Three months ago, during a flashy event at its Washington, DC, headquarters, NASA announced that it was shifting the focus of its lunar plans from an orbital space station to a Moon base on the surface.

As part of this, officials said work would be paused on the Lunar Gateway planned to orbit the Moon. Of the two elements that were furthest along, NASA also revealed that one of them—the  Power and Propulsion Element—would be repurposed to serve as a core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space.

Less was said about the fate of the other major component, the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO). This is the large pressurized module, 6.1 meters long, in which visiting astronauts would spend the majority of their time when visiting the Lunar Gateway. NASA has awarded contracts worth $1.1 billion to Northrop Grumman to design, build, and integrate the habitation module with the Power and Propulsion Element.

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© NASA/Josh Valcarcel

Almost 20 years ago, Google pitched Android as the more open alternative to Apple's walled garden. Last year, Google announced it would begin erecting its own walls through developer verification. The company has issued an update on its plans, affirming that the verification system will begin rolling out in select countries later this year. We're also learning which app stores are participating in verification and the timeline for key features like the recently revealed "advanced flow" for bypassing verification.

Google has claimed that developer verification is a necessary change to smartphone software distribution, pointing to the increased prevalence of scams that trick Android users into installing malware apps. Google's solution requires verifying the identities of developers outside the Play Store just like it does for devs publishing on its platform. This has proven to be a contentious change for myriad reasons.

In the new blog post, Google's Matthew Forsythe confirms that the developer verification system is slated to come online on September 30 of this year. The initial deployment will be limited to countries with a high level of app scams: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.

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Apple has updated its Beats Studio Buds wireless earbuds to patch a high-severity vulnerability that could be exploited by nearby hackers to eavesdrop on users.

The vulnerability, CVE-2025-20701, allowed improper authentication in the firmware running on the Bluetooth-related chips, enabling people within signal range to impersonate devices that had previously been paired with the earbuds. The researchers demonstrated this in a series of end-to-end attacks that allowed them to eavesdrop on conversations or sounds within earshot of the phone microphone.

Apple joins the patch party

“Impact: An attacker within Bluetooth range may be able to listen through the microphone of a device which is not yet paired and actively seeking pair requests,” Apple said in a Tuesday security advisory. The fix is contained in Beats Firmware Update 1B211, which is delivered automatically while headphones are paired with and within Bluetooth range of a user’s iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Users can check their firmware version by going to Settings on their device, navigating to Bluetooth, and tapping the info button next to the headphones.

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© Jeff Dunn

In May, the federal government announced without warning that it would take apart a network of ocean monitoring systems that it had spent over $350 million to build. No reason was given for the decision to shut down the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), but suspicion immediately focused on the network's role in tracking climate change.

But the OOI also provides data that's useful for weather forecasting and fisheries management, leading to widespread opposition. Today, it appears that the opposition has won, as the government will announce that it's reversing the decision. The big remaining question is how much damage the OOI took during the intervening month.

As of now, there is no formal statement available from the federal government. However, The New York Times reports that the decision will be announced later today, and Ars received a statement from Zoe Lofgren, the ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee, indicating that the decision has been made.

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A businessman with ties to Chinese military contractors was among the overseas investors who acquired stakes in SpaceX while it was still a private company. An entity linked to the Qatari royal family also took a stake.

The new details come from a private investor list obtained by ProPublica that sheds light on a particularly delicate issue for Elon Musk’s rocket company: which people in countries like China bought into the company, and how. SpaceX built its business off sensitive US government work like making spy satellites for the Pentagon. While there is no ban on Chinese investment in US military contractors, such investment is heavily regulated.

In a sign of its sensitivity to the concerns, SpaceX barred investors from China and Hong Kong from buying shares in its initial public offering last week due to “regulatory and compliance risks,” Bloomberg reported. The US government alleges that China has a strategy of using investments in sensitive industries for espionage and to get access to cutting-edge technology.

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Bernie Sanders has unveiled an aggressive plan to transfer trillions from leading AI firms to the public, and, to the likely horror of AI firms, it goes even further than expected to give Americans more control over the AI industry.

Sanders shared a summary of his legislation with AP News. If passed, the law would create a sovereign wealth fund “financed through a one-time 50 percent tax on the stock of the largest AI companies,” AP News reported. Any AI firm that does $200 million in annual AI sales would be subject to the tax, as would any new firm once it reaches that revenue level.

In total, Sanders estimated the fund could be worth $7 trillion, generating “hundreds of billions of dollars annually in direct payments to Americans and programs such as health care, education and housing,” AP News reported. Each American would likely receive more than $1,000 annually in 5 percent annual dividends, Sanders estimated.

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Plague swept through groups of hunter-gatherers in southeastern Siberia 5,500 years ago, leaving dozens dead in its wake—with DNA from Yersinia pestis bacteria still trapped inside their teeth.

University of Oxford ancient DNA researcher Ruairidh Macleod and his colleagues recently sequenced the telltale bacterial DNA in teeth from plague victims at four ancient cemeteries in the area around Russia’s Lake Baikal. The tragedy that befell these communities is now the earliest known plague outbreak, courtesy of the oldest strain of Y. pestis ever sequenced.

Unearthing a new backstory for the plague

Until recently, scientists who study the evolution of diseases have held two fairly solid ideas about the origins of plague, the disease caused by Yersinia pestis bacteria. It's a scourge so awful that it has gone down in history as not just a plague but the plague. The first idea is that the earliest strains didn't have the right genetic traits to be really lethal. And the second is that the plague first began menacing humans when the first farmers settled in densely packed towns alongside rats and domestic animals.

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© Kevin WIlson

Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev, who served twice as a crew member aboard the International Space Station (ISS), including during the final US space shuttle mission in 2011, has died at the age of 56.

With Samokutyaev's death on Wednesday, he becomes the first former ISS long-duration resident to die in the 26 years that the space station has been a home to 155 other cosmonauts and astronauts as expedition crew members. The cause of his death is unknown.

Portrait of cosmonaut Aleksandr Samokutyaev. Credit: Roscosmos

"The leadership and staff of the Roscosmos State Corporation extend their sincere condolences to the family and loved ones of Aleksandr Mikhailovich," officials with Russia's space agency said in a statement.

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We're about six weeks out from the debut of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the follow-up to 2021’s No Way Home. It's been five years since Spidey graced the big screen, so naturally, Sony Pictures has released a new trailer to build audience anticipation.

(Spoilers for No Way Home below.)

No Way Home ended on a pretty bleak note, with Peter Parker (Tom Holland) asking Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to erase him from everyone’s memory to protect the multiverse, including MJ (Zendaya).

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