Powderhorn

If at first you don't succeed, move, move the goalposts.

Nasa announced on Friday radical changes to its delayed Artemis III mission to land humans back on the moon, as the US space agency grapples with technical glitches and criticism that it is trying to do too much too soon.

The abrupt shift in strategy was laid out by the space agency’s recently confirmed administrator, Jared Isaacman. Announcing the changes on Friday, he said that Nasa would introduce at least one new moon flight before attempting to put humans back on the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century, in 2028.

The new, more incremental approach would give the Nasa team a chance to test flight and refine its technology. As part of the changes, the Artemis II mission to fly humans around the moon this year, without landing, would also be pushed back from its latest scheduled launch on 6 March to 1 April at the earliest.

“Everybody agrees this is the only way forward,” Isaacman told reporters at a news conference. “I know this is how Nasa changed the world, and this is how Nasa is going to do it again.”

It's weird to see Eric Berger's byline in The Guardian instead of Ars ...

Scientists have captured a beautiful image in unprecedented detail of the vast Milky Way galaxy, of which our own solar system is a part.

The stunning image is the largest ever obtained by the specialist telescope in Chile called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (Alma) radio telescope, according to the group behind the project.

The picture not only serves to stir the public imagination of outer space but is also incredibly important for understanding our own origins as a planet, said Steven Longmore, the principal investigator and a professor of astrophysics at Liverpool John Moores University.

“The conditions at the center of our galaxy – the extreme temperatures, pressures, and turbulence – are very similar to the conditions in galaxies in the early universe, when most of the stars that exist today were being formed. Those galaxies are so far away that we cannot observe individual stars and planets forming within them, but we can in the center of our galaxy, and that’s what our survey has been able to do,” Longmore said. He has worked with more than 160 scientists over several years on a project called the Alma CMZ Exploration Survey.

I hate heds like that, but in trying to rework it, I realized anything short enough to fit the space (figuratively) would not adequately convey the story.

Plenty of research has amassed on the benefits of applying biochar to soil to lock in carbon. Now, an unusual new study looks at a novel way to get it there: feed biochar to cows, it says, and they’ll do the work for you.

The new research finds that when cows consume and excrete biochar, it remains almost completely intact and stable, suggesting that cows could spread biochar across the land and become architects of better soil health while tackling their own climate impacts.

Led by a team of Swiss researchers, the study took a group of eight dairy cows and fed them a diet containing trace amounts of biochar, about 1%. The feeding trial had two periods of 35 days each. In one, half the cows received the biochar additive, and the other half did not. In the second, the researchers switched the two groups of cows, so that each cow ultimately acted as its own control.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s financial services company Block has announced it will fire 40 percent of staff – around 4,000 people – because new "intelligence tools" the company is implementing “can do more and do it better.”

The company announced the sackings in the shareholder letter [PDF] accompanying its Q4 earnings announcement on Thursday. The payments and crypto company reported quarterly revenue of about $6.25 billion – up 3.6 percent year-over-year – and gross profit of around $2.9 billion. The company made $1 billion of gross profit in December 2025 alone. Full-year revenue came in at about $24.2 billion, and gross profit was around $10.36 billion.

“2025 was a strong year for us,” Dorsey wrote in the shareholder letter, before posing the question, “Why are we changing how we operate going forward?”

His answer, spread across the letter and a Xeet, is that AI has already changed the way Block works, so it needs to change its structure.

“We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly,” he wrote on X.

Zitron is apparently back for the plebs.

Hey all! I’m going to start hammering out free pieces again after a brief hiatus, mostly because I found myself trying to boil the ocean with each one, fearing that if I regularly emailed you you’d unsubscribe. I eventually realized how silly that was, so I’m back, and will be back more regularly. I’ll treat it like a column, which will be both easier to write and a lot more fun.

This quote is from the February 2016 conversation where my ex-wife and I agreed to divorce. It didn't seem at all plausible ... if we'd tried to make it work for seven years (of which perhaps three were good) and failed, how the hell was that going to happen?

A decade later, we appear determined to find out. Neither of us has a car, which means Lyfts are the order of the day when I head up there (she has a kitchen and indoor plumbing, so she doesn't come down to my van).

And this is keeping things to a pretty steady monthly cadence (three data points is a trend, and she wants me there next week) of a few nights, which I think is the sweet spot.

I've taken myself off the market. She's pulling me in far more than pushing me away (though she still does do both). We're both in our mid-40's at this point and uninterested in starting our life stories from the top with a new partner.

Which means we could be settling for each other, just ground down by life and seeking familiarity. There's no way we work long term; her kids hate me, and as such, the windows where I can visit are dictated by being sure neither will knock on the door.

But at this point, we've been talking on the phone almost daily, usually for hours, since my dad died in November.

We are not the couple who hated each other in 2016. In 2026, we are something different. Almost curious ... prodding, seeing what's still there. And the answer is a lot; we've not kept things platonic.

But it isn't about the sex. As I've said before, it's about the touch.

While lifesaving vaccines face a relentless onslaught from the Trump administration—with fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leading the charge—scientific literature is building a wondrous story: A vaccine appears to prevent dementia, including Alzheimer’s, and may even slow biological aging.

For years, study after study has noted that older adults vaccinated against shingles seemed to have a lower risk of dementia. A study last month suggested the same vaccine appears to slow biological aging, including lowering markers of inflammation.

“Our study adds to a growing body of work suggesting that vaccines may play a role in healthy aging strategies beyond solely preventing acute illness,” study author Eileen Crimmins, of the University of Southern California, said.

Another study this month suggested the positive findings against dementia from the past may even be underestimates of the vaccination’s potential, with a newer vaccine against shingles providing even more protection.

We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in: mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached. Every single time. And every single time it happens, the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that built them act shocked—shocked!—that collecting enormous databases of government IDs, facial scans, and biometric data from millions of people turns out to be a security nightmare.

Well, here we go again.

A couple weeks ago, Discord announced it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience, meaning all users would be shunted into a restricted experience unless they verified their age through biometric scanning. The internet, predictably, was not thrilled. But while many users were busy venting their frustration, a group of security researchers decided to do something more useful: they took a look under the hood at Persona, one of the companies Discord was using for verification (specifically for users in the UK).

What they found, according to The Rage, was exactly what we would predict:

Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government authorized server.

In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting – and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies.

Let me say that again: 2,456 publicly accessible files sitting on a government-authorized server, exposed to the open internet.

Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year - and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones.

Analyst biz Gartner is projecting a drop in PC shipments of more than 10 percent during 2026, and a decline of around 8 percent for smartphones, all due to the AI-driven memory shortage.

Some types of memory have doubled or quadrupled in price since last year, and Gartner believes DRAM and NAND flash used in PCs and phones is set for a further 130 percent rise by the end of 2026.

The upshot of this is that the budget PC will disappear, simply because vendors won't be able to build them at a price that will satisfy cost-conscious buyers, according to Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal.

"Because the price of memory is increasing so much, vendors lose the ability to provide entry-level PCs – those below about $500," he told The Register.

Imagine this: You're on Reddit, Hacker News, or some forum, posting with a silly username like GamerCat2025 or SecretCoderX. You think you are anonymous, and no one knows you and so you can freely express your thoughts.

Well, a brand-new research paper just blew that idea apart. It's called "Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs" which is a fancy way of saying "figuring out the real person behind a secret online name".

The researchers include people ETH Zurich and, Anthropic (parent company of Claude), and a research group called MATS and they proved that today's super-powerful AI chatbots can play detective and unmask people way better than ever before.

The US space agency has released a “pre-solicitation” for what is expected to be a hotly contested contract to develop a spacecraft to orbit Mars and relay communications from the red planet back to Earth.

Ars covered the intrigue surrounding the spacecraft in late January, which was initiated by US Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, as part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” legislation in the summer of 2025. The bill provided $700 million for NASA to develop the orbiter and specified funding had to be awarded “not later than fiscal year 2026,” which ends September 30, 2026. This legislation was seemingly crafted by Cruz’s office to favor a single contractor, Rocket Lab. However, multiple sources have told Ars it was poorly written and therefore the competition is more open than intended.

The pre-solicitation released this week is not a request for proposals from industry—it states that a draft Request for Proposals is forthcoming. Rather, it seeks feedback from industry and interested stakeholders about an “objectives and requirements” document that outlines the goals of the Mars mission.

We wrote recently about the FBI’s pre-dawn raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home, in which agents seized two laptops, a phone, a portable hard drive, a recording device, and even a Garmin watch. Natanson covers the federal workforce and had cultivated nearly 1,200 confidential sources across more than 120 government agencies. She was not accused of any crime. She was not the target of any investigation. The FBI told her that much while they were busy carting away basically everything she uses to do her job.

The raid was connected to the prosecution of Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a government contractor charged with retaining classified information. The DOJ wanted to rummage through a journalist’s entire digital life to find evidence against someone else. And they got a warrant to do it by, among other things, simply never mentioning to the magistrate judge that there’s a federal law—the Privacy Protection Act of 1980—that exists specifically to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening.

Last week, at a hearing on the Washington Post’s motion to get the devices back, Magistrate Judge William Porter let the DOJ attorneys have it. And then on Tuesday, he issued his ruling, blocking the government from searching Natanson’s devices and rescinding the portion of the warrant that would have let them do so.