, ephemeral content, and connecting children with adult strangers),” as well as “harms associated with Meta’s platforms including addiction/problematic use, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, suicidality, self-harm, and sexualization.”

If K.G.M. can convince the jury that she was not harmed by platforms’ failure to remove content but by companies “designing their platforms to addict kids” and “developing algorithms that show kids not what they want to see but what they cannot look away from,” Bergman thinks her case could become a “data point” for “settling similar cases en masse,” he told Barrons.

“She is very typical of so many children in the United States—the harms that they’ve sustained and the way their lives have been altered by the deliberate design decisions of the social media companies,” Bergman told the Post.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

“IG is a drug”: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial Read More »

AI Overviews gets upgraded to Gemini 3 with a dash of AI Mode

AI, ai overviews, Artificial Intelligence, generative ai, Google, search / Mike M. / January 27, 2026

It can be hard sometimes to keep up with the deluge of generative AI in Google products. Even if you try to avoid it all, there are some features that still manage to get in your face. Case in point: AI Overviews. This AI-powered search experience has a reputation for getting things wrong, but you may notice some improvements soon. Google says AI Overviews is being upgraded to the latest Gemini 3 models with a more conversational bent.

In just the last year, Google has radically expanded the number of searches on which you get an AI Overview at the top. Today, the chatbot will almost always have an answer for your query, which has relied mostly on models in Google’s Gemini 2.5 family. There was nothing wrong with Gemini 2.5 as generative AI models go, but Gemini 3 is a little better by every metric.

There are, of course, multiple versions of Gemini 3, and Google doesn’t like to be specific about which ones appear in your searches. What Google does say is that AI Overviews chooses the right model for the job. So if you’re searching for something simple for which there are a lot of valid sources, AI Overviews may manifest something like Gemini 3 Flash without running through a ton of reasoning tokens. For a complex “long tail” query, it could step up the thinking or move to Gemini 3 Pro (for paying subscribers).

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“Wildly irresponsible”: DOT’s use of AI to draft safety rules sparks concerns

AI, AI hallucination, Artificial Intelligence, department of transportation, Gemini, Google, Policy / Mike M. / January 26, 2026

At DOT, Trump likely hopes to see many rules quickly updated to modernize airways and roadways. In a report highlighting the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s biggest “wins” in 2025, the White House credited DOT with “replacing decades-old rules with flexible, innovation-friendly frameworks,” including fast-tracking rules to allow for more automated vehicles on the roads.

Right now, DOT expects that Gemini can be relied on to “handle 80 to 90 percent of the work of writing regulations,” ProPublica reported. Eventually all federal workers who rely on AI tools like Gemini to draft rules “would fall back into merely an oversight role, monitoring ‘AI-to-AI interactions,’” ProPublica reported.

Google silent on AI drafting safety rules

Google did not respond to Ars’ request to comment on this use case for Gemini, which could spread across government under Trump’s direction.

Instead, the tech giant posted a blog on Monday, pitching Gemini for government more broadly, promising federal workers that AI would help with “creative problem-solving to the most critical aspects of their work.”

Google has been competing with AI rivals for government contracts, undercutting OpenAI and Anthropic’s $1 deals by offering a year of access to Gemini for $0.47.

The DOT contract seems important to Google. In a December blog, the company celebrated that DOT was “the first cabinet-level agency to fully transition its workforce away from legacy providers to Google Workspace with Gemini.”

At that time, Google suggested this move would help DOT “ensure the United States has the safest, most efficient, and modern transportation system in the world.”

Immediately, Google encouraged other federal leaders to launch their own efforts using Gemini.

“We are committed to supporting the DOT’s digital transformation and stand ready to help other federal leaders across the government adopt this blueprint for their own mission successes,” Google’s blog said.

DOT did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

“Wildly irresponsible”: DOT’s use of AI to draft safety rules sparks concerns Read More »

A decade of Star Trek-themed fart jokes: The Greatest Generation podcast turns 10

culture, greatest generation, podcast, Star Trek / Mike M. / January 25, 2026

How two podcasters turned a Star Trek side project into a full-time career.

A decade is a long time for a TV series; no single iteration of Star Trek has made it that far.

But “a Star Trek podcast by two guys just a little bit embarrassed to have a Star Trek podcast” has now passed the milestone. January 25, 2026, marks a full decade since The Greatest Generation, my favorite podcast, debuted. Like a bottle of Château Picard, the show has only improved with age. (I interviewed the guys behind the show back in 2016 when they were just getting started.)

The podcast helped me rediscover, and appreciate more fully, Star Trek: The Next Generation—which is also my favorite TV show. The Greatest Generation continues to delight with its irreverent humor, its celebration of the most minor of characters, and its technical fascination with how a given episode was made.

Over the last decade, hosts Ben Harrison and Adam Pranica have both moved to Los Angeles and become full-time podcasters. They have completed an episode-by-episode recap of all of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, and they’re now nearing the end of Enterprise. When finished, they’re threatening/promising to start over again.

The podcast has spawned its own (sometimes NSFW!) lexicon (a “friend of DeSoto” means a listener to and fan of The Greatest Generation), its own recurring and hilarious segments (“Drunk Shimoda,” “Bad Bit Moment,” and “Polo? Polo? Or Pollo?”), and most importantly, its own delightful fandom. It’s the coolest and dorkiest secret club that I will ever be a part of.

In 2016, the podcast was folded into the Maximum Fun organization. Harrison and Pranica formed their own company, Uxbridge-Shimoda LLC, that takes its name from two obscure TNG-era characters.

Like the original Star Trek, the podcast even spawned its own 2017 spinoff—now called The Greatest Trek—entirely devoted to the newer series in the Star Trek universe.

Harrison and Pranica also produce two irregularly released, members-only podcasts called Santa Monica Mountains (about the 1980s and 1990s TV show Baywatch) and Factory Seconds (where they eat at various Cheesecake Factory restaurants). Last year, they also started—in conjunction with YouTube cooking star Adam Ragusea—yet another podcast, called Wholesome, which is only available to Patreon subscribers.

In a world replete with chaos and awfulness, I’m just here for the hang.

(This interview, which was conducted earlier this month, has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.)

Ars: When I first spoke to you guys back in 2016, Adam was living in Seattle. Ben, I believe you were living in New York. You guys were still working in film production. As best as I could tell, this was just a fun little side project. Who knew how long it would run?

Ben: I think that us talking to you has a lot to do with it taking over our lives.

Ars: Sorry, not sorry? I don’t know! [laughs]

Adam: Your Ars article was one of the reasons we catapulted into the sort of audience we got afterward. It’s an audience that has meant we’ve been able to do the show professionally for 10 years.

Ben: Yeah. And when we meet people—all the time—people will say: “Oh, I’ve been listening to you guys since the beginning. Like, I was on at episode five because of that Ars Technica article.”

Ars: Do you feel like you are over it? It’s been a decade now. Is Greatest Gen as we know it going to continue?

Adam: I think the thing that’s changed is that in the beginning, it felt like a fun hobby. But when you professionalize a thing and you hire employees and you are depended on for the thing that you make in a way that you’ve never been before, it’s serious business.

It’s serious funny business, you know?

This is the best job I’ve ever had, but it’s also the most seriously I’ve ever taken a job because it means so much to our well-being, but also the folks who appreciate what we do.

Ben: Yeah, one thing that Adam has said many times is we’re going to die in these chairs.

And I think also, as we come toward the end of Enterprise and have sort of run out of the well of Old Trek, as it were, I have been thinking about [what] if I hadn’t had this show? I would still be about ready to start my next TNG rewatch.

Loving Star Trek is a lot about watching it over again, you know? In the same way that I’ll put on an old rerun of The Simpsons or Seinfeld. And I love rewatching those shows. I love rewatching Star Trek.

I think Adam and I have grown as both a comedy duo but also as observers of Star Trek and what it means on an ongoing basis. So I feel like it would be unfair for us not to go back and start painting the bridge from the beginning.

Adam: I think one of the things that we’ve learned from doing the show, especially live in front of people, is that we are told by the people who enjoy this show that it’s about Star Trek, sure, but that’s not the thing that people love the most about the show.

And I think that’s what makes a return to the beginning of it make so much sense in the way Ben’s describing. It’s about the hang and your life as it relates to a Star Trek rerun that you’re watching in that moment.

Ars: I have watched zero minutes of Baywatch in my life. But I have listened to every single episode of the Santa Monica Mountains. I enjoy hearing you guys talk about it.

I think you’ve hit on a format: “Let’s talk about a thing in the way that we like to talk about it and make jokes in the way that we like to make jokes about it.” Which for me really resonates more than the format of a podcast that’s like: “Let’s get comedians to talk about a thing.”

Adam: Or let’s get celebrities in a room to talk about anything and have that be good enough.

Ben: The format that our shows tend to follow is something that I think just kind of was an emergent property of the way Adam and I talked to each other, much more so than it was us attempting to create a show that was our version of anything else.

I don’t really listen to other recap podcasts. It’s kind of a funny thing, but we weren’t really inspired by any recap podcasts in particular. I guess the Flop House a little bit for me, but what they do is so different and such its own thing.

It’s hard to feel like we are connected to the universe of recap podcasts. Like when we go to add our show to a podcast service like iTunes or Apple Podcasts, you have to pick the category that you’re going to be in, and we’ve always picked comedy.

Properly, I guess we probably would be in the television recap podcast section. We just never really thought of ourselves as being that. We were just doing what we wanted to do.

You know, we’re just making a show that makes us laugh. Making each other laugh has always been the primary goal of the show. So it’s very funny to me that we’re in a category that we’ve never really aspired to be in or compared ourselves to in any way.

Ars: Any favorite moments, perhaps at live shows, that have happened to you over the last 10 years?

Ben: Getting to do live shows at all has been a total shock to me. When we talked to you for that first article, we barely knew what we were doing as entertainers. And I’ve taken improv classes and stuff but never really had any personal aspirations to be someone who gets up on a stage and does something. And I found that I fucking love it!

I really love doing the show in front of an audience! And we just have had so many amazing adventures getting to go all over the country doing that.

And all over the world—we’ve done the show in Canada and London now. That was a total surprise to me.

Like, if you grabbed me on the street 15 years ago and said, “Hey, you’re going to have a show that you get to travel around and do in front of audiences of 300 people someday!” I would have said, “Get the hell out of here! That’s not possible. That’s not something I am working toward in any way.”

Adam: There’s an unexpected quality to the type of—I mean, barf, right? I’m going to say the word “celebrity.” But David Letterman said that when you achieve a certain amount of notoriety, the world becomes a neighborhood to you.

A week ago, I was at a bar with friends, and a stranger came up and told me that they really like our show and they thanked me for making it. And that is something that happens in my life in a way that I never could have anticipated at all.

It’s those little moments that you have with people. Those perfect interactions where it’s just like: “I like what you do and thanks for doing it.”

That makes my life seem meaningful in a way that any previous job did not create the conditions for, you know? You do the work and you think it matters and it’s important, and largely it is in its own way, in its own ecosystem.

But to have a broad interest from folks in what you do and that it matters to them and what they do in their lives? That’s the very best part of this entire thing: knowing that the times that I can make Ben laugh are also the times that I can make 500 people laugh in a room or 25,000 people laugh on a Monday when the episode drops, you know?

That’s really powerful stuff! And it keeps me on my best behavior when I’m out in public in case an FOD is out there watching what I’m doing.

Ben: Oh, yeah. You don’t want to see all the videos of Adam on Worldstar.

Adam: Exactly. Yeah. So lock it up!

Ars: You try really hard to make the show sound great, which it does. It is well-engineered. It is well mixed. You guys put a lot of care into the production of the show.

But also, to my knowledge, you have never missed a show’s publish date. I’m curious about how you balance all of that with whatever else is going on in your lives. Ben, you have two young kids. I know Adam has martinis to drink and golf to play.

Ben: I think the best thing that has happened to us as a duo over the years has been all of the people who have been here to help us along the way.

You know, for a while, we were working with a producer named Rob Schulte, who was really great. And we’re now very fortunate to have a full-time producer named Wynde Priddy, who is so good at anticipating things that are coming up and keeping our minds on what we need to be prepping for the future. And also taking all of the stuff off of our plate that involves the day-in, day-out of editing and producing the shows.

So when it’s all running as it should be, which is most of the time—Adam and I get to focus on prepping, sitting down and recording, and then listening back to basically finished episodes. At that point, we’re just pitching jokes. Like: “Hey, we could add a little audio here to illustrate this point or whatever.” But 90 percent of the time we listen to an episode that’s pretty much ready to go and are just signing off on it for Wynde.

I think that the logistics of making this are complex in some ways. But at its core, it’s just me and Adam having to watch a TV show and then talk to each other about it. And that period of the day, that period of the week where I’m talking to my buddy about a thing we both really love is still the best part of my week.

Adam: We’ve been doing this for 10 years. If you need to take some time off, we know about it usually a month before, and we prepare for it. We know that we record two or three or four episodes a week, every week.

We know that if one of us gets sick, we will have to record more than that in a given week. And I think part of it is if you know that’s what your life is, it’s not stressful or disappointing when that’s your responsibility. That’s just what it takes.

We were both in alignment right away initially that you cannot miss a week doing this because people depend on it for the rhythm of their own weeks. But also, be a fucking professional! Are you telling me you don’t have an afternoon in a given week to do the thing that you’re doing professionally? Get out of here. Of course you do! Find a way.

And this is why, when people over the years have told us, “I really want to do a podcast,” the first advice is: “The same time, the same day, every week. Forever.” And that’s the only advice I give because if you can do that for a year and you ask me what else you need to do, then we can have that conversation.

But if you’re not willing to be a pro like that, good luck. I doubt your ability to get traction with an audience, because I think so much depends on that.

Ben: The podcasts that I listen to throughout the week are something I really look forward to—those shows being there at that time when I do the thing that I do when I listen to them. And so we’ve been very lucky to burrow under the skin of a lot of people—

Adam: I wonder if that’s how we know, Ben? Like, we’re not just the president of Hair Club, we’re also the clients? I think we know what’s meaningful to a podcast listener because we are them ourselves. In a way, I feel like nouveau podcasting right now is often made up of hosts who are doing it because it’s lucrative in their niche, you know?

Ben: Wait, this can be lucrative? Shit, what have we been doing?

Ars: I’m at a place in my life right now—and maybe you guys are, too—where I find it very hard to emotionally engage with the news. I find myself turning off the news on the radio, on my phone, in ways that I didn’t three years ago, five years ago. I used to be hyper-on: all the news, all the things, all the time. And I just can’t now. I just want to hear some guys talk about martinis.

Ben, you mentioned earlier that this is a show about the hang, and it’s sort of loosely anchored around the thing that you love, Star Trek.

Do you have that same feeling when it’s chatting with Adam Pranica about Baywatch? Does the subject for you, both of you, matter at all? Or does Star Trek have a particular emotional resonance in a way that, you know, lawns don’t?

Ben: I think that the Trek of it all is still really important to the show. And I think that we’re in an era where the news is devastating and exhausting in equal measure, and, you know, Trek has a lot of politics in it.

Adam and I share a lot of politics, but we also, I think, are pretty conscious of this being a place where the horrors of the world aren’t the center of attention.

So we’ve been pretty intentional about trying to make a thing that is a refuge and not a giant bummer.

And I think in its own way, that is an act of defiance. Still being able to have the hang despite all of the horrific shit going on is a sort of powerful statement—no, we’re not going to be ground into bummer pulp.

Adam: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I’m not interested in introducing that into our programs at all. I think a person’s politics is largely their behavior, and I don’t want to compare the things that I’m watching to the things that are happening in the real world generally.

But I think I might take a different side than Ben, about how Star Trek-located the project needs to be for it to be—I don’t know—fun or enriching.

I think those other projects, whether they’re about Baywatch or food or whatever—I’m interested in interesting conversations that are challenging or comedically interesting to me. It largely doesn’t matter what the subject is at its core. I want to be the sort of person that could make anything funny in conversation and through our various other types of shows, that’s become the truth, I hope.

Ben: That’s very fair. I still sort of think it’s the on-ramp for a lot of people. Like, oh, yeah, I like Star Trek. I’ll give that a try. And then it becomes about more than that.

Ultimately, I couldn’t make a show with Adam Pranica and Adam Ragusea if I wasn’t delighted by their perspective on things on an ongoing basis. The thing that’s amazing about this is we’ve made 600-something episodes of The Greatest Generation and 300-something episodes of Greatest Trek and dozens and dozens of episodes of Wholesome, and Adam says stuff every single time we sit down that surprises and delights me. That’s a complete magic trick.

Adam: You can’t do this for 10 years if it’s a bummer-hate show with a bunch of politics in it. That would have been exhausting nine years ago, you know? I don’t listen to any news or politics podcasts. Why would you? Look for the light where you can find it.

Ars: Going back to our original interview, you guys didn’t have very much in the way of established bits and jokes in the way that you do now.

I’m looking here at the Wikia and there’s a long list of bits and phrases: 50-year-old Ensign. Anybody Canyon. Bangers. Ball-kicking machine. Big Rod. McLaughlin Group. Miriam. Mount Armis. Natural Yeager.

Do you feel like any bits are played out? As I read through this, I’m like, “Oh yeah, I totally forgot about ‘Fuck Bokai.’ That’s pretty funny!”

Ben: Oh man, Fuck Bokai. That may have been the high-water mark! I think that one of the cool things about some of these is that they sort of ebb and flow depending on what we’re covering, you know?

There were things that were kind of jokes that stayed within the confines of Deep Space Nine or Voyager that sometimes you get an idea and you can pull one out of the cold storage.

But often the group of active working runners is very influenced by what we are actively covering. I think it’ll be very interesting to see how that long list of old inside jokes interacts with the show when we start going back through the second time.

Because I’m kind of tempted to not reference any of that stuff. I don’t know. I will have to see what happens when we start doing it.

Adam: I feel the same way, Ben. I think we don’t do a bit just because it’s “time to do the bit.” I have felt for a long time that it’s not funny if you’re trying to be funny. If we choose to turn it around and go back from the beginning—these are going to be new experiences for the time that we record them.

And they’re going to feel brand new. I wouldn’t expect a retread of much of anything. Because that doesn’t sound funny to me.

Ben: Well, also 10 years older. Our lives are different. Our world is different.

We will see new things in the show. And that’s one of the things that’s so cool about Star Trek: I feel like I experience it in new ways each time I watch it. So I think it’s kind of inevitable that it will get something that is really different and novel. And maybe some of those old runners will find their way back because they happen to be the funny thing at that moment.

But generally speaking, I’m really excited for crumpling up the paper and throwing it away and writing something fresh, you know?

Adam: Cyrus, you mentioned the Wiki, and I just want to say, one of the best things that’s happened to us over the 10 years of making the show has been the community that formed around it to do things, like making the wiki, making the Discord, that have formed groups where they watch movies together and date each other and marry each other and whatever.

This is a thing that we didn’t intend—imagine doing a thing so important that a large audience would enjoy it—but this large audience has their own lives, and they’re enjoying this thing that we do completely separate from us in their own way.

In a way, that’s great. Neither Ben nor I have the time or the inclination to make a wiki about our show, for example. And yet the folks that put in the effort here to make the experience of listening to the show better for everyone—that’s selfless and good and appreciated.

Ars: Given that there’s such a large body of work that you guys have produced, do you ever get people asking: “You guys have done a thousand episodes. Where do I start?”

I’ll give my answer first. I always tell people who are Star Trek fans but who have maybe not listened to Greatest Gen, “Choose a Star Trek episode that you love or that is memorable to you in some way and listen to the podcast episode about that episode.”

Adam: That’s my answer, too.

Ben: I like that, too. I also get the question “Oh, you know a lot about Star Trek. I want to get my kid into it. Where should we start?” And I don’t really think that there’s a right answer to that kind of question. Like, going back to the beginning doesn’t necessarily work for me or doesn’t necessarily work as an answer for everybody.

So I like the suggestion to jump in somewhere where you feel like you’ve got some fluency, but I also think it’s totally cool to jump in midstream on the show now or, you know, start at the beginning of one of the series that you really like or jump around. We hear from people that do it all different kinds of ways.

We’ve heard from people who got into the Greatest Generation because of Greatest Trek. We’ve heard from people who started listening to the Greatest Generation and were like: “Well, there’s a lot of references to old stuff in here. So I better go back and listen from the beginning.”

And then they binge the entire thing in three months. And I’m concerned that there may be some kind of exposure toxicity!

Adam: It’s an interesting quality to consider because a lot of the podcasts I listen to are about sports, and the sports that just happened over the weekend. No one listens to that show a month after it comes out.

But 10 years of our conversations are still being listened to in a way that I feel [isn’t the case] if you’re podcasting about the football game.

Ben: As many things as we’ve done in the past of the show, they stay in the present for a lot of people—I think more than half of our downloads in a given week are old episodes.

So that is a place where people hang out, and I think a lot of people that have jobs where they’re working with their hands but they don’t need to be processing language—[they] love podcasts. So we hear from a lot of graphic designers and truckers who like the show.

And that huge back catalog is such a boon to them because by the time you’re on your second listen through, you’re not going to remember exactly how the bit went from episode 324. So the comedy works again for that person.

Ars: I presume you guys have received screeners for Starfleet Academy. How are you feeling about Starfleet Academy as a show? And how are you guys feeling about doing it for your own show?

Ben: I’ve watched two episodes now. And I remain pretty optimistic about Starfleet Academy as a show. I think that there is some melancholy to it being the only one that’s actively being made now of any of the shows. I think they’ve wrapped on Strange New Worlds, even though they haven’t released season four. And none of the others are, like, in production at this point.

Adam: I’m also two episodes in—two very long episodes. I think that one of the qualities to Starfleet Academy that’s been surprising is the hour-long nature of it.

I think many years ago I coined the phrase “Star Trek is a place.” And what that means definitionally is that it’s not a ship or a particular captain or a planet or a federation. It’s a place to tell stories.

That’s just my way of saying that Starfleet Academy at this point, two episodes in, feels like the expression of that idea. Like, Starfleet Academy exists in a place that is Star Trek.

So I don’t hate it because they put out a cheesy poster. I don’t hate it at all! I am enjoying what I’ve seen so far. It’s interesting and new. I think the feeling that I have about it is something that Ben touched on a little bit there, which was like, are we getting near the end of it? Are we going to go back into the desert of ten years without Star Trek?

I hope not because I think my preference is going to always be that I would rather have Star Trek even if it’s difficult or disliked by folks or whatever, than to go without it at all because it provokes thought. I mean, even when it’s not your Star Trek, I think it’s still fun to talk about.

Ars: One of your greatest wishes—maybe the greatest wish of your lives—is to be blown out of an airlock in a new episode of Star Trek. How close are we to seeing that on screen?

Adam: It’s happened in comic books.

Ars: Have you actually pitched this to somebody who could make it happen?

Ben: There are people inside the walled garden that are aware that a lot of people are invested in this idea. And yeah, it’s happened in comics, it’s happened in fan productions several times now.

We leap at every opportunity we have to get blown out of an airlock. If and when the call comes from inside the Star Trek house, it will be the thrill of a lifetime. That remains the overarching goal of the show, I would say.

We’ve gone so far as to say that if the offer is made, we will fly ourselves to Toronto. If [Paramount is] obligated by some kind of agreement with the union to pay us, we will donate that money to a charity.

This is not about fame or fortune for us. It is about getting blown out of an airlock, which…

Adam: It’s about finally experiencing the sweet, sweet peace of death.

A decade of Star Trek-themed fart jokes: The Greatest Generation podcast turns 10 Read More »

Demand for Intel’s processors is apparently there, but the supply is not

18a, core ultra series 3, intel, intel 18a, panther lake, Tech / Mike M. / January 23, 2026

Yields are currently improving by 7 or 8 percent every month, according to Intel. But that could be building on pretty low initial yields—reporting from last summer suggested that just 10 percent of the chips coming off of the 18A production lines were meeting Intel’s requirements at the time. Intel predicts that its supply will have ramped up enough within the next few months to help alleviate shortages.

“I do believe that the first quarter is the trough,” said Zinsner. “We will improve supply in the second quarter.”

Intel is selling everything it can make

When Intel can start making enough chips to meet its demand, it ought to help brighten the company’s earnings reports.

“We delivered [our Q4 2025] results despite supply constraints, which meaningfully limited our ability to capture all of the strengths in our underwriting markets,” said Tan. “We are working aggressively to address this and better support our customers’ needs going forward.”

Intel has been signaling for a while now that it was selling essentially all of the chips it could get its hands on. Intel investor relations VP John Pitzer said last month that Intel would be selling more of both its Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake Core Ultra Series 2 chips for consumers, as well as its Granite Rapids chips for data centers, if it could get more of them.

As Intel seeks to improve its position in the short term, the company also says that it’s still making progress on its future manufacturing nodes, including different versions of the 18A process and the upcoming 14A process. Intel is working to engage “potential external customers” who would use the 14A process to make their own chips. If these third parties decide to use Intel’s manufacturing facilities, Intel expects to know about it “starting in the second half of this year and extending into the first half of 2027,” and then it expects to build out manufacturing capacity based on the number of external customers it finds.

On the chip design side, Intel also expects to have its first next-generation Nova Lake chips ready “at the end of 2026.” We don’t know much about Nova Lake yet, but it should be Intel’s next architecture to cover both desktop and laptop processors, while Panther Lake chips are intended mainly for laptops. At least part of the chip will also be manufactured using the 18A process.

Demand for Intel’s processors is apparently there, but the supply is not Read More »

DHS keeps trying and failing to unmask anonymous ICE critics online

censorship, DHS, First Amendment, ice, immigration and customs enforcement, Policy / Mike M. / January 23, 2026

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has backed down from a fight to unmask the owners of Instagram and Facebook accounts monitoring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in Pennsylvania.

One of the anonymous account holders, John Doe, sued to block ICE from identifying him and other critics online through summonses to Meta that he claimed infringed on core First Amendment-protected activity.

DHS initially fought Doe’s motion to quash the summonses, arguing that the community watch groups endangered ICE agents by posting “pictures and videos of agents’ faces, license plates, and weapons, among other things.” This was akin to “threatening ICE agents to impede the performance of their duties,” DHS alleged. DHS’s arguments echoed DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who has claimed that identifying ICE agents is a crime, even though Wired noted that ICE employees often post easily discoverable LinkedIn profiles.

To Doe, the agency seemed intent on testing the waters to see if it could seize authority to unmask all critics online by invoking a customs statute that allows agents to subpoena information on goods entering or leaving the US.

But then, on January 16, DHS abruptly reversed course, withdrawing its summonses from Meta.

A court filing confirmed that DHS dropped its requests for subscriber information last week, after initially demanding Doe’s “postal code, country, all email address(es) on file, date of account creation, registered telephone numbers, IP address at account signup, and logs showing IP address and date stamps for account accesses.”

The filing does not explain why DHS decided to withdraw its requests.

However, previously, DHS requested similar information from Meta about six Instagram community watch groups that shared information about ICE activity in Los Angeles and other locations. DHS withdrew those requests, too, after account holders defended their First Amendment rights and filed motions to quash their summonses, Doe’s court filing said.

DHS keeps trying and failing to unmask anonymous ICE critics online Read More »

White House alters arrest photo of ICE protester, says “the memes will continue”

ice, immigration and customs enforcement, Policy / Mike M. / January 23, 2026

Protesters disrupted services on Sunday at the Cities Church in St. Paul, chanting “ICE OUT” and “Justice for Renee Good.” The St. Paul Pioneer Press quoted Levy Armstrong as saying, “When you think about the federal government unleashing barbaric ICE agents upon our community and all the harm that they have caused, to have someone serving as a pastor who oversees these ICE agents is almost unfathomable to me.”

The church website lists David Easterwood as one of its pastors. Protesters said this is the same David Easterwood who is listed as a defendant in a lawsuit that Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed against Noem and other federal officials. The lawsuit lists Easterwood as a defendant “in his official capacity as Acting Director, Saint Paul Field Office, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

Levy Armstrong, who is also a former president of the NAACP’s Minneapolis branch, was arrested yesterday morning. Announcing the arrest, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote, “WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP.” Bondi alleged that Levy Armstrong “played a key role in organizing the coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.”

Multiple arrests

Noem said Levy Armstrong “is being charged with a federal crime under 18 USC 241,” which prohibits “conspir[ing] to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

“Religious freedom is the bedrock of the United States—there is no first amendment right to obstruct someone from practicing their religion,” Noem wrote.

St. Paul School Board member Chauntyll Allen was also arrested. Attorneys for the Cities Church issued statements supporting the arrests and saying they “are exploring all legal options to protect the church and prevent further invasions.”

A federal magistrate judge initially ruled that Levy Armstrong and Allen could be released, but they were still being held last night after the government “made a motion to stay the release for further review, claiming they might be flight risks,” the Pioneer Press wrote.

White House alters arrest photo of ICE protester, says “the memes will continue” Read More »

Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee

Cars, tesla autopilot, Tesla FSD / Mike M. / January 23, 2026

No Tesla sales in California

Tesla was told that if it couldn’t resolve the deceptive marketing within those 60 days, the sales suspension would take effect. That would be bad for the automaker, as California is far and away its largest market in the US, albeit one that is shrinking each quarter. Having to suspend sales entirely in the state would be disastrous. Some had speculated that Tesla could change Autopilot’s name to something less misleading, but the company chose a more drastic approach.

Now, if you want your new Tesla to steer itself—while you pay attention to the road—you will have to pay for FSD. Until the middle of February, that can be done for a one-time fee of $8,000. But starting on February 14, that option goes away, too, and the sole choice will be a $99/month FSD subscription.

But probably not for very long. Last night, Musk revealed on his social media platform that “the $99/month for supervised FSD will rise as FSD’s capabilities improve. The massive value jump is when you can be on your phone or sleeping for the entire ride (unsupervised FSD).”

The quest for recurring revenue streams is becoming something of a holy grail in the automotive industry as OEMs that previously treated their customers as a single sale now hope to make themselves more attractive to investors by encouraging customers to give them regular payouts.

This may have contributed to General Motors’ decision to drop Apple CarPlay and Android Automotive. BMW has also experimented with subscription services. Tesla’s stock price remains so high that such games are probably unnecessary here, but with falling profit margins, declining sales, and the loss of emissions credits to bolster the bottom line, one can see why regular cash infusions from Tesla drivers would be desirable.

Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee Read More »

Rocket Report: Chinese rockets fail twice in 12 hours; Rocket Lab reports setback

australia, Commercial space, Gilmour space, isar aerospace, launch, rocket report, Science, Space / Mike M. / January 23, 2026

Another partially reusable Chinese rocket, the Long March 12B, is nearing its first test flight.

An Archimedes engine for Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket is test-fired at Stennis Space Center, Mississippi. Credit: Rocket Lab

Welcome to Edition 8.26 of the Rocket Report! The past week has been one of advancements and setbacks in the rocket business. NASA rolled the massive rocket for the Artemis II mission to its launch pad in Florida, while Chinese launchers suffered back-to-back failures within a span of approximately 12 hours. Rocket Lab’s march toward a debut of its new Neutron launch vehicle in the coming months may have stalled after a failure during a key qualification test. We cover all this and more in this week’s Rocket Report.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Australia invests in sovereign launch. Six months after its first orbital rocket cleared the launch tower for just 14 seconds before crashing back to Earth, Gilmour Space Technologies has secured 217 million Australian dollars ($148 million) in funding that CEO Adam Gilmour says finally gives Australia a fighting chance in the global space race, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. The funding round, led by the federal government’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation and superannuation giant Hostplus with $75 million each, makes the Queensland company Australia’s newest unicorn—a fast-growth start-up valued at more than $1 billion—and one of the country’s most heavily backed private technology ventures.

Homegrown rocket… “We’re a rocket company that has never had access to the capital that our American competitors have,” Gilmour told the newspaper. “This is the first raise where I’ve actually raised a decent amount of capital compared to the rest of the world.” The investment reflects growing concern about Australia’s reliance on foreign launch providers—predominantly Elon Musk’s SpaceX—to put government, defense, and commercial satellites into orbit. With US launch queues stretching beyond two years and geopolitical tensions reshaping access to space infrastructure, Canberra has identified sovereign launch capability as a strategic priority. Gilmour’s first Eris rocket lifted off from the Bowen Orbital Spaceport in North Queensland on July 30 last year. It achieved 14 seconds of flight before falling back to the ground, a result Gilmour framed as a partial success in an industry where first launches routinely fail.

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Isar Aerospace postpones test flight. Isar Aerospace scrubbed a potential January 21 launch of its Spectrum rocket to address a technical fault, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Hours before the launch window was set to open, the German company said that it was addressing “an issue with a pressurization valve.” A valve issue was one of the factors that caused a Spectrum to crash moments after liftoff on Isar’s first test flight last year. “The teams are currently assessing the next possible launch opportunities and a new target date will be announced shortly,” the company wrote in a post on its website. The Spectrum rocket, designed to haul cargoes of up to a metric ton (2,200 pounds) to low-Earth orbit, is awaiting liftoff from Andøya Spaceport in Norway.

Geopolitics at play... The second launch of Isar’s Spectrum rocket comes at a time when Europe’s space industry looks to secure the continent’s sovereignty in spaceflight. European satellites are no longer able to launch on Russian rockets, and the continent’s leaders don’t have much of an appetite to turn to US rockets amid strained trans-Atlantic relations. Europe’s satellite industry is looking for more competition for the Ariane 6 and Vega C rockets developed by ArianeGroup and Avio, and Isar Aerospace appears to be best positioned to become a new entrant in the European launch market. “I’m well aware that it would be really good for us Europeans to get this one right,” said Daniel Metzler, Isar’s co-founder and CEO.

A potential buyer for Orbex? UK-based rocket builder Orbex has signed a letter of intent to sell its business to European space logistics startup The Exploration Company, European Spaceflight reports. Orbex was founded in 2015 and is developing a small launch vehicle called Prime. The company also began work on a larger medium-lift launch vehicle called Proxima in December 2024. On Wednesday, Orbex published a brief press release stating that a letter of intent had been signed and that negotiations had begun. The company added that all details about the transaction remain confidential at this stage.

Time’s up... A statement from Orbex CEO Phil Chambers suggests that the company’s financial position factored into its decision to pursue a buyer. “Our Series D fundraising could have led us in many directions,” said Chambers. “We believe this opportunity plays to the strengths of both businesses, and we look forward to sharing more when the time is right.” The Exploration Company, headquartered near Munich, Germany, is developing a reusable space capsule to ferry cargo to low-Earth orbit and a high-thrust reusable rocket engine. It is one of the most well-financed space startups in Europe. Orbex is one of five launch startups in Europe selected by the European Space Agency last year to compete in the European Launcher Challenge and receive funding from ESA member states. But the UK company’s financial standing is in question. Orbex’s Danish subsidiary is filing for bankruptcy, and its main UK entity is overdue in filing its 2024 financial accounts. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

A bad day for Chinese rockets. China suffered a pair of launch failures January 16, seeing the loss of a classified Shijian satellite and the failed first launch of the Ceres-2 rocket, Space News reports. The first of the two failures involved the attempted launch of a Shijian military satellite aboard a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang launch base in southwestern China. The Shijian 32 satellite was likely heading for a geostationary transfer orbit, but a failure of the Long March 3B’s third stage doomed the mission. The Long March 3B is one of China’s most-flown rockets, and this was the first failure of a Long March 3-series vehicle since 2020, ending a streak of 50 consecutive successful flights of the rocket.

And then… Less than 12 hours later, another Chinese rocket failed on its climb to orbit. This launch, using a Ceres-2 rocket, originated from the Jiuquan space center in northwestern China. It was the first flight of the Ceres-2, a larger variant of the light-class Ceres-1 rocket developed and operated by a Chinese commercial startup named Galactic Energy. Chinese officials did not disclose the payloads lost on the Ceres-2 rocket.

Neutron in neutral. Rocket Lab suffered a structural failure of the Neutron rocket’s Stage 1 tank during testing, setting back efforts to get to the inaugural flight for the partially reusable launcher, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. The mishap occurred during a hydrostatic pressure trial, the company said Wednesday. “There was no significant damage to the test structure or facilities,” Rocket Lab added. Rocket Lab last year pushed the first Neutron mission from 2025 to 2026, citing the volume of testing ahead. The US-based company said it is now analyzing what transpired to determine the impact on Neutron launch plans. Rocket Lab said it would provide an update during its next quarterly financials, due in a few weeks.

Where to go from here?… The Neutron rocket is designed to catapult Rocket Lab into more direct competition with legacy rocket companies like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. “The next Stage 1 tank is already in production, and Neutron’s development campaign continues,” the company said. Setbacks like this one are to be expected during the development of new rockets. Rocket Lab has publicized aggressive, or aspirational, launch schedules for the first Neutron rocket, so it’s likely the company will hang onto its projection of a debut launch in 2026, at least for now. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Falcon 9 launches NRO spysats. SpaceX executed a late night Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base on January 16, carrying an undisclosed number of intelligence-gathering satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission, NROL-105, hauled a payload of satellites heading to low-Earth orbit, which are believed to be Starshield, a government variant of the Starlink satellites. “Today’s mission is the twelfth overall launch of the NRO’s proliferated architecture and first of approximately a dozen NRO launches scheduled throughout 2026 consisting of proliferated and national security missions,” the NRO said in a post-launch statement.

Mysteries abound… A public accounting of the agency’s proliferated constellation suggests it now numbers nearly 200 satellites with the ability to rapidly image locations around the world. The NRO has dozens more satellites serving other functions. “Having hundreds of NRO satellites on orbit is critical to supporting our nation and its partners,” the agency said in a statement. “This growing constellation enhances mission resilience and capability through reduced revisit times, improved persistent coverage, and accelerated processing and delivery of critical data.” What was unusual about the January 16 mission is it may have only carried two satellites, well short of the 20-plus Starshield satellites launched on most previous Falcon 9 launches, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and expert tracker of global space launch activity.

Long March 12B hot-fired at Jiuquan. China’s main space contractor performed a static fire test of a new reusable Long March rocket Friday, paving the way for a test flight, Space News reports. The test-firing of the Long March 12B rocket’s first stage engines occurred on a launch pad at the Dongfeng Commercial Space Innovation Test Zone at Jiuquan spaceport in northwestern China. The mere existence of the Long March 12B rocket was not publicly known until recently. The new rocket was developed by a subsidiary of the state-owned China Aerospace Science Technology Corporation, with the capacity to carry a payload of 20 metric tons to low-Earth orbit in expendable mode. It’s unknown if the first Long March 12B test flight will include a booster landing attempt.

Another one… The Long March 12B has a reusable first stage with landing legs, similar to the recovery architecture of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The booster is designed to land downrange at a recovery zone in the Gobi Desert. The Long March 12B is the latest in a line of partially reusable Chinese rockets to reach the launch pad, following soon after the debut launches of the Long March 12A and Zhuque 3 rocket last month. Several more companies in China are working on their own reusable boosters. Of them all, the Long March 12B appears to be the closest to a clone of SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Like the Falcon 9, the Long March 12B will have nine kerosene-fueled first stage engines and a single kerosene-fueled upper stage engine. Chinese officials have not announced when the Long March 12B will launch.

Artemis II rolls to the launch pad. Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward last weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad, Ars reports. The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the end of its nearly 10-day tour through cislunar space, the Orion capsule on top of the rocket will exceed 25,000 mph as it plunges into the atmosphere to bring its four-person crew back to Earth.

Key test ahead… “This is the start of a very long journey,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “We ended our last human exploration of the Moon on Apollo 17.” The Artemis II mission will set several notable human spaceflight records. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will travel farther from Earth than any human in history as they travel beyond the far side of the Moon. They won’t land. That distinction will fall to the next mission in line in NASA’s Artemis program. This will be the first time astronauts have flown on the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. The launch window opens February 6, but the exact date of Artemis II’s liftoff will be determined by the outcome of a critical fueling test of the SLS rocket scheduled for early February.

Blue Origin confirms rocket reuse plan. Blue Origin confirmed Thursday that the next launch of its New Glenn rocket will carry a large communications satellite into low-Earth orbit for AST SpaceMobile, Ars reports. The rocket will launch the next-generation Block 2 BlueBird satellite “no earlier than late February” from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. However, the update from Blue Origin appears to have buried the real news toward the end: “The mission follows the successful NG-2 mission, which included the landing of the ‘Never Tell Me The Odds’ booster. The same booster is being refurbished to power NG-3,” the company said.

Impressive strides… The second New Glenn mission launched on November 13, just 10 weeks ago. If the company makes the late-February target for the next mission—and Ars was told last week to expect the launch to slip into March—it will represent a remarkably short turnaround for an orbital booster. By way of comparison, SpaceX did not attempt to refly the first Falcon 9 booster it landed in December 2015. Instead, initial tests revealed that the vehicle’s interior had been somewhat torn up. It was scrapped and inspected closely so that engineers could learn from the wear and tear.

Next three launches

Jan. 25: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-20 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 15: 17 UTC

Jan. 26: Falcon 9 | GPS III SV09 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 04: 46 UTC

Jan. 26: Long March 7A | Unknown Payload | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 21: 00 UTC

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Rocket Report: Chinese rockets fail twice in 12 hours; Rocket Lab reports setback Read More »

Millions of people imperiled through sign-in links sent by SMS

authentication links, Biz & IT, Policy, privacy, Security, sms messages / Mike M. / January 21, 2026

“We argue that these attacks are straightforward to test, verify, and execute at scale,” the researchers, from the universities of New Mexico, Arizona, Louisiana, and the firm Circle, wrote. “The threat model can be realized using consumer-grade hardware and only basic to intermediate Web security knowledge.”

SMS messages are sent unencrypted. In past years, researchers have unearthed public databases of previously sent texts that contained authentication links and private details, including people’s names and addresses. One such discovery, from 2019, included millions of stored sent and received text messages over the years between a single business and its customers. It included usernames and passwords, university finance applications, and marketing messages with discount codes and job alerts.

Despite the known insecurity, the practice continues to flourish. For ethical reasons, the researchers behind the study had no way to capture its true scale, because it would require bypassing access controls, however weak they were. As a lens offering only a limited view into the process, the researchers viewed public SMS gateways. These are typically ad-based websites that let people use a temporary number to receive texts without revealing their phone number. Examples of such gateways are here and here.

With such a limited view of SMS-sent authentication messages, the researchers were unable to measure the true scope of the practice and the security and privacy risks it posed. Still, their findings were notable.

The researchers collected 332,000 unique SMS-delivered URLs extracted from 33 million texts, sent to more than 30,000 phone numbers. The researchers found numerous evidence of security and privacy threats to the people receiving them. Of those, the researchers said, messages originating from 701 endpoints sent on behalf of the 177 services exposed “critical personally identifiable information.” The root cause of the exposure was weak authentication based on tokenized links for verification. Anyone with the link could then obtain users’ personal information—including social security numbers, dates of birth, bank account numbers, and credit scores—from these services.

Millions of people imperiled through sign-in links sent by SMS Read More »

mRNA cancer vaccine shows protection at 5-year follow-up, Moderna and Merck say

cancer, clinical trial, health, melanoma, moderna, mRNA, skin cancer, vaccine / Mike M. / January 21, 2026

mRNA’s potential

Previous data from the trial reported that 107 participants received the mRNA vaccine and Keytruda treatment, while the remaining 50 only received Keytruda. At the two-year follow-up, 24 of the 107 (22 percent) who got the experimental vaccine and Keytruda had recurrence or death, while 20 of 50 (40 percent) treated with just Keytruda had recurrence or death, indicating a 44 percent risk reduction. The companies did not report the breakdown of the two groups in the press release this week for the five-year follow-up, but said the risk reduction was 49 percent, which is also what the companies reported for the three-year follow-up.

As for side effects, the companies reported that little had changed from previous analyses; adverse events were similar between the two groups. The top side effects linked to the vaccine were fatigue, injection site pain, and chills.

The results “highlight the potential of a prolonged benefit” of the vaccine combined with Keytruda in patients with high-risk melanoma,” Kyle Holen, a senior vice president at Moderna, said.

They also “illustrate mRNA’s potential in cancer care,” he said, noting that the company has eight more Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials going for mRNA vaccines against a variety of other cancers, including lung, bladder, and kidney cancers.

Marjorie Green, a senior vice president at Merck, called the five-year follow-up data a “meaningful milestone” and “encouraging.”

“[W]e look forward to late-stage data from the INTerpath clinical development program with Moderna, across a range of tumor types where significant unmet needs remain,” she said.

While the top-line results appear positive, conclusions can’t be drawn until the full data from the trial are published. The vaccines are also being developed amid a political environment hostile to mRNA vaccines. Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has railed against mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, making false claims about their safety and efficacy. In August, Kennedy unilaterally canceled $500 million in grant funding for the development of mRNA-based vaccines against diseases that pose pandemic threats.

mRNA cancer vaccine shows protection at 5-year follow-up, Moderna and Merck say Read More »

Author name: Mike M.