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Queer messages, characters, and storylines being censored in media in certain territories is nothing new, but just because it’s a regular occurrence, that doesn’t make it any less disheartening when it happens. The latest offender is an Amazon Prime

The U.S. Ran Its First Space Weather Preparedness Drill—Here’s How It Went Ironically, the exercise last May was interrupted by a real scenario, when Earth was hit by the strongest solar storm in two decades NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured this image of extreme solar activity on May 10, 2024. NASA SDO In May last year, the United States government hosted its first-ever “Space Weather Tabletop Exercise,” a hypothetical practice test to determine whether the country is prepared for space weather events, such as intense geomagnetic storms. The exercise brought together agencies such as NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Department of Homeland Security to talk through how they would handle such a threat—and the risks it would pose to Earth. “Minimizing the impacts of such storms requires close coordination, and this meeting was their chance to practice,” reads a NASA statement. The outcome of the test? State and federal agencies found out they need all the practice they can get. “Overall, the exercise demonstrated the need for better coordination to produce meaningful [space weather] notifications that describe the potential impacts to critical infrastructure,” reads the post-exercise report, “as well as emphasized the importance of the whole-of-government planning approach for significant [space weather] events.” Geomagnetic storms are strong disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field, and they can result from solar storms: explosions of material including energy, particles and magnetic fields from the sun’s surface, which can include solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Geomagnetic storms can wreck satellites, trigger radio blackouts and power outages and endanger astronauts by exposing them to intense radiation, according to the statement. Extreme geomagnetic storms only occur every few decades, per Live Science’s Tereza Pultarova. But our society has become so dependent on vulnerable technologies that the impact of space weather today could be significant. On May 8 and 9, 2024, participants at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland and the Federal Emergency Management Agency office in Colorado pretended it was January 2028, and they had to work through hypothetical scenarios involving harmful solar activity. At the beginning of the exercise, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center notified participants that an active region on the sun had rotated to a point that, if it exploded, it could impact Earth. To make matters worse, two NASA astronauts were in a spacecraft orbiting the moon, with two of their colleagues currently on the lunar surface. The scenario quickly introduced harmful solar activity. Hypothetical effects included satellites, astronauts and airplanes exposed to intense radiation; disrupted or blocked radio communication and GPS systems; degraded communication with orbiting satellites and widespread power outages. One issue the report highlights is that space weather forecasters have very little time to determine the potential impact of the sun’s coronal mass ejections (CMEs). They can’t measure the CME until it passes satellites at the first Lagrange point, a gravitationally stable location that’s about 930,000 miles from Earth. “We never know … what the CME is composed of and what to make of it until it gets just one million miles from Earth, where it’s only 15 to 45 minutes away,” Shawn Dahl, senior space weather forecaster at the Space Weather Prediction Center, told Gizmodo’s Passant Rabie in August. “That’s when we can see what the CME is composed of. How strong is it magnetically? What’s the speed of its movement? Is it going to connect with Earth?” According to the NASA statement, the exercise demonstrated “a critical need” for “more robust forecasting capabilities of space weather drivers and effects.” The report also emphasizes the need to educate the public, continue developing response plans, make critical infrastructure less vulnerable and collaborate with both the private sector and international agencies. What Happened During the Biggest Geomagnetic Storm in More than 20 Years Watch on Notably, the hypothetical exercise last year was interrupted by a real one, when Earth was hit by the most severe solar storm in more than 20 years, now named the Gannon storm. That staggering event, which first struck our planet on May 10, 2024, provided a real-world example for scientists to study. “These extraordinary events required key participants to simultaneously manage both simulated actions of the [exercise] and the real-world needs of the nation,” according to a statement from NOAA. The storm tripped high-voltage lines, overheated transformers, interfered with GPS-guided farm equipment and re-routed flights over the Atlantic Ocean. The atmosphere expanded from heat, reaching a whopping 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit (compared to the standard high of 1,200 degrees), and that led to increased drag on satellites. It super-charged the magnetosphere with the largest electric current seen in 20 years, and it temporarily restructured the planet’s ionosphere. Participants reported that running through the hypothetical scenario generated important conversations and improved communication across agencies. Still, it remains to be seen how prepared we’ll be next time an angry solar region turns our way. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

By Lucas Ropek Published May 21, 2025 | Comments (0) | © MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News (Getty Images) A Massachusetts teenager has pled guilty to a number of hacking crimes, including his role in the penetration of a cloud company with data on tens of millions of children, the government says. On Wednesday, the Justice Department said that 19-year-old Matthew D. Lane of Sterling, Massachusetts, had entered into a plea agreement with the government for his role in a number of high-profile hacking episodes. The former college student pled guilty to aggravated identity theft, as well as other crimes. Lane’s plea agreement and a criminal complaint against him were posted to the Justice Department’s website, along with additional information about the teen’s criminal antics. Lane is accused of personally hacking a company using leaked employee credentials. While this company hasn’t been named in court documents, NBC has reported that the victim is PowerSchool, a cloud and analytics provider that says it services K-12 schools across North America. NBC describes it as “one of the top tech education companies” in the country. Lane’s compromise of it last year led to the theft of data on tens of millions of children. The information that Lane stole included the “Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and confidential medical information, among other data, of the students and faculty” sourced from the company’s network. Not long after Lane stole the data, the company received an extortion message, the government says. That message threatened to “leak . . . worldwide” the “names, email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, medical information, residential addresses, parent and guardian information, and passwords, among other data, of more than 60 million students and 10 million teachers if Victim 2 did not send 30 Bitcoin (approximately $2.85 million at the time) to a specific Bitcoin address,” federal prosecutors wrote. Gizmodo reached out to PowerSchool for comment. According to the Justice Department, Lane was also part of a criminal group that stole data from a telecommunications firm and then sought to extort the company for $200,000. It is unknown who actually hacked the telecom, though Lane is said to have used an anonymous email to contact the telecom directly, telling it to fork over the ransom in Bitcoin or suffer a humiliating data breach. Lane purportedly said: “We are the only ones with a copy of this data now. Stop this nonsense [or] your executives and employees will see the same fate . . . . Make the correct decision and pay the ransom. If you keep stalling, it will be leaked.” “Matthew Lane apparently thought he found a way to get rich quick, but this 19-year-old now stands accused of hiding behind his keyboard to gain unauthorized access to an education software provider to obtain sensitive data which was used in an attempt to extort millions of dollars,” said FBI official Kimberly Milka. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By AJ Dellinger Published May 18, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published April 29, 2025 Jake Pearson, ProPublica Published April 29, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published April 15, 2025 By Matthew Gault Published March 26, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published March 26, 2025

By Vanessa Taylor Published May 20, 2025 | Comments (0) | Three Delta planes parked on the tarmac © David Peterlin (Shutterstock) Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has tried to limit the fallout from its global outage last summer, which wreaked havoc on airlines, financial services, and numerous other industries. When Delta Air Lines filed a lawsuit to recoup its losses, CrowdStrike tried having the case dismissed. But now a federal judge has given Delta the okay to proceed with its lawsuit over the outage, pointing out that CrowdStrike’s own president admitted that it did something “horribly wrong”. The July 2024 screwup, which has since been described as the largest IT outage in history, affected computers running on Microsoft Windows. Per CrowdStrike, it was caused by a faulty software update that passed the company’s validation checks “despite containing problematic content data.” Once the update went through, millions of devices worldwide displayed the infamous Blue Screen of Death. CrowdStrike’s outage is estimated to have cost U.S. Fortune 500 Companies $5.4 billion. But amongst airline companies, Delta was hit the hardest. Per Reuters, Delta says it cancelled 7,000 flights and accrued $550 million in lost revenue and additional costs. (Although, Delta did save $50 million on fuel from cancelling flights so, hey. That’s something.) Delta filed its initial lawsuit against CrowdStrike three months after the outage. Although CrowdStrike tried to have it dismissed, Judge Kelly Lee Ellerbe of the Fulton County Superior Court ruled that Delta can try to prove CrowdStrike’s gross negligence, writing, “Delta has specifically pled that if CrowdStrike had tested the July update on one computer before its deployment, the programming error would have been detected.” In addition, Reuters reported that Ellerbe is allowing Delta to pursue a computer trespass claim because Delta states that CrowdStrike falsely promised not to add an “unauthorized back door” into the company’s computers. CrowdStrike, meanwhile, claims that Georgia “specifically precludes Delta’s efforts to recover through tort claims the economic damages it claims to have suffered,” per CNBC. In addition, CrowdStrike said that Delta was an “outlier” that refused help and its own systems likely made the incident worse. CrowdStrikes wrote, “Although Delta acknowledges that it took just hours — not days — for Delta employees to [fix the outage], cancellations far exceeded the flight disruptions its peer airlines experienced.” It’s true that other airlines recovered faster (for example, United only cancelled about 1,500 flights). Per Fortune, one reason that Delta was hit harder is because of its heavy reliance on its Atlanta hub. In an earlier letter that CrowdStrike’s lawyer, Michael Carlinsky, sent Delta denying any gross negligence, Carlinsky wrote that Delta needs to address the “design and operational resiliency capabilities” of its IT structure. He said that if Delta “pursue[s] this path, Delta will have to explain to the public, its shareholders, and ultimately a jury why CrowdStrike took responsibility for its actions — swiftly, transparently, and constructively — while Delta did not.” But CrowdStrike really shouldn’t pat itself on the back for its response to the outage. Shortly after the incident, CrowdStrike sent out $10 apology gift cards for UberEats that didn’t even work. And about a week after Carlinsky’s letter to Delta, CrowdStrike’s president, Michael Sentonas, attended the Pwnie Awards to accept his company’s win for Most Epic Fail. “Definitely not the award to be proud of receiving,” Sentonas said. “I think the team was surprised when I said straight away that I’d come and get it because we got this horribly wrong…It’s super important to own it when you do things horribly wrong, which we did in this case.” Sentona’s acceptance speech was referenced in Ellerbe’s decision where she wrote that “its own president publicly stated that CrowdStrike did something ‘horribly wrong.'” But per Reuters, Carlinsky believes that a judge will either say Delta’s case has no merit or keep damages in the “single-digit millions of dollars” region. This is a small win for Delta. But just as CrowdStrike must atone for its apparent sins, Delta has to do so, too. Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Mark Cohen in Atlanta said that Delta must face a lawsuit from passengers who were refused full refunds for canceled flights in connection with the outage. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Kyle Barr Published September 24, 2024 By Kyle Barr Published April 19, 2024 By Passant Rabie Published April 9, 2024 By Passant Rabie Published March 28, 2024 By George Dvorsky Published March 25, 2024 By Passant Rabie Published March 25, 2024

By Passant Rabie Published May 20, 2025 | Comments (0) | The galactic supernova remnant shown here with its perfect symmetry. Filipović et al./arXiv The universe is a chaotic place filled with exploding stars, material falling into black holes, and rogue planets wandering off on their own. All that chaos makes astronomers suspicious when they glimpse a hint of perfection in the cosmos, like a bubble of material left over from the death of a star that appears to be in perfectly symmetrical shape. Astronomers recently discovered the remnant of a galactic supernova with a remarkable circular symmetry, making it stand out as one of the most perfectly spherical objects detected in the universe. Perfection is not always a bad problem to have, but it does prompt certain questions regarding how the object came to be this way. The discovery, submitted to the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia and made available on the preprint website arXiv, was spotted in images collected by the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder. The researchers behind the paper identified the object as a galactic supernova remnant—an expanding cloud of debris that forms in the aftermath of the exploding death of a star. The object, located in the Milky Way galaxy, has been dubbed Teleios, the Greek word for perfect. Although it is almost perfectly symmetrical, Teleios is not very bright. It has one of the lowest recorded surface brightness levels among known supernova remnants. Astronomers observing Teleios are also uncertain about its distance to Earth, estimating that it could either be around 7,175 or 25,114 light-years away. That’s a huge difference in distance, and the uncertainty is affecting our understanding of how long the object has been there. The two different distances imply different sizes for Teleios, since objects appear smaller the farther away they are. At its closer distance to Earth, the supernova remnant would be about 46 light-years wide. If it were much farther away, it would be a much larger cloud—around 157 light-years across. Based on its size variation, the scientists suggest that this particular cloud of expanding material has either been around for less than 1,000 years at its smaller size, or a much older supernova remnant that formed more than 10,000 years ago and grew to its larger size. Another odd thing about Teleios is that it only appears in radio wavelengths, even though modeling of the object suggests it should have X-ray emissions. The scientists behind the study try to explain the lack of X-ray emissions by suggesting Teleios is a Type Ia supernova, which takes place in a binary star system in which one of the stars is a white dwarf. In that case, a zombie star is often left behind along with the supernova remnant. There is a nearby star that fits the profile, but it would mean that Teleios is much smaller, spanning across a mere 11 light-years in the Milky Way. However, none of the measurements of Teleios’ distance correspond to this small size. “We consider several different scenarios to explain Teleios’s unusual properties, all of which have their challenges,” the researchers wrote in the paper. “While we deem the Type Ia scenario the most likely, we note that no direct evidence is available to definitively confirm any scenario.” The researchers suggest that sensitive and high-resolution observations of this object are needed in order to uncover its mysteriously perfect shape and unusual qualities. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Isaac Schultz Published May 11, 2025 By Isaac Schultz Published April 21, 2025 By Isaac Schultz Published April 13, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published March 28, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published March 27, 2025 By Isaac Schultz Published March 24, 2025

See the First Visible Auroras Captured on Mars, Glowing a Hazy Green Above the Planet Scientists directed NASA’s Perseverance rover to take an image of the Martian sky after a solar storm in hopes that an aurora would show up Lillian Ali - Staff Contributor May 16, 2025 1:19 p.m. The first image in visible light of green auroras on Mars (left), compared to the night sky of Mars without auroras. NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / MSSS / SSI On March 18, 2024, NASA’s Perseverance rover, which usually examines rocks on Mars’ surface, tilted its camera upward. The planet’s entire sky glowed a soft green, and the rover snapped an image of the moment—capturing the first visually observed aurora on Mars. The photograph is the result of several years of planning, waiting and retrying to grab this shot. Researchers led by Elise Wright Knutsen, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Oslo, waited for the right conditions and commanded Perseverance to look up at exactly the right time. They reported their feat in a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. “It took three unsuccessful attempts before we got it right, but when we did, it appeared exactly as we imagined it; as a diffuse green haze, uniform in all directions,” Knutsen tells Gizmodo’s Passant Rabie.Auroras can occur following a solar storm, when the sun suddenly blasts charged particles, energy and magnetic fields into the solar system. These particles can collide with gases in a planet’s atmosphere, energizing them and causing their atoms to emit light in different colors. On Earth, the charged particles from the sun are guided to the poles by the magnetic field, leading to the northern and southern lights. Mars does not have a global magnetic field, “so the charged particles bombarded all of Mars at the same time, which leads to this planet-wide aurora,” Knutsen tells Reuters’ Will Dunham. The Martian atmosphere is much thinner than Earth’s, and it doesn’t have as many gas atoms that could light up in an aurora. But Mars has atomic oxygen, and oxygen on Earth causes a green glow. So, astronomers thought its sky would appear green after a solar storm, although the hue would be fainter and harder to capture than auroras on Earth. Historically, Mars’ auroras have only been observed by orbiting spacecraft in ultraviolet light, which is not visible to the naked eye. An aurora seen from Abisko, Sweden, glows green due to emissions from atmospheric oxygen. Pavel.shyshkouski via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0 Perseverance’s photo surprised some scientists, who had anticipated an image of an aurora to come from a spacecraft instead. “I didn’t really expect it to be seen by one of the rovers,” planetary astronomer James O’Donoghue of the University of Reading in England, who was not involved in the study, tells the New York Times’ Perseverance’s mission is to sample rocks that may contain evidence of ancient microbial life, like “Cheyava Falls,” a rock discovered last year that scientists say bears a potential biosignature. To observe an aurora, researchers applied the rover’s rock-studying instruments to the sky. One of its cameras, Mastcam-Z, could spot green lights. An instrument called SuperCam would chemically analyze whatever was emitting that green light, potentially identifying an aurora. To get their photo, researchers had to accurately forecast the aurora by observing the sun, studying the Martian atmosphere and perfectly timing Perseverance’s movements. After several months, during a period of solar hyperactivity, Knutsen’s team found exactly the right moment. “It was so satisfying,” Knutsen tells the New York Times. NASA's Perseverance rover took this "selfie" on July 23, 2024, with a rock nicknamed "Cheyava Falls." NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS Perseverance’s instruments determined the aurora emitted light with a wavelength of 557.7 nanometers—a green glow that’s visible to the human eye—which told astronomers the source was oxygen. Data from NASA’s orbiting MAVEN mission confirmed the light came from an aurora caused by solar energetic particles. Capturing an aurora on Mars opens new methods of studying the planet’s atmosphere and weather. It also shows how scientists can continue to track solar activity, which is especially relevant as a solar flare caused radio blackouts internationally this week. For now, though, Knutsen’s team gets to celebrate capturing the first visible Martian aurora. She tells the New York Times about being one of the first people to see “a black horizon and a softly glowing green sky” on Mars, saying, “I cried a little bit.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

By Passant Rabie Published May 15, 2025 | Comments (0) | The Athena lander ended up lying on its side on the surface of the Moon. Intuitive Machines Earlier this year, an ill-fated lander skidded across the lunar surface and ended up lying sideways in a cold, dark crater. Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander was declared dead on arrival at the Moon. Now, the company has released a report detailing the chain of mishaps that led to its demise. Athena touched down on the Moon on Thursday, March 6, following a week-long journey through space. After a less-than-ideal touchdown, the lunar lander ended up on its side in a shallow crater in the Moon’s Mons Mouton region, 820 feet (250 meters) from its targeted landing site. During an earnings call on Wednesday, Intuitive Machines listed three factors that affected Athena’s ability to land on the Moon, SpaceNews reported. The first issue had to do with the lander’s laser altimeters, instruments designed to help it estimate its distance from the Moon during descent. “In the final phase of descent, we saw signal noise and distortion that did not allow for accurate altitude readings,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said during the call. The Houston-based company also blamed conditions at the Moon’s south polar region. According to Altemus, the sunlight’s low angles and the topography “created long shadows and dim lighting conditions that challenged the precision capability of our landing system.” The third factor that resulted in Athena’s lunar tumble was the lander’s inability to recognize craters on the Moon from lower altitudes. Intuitive Machines relied on photos captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnoissance Orbiter to guide the lander’s optical navigation system during its descent. Those images, however, are captured at an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers) and therefore “could not accurately account for how craters appear at lower altitudes with south pole lighting conditions as you approach the landing site,” Altemus said. The company is treating Athena’s failed mission as a set of lessons learned as it prepares to launch its third lander sometime next year. “We’ve added dissimilar and redundant altimeters to the sensor suite, and they’re going through more rigorous and extreme flight-like testing than we’ve done before,” Altemus said in Tuesday’s call, according to Space.com. “We’ve incorporated an additional lighting-independent sensor for surface velocity measurements. We’ve expanded onboard terrain crater database for enhanced navigation across the surface of the moon.” Intuitive Machines launched its first lunar lander, Odysseus, in February 2024. It reached the lunar surface, but the landing wasn’t exactly smooth. One of the lander’s legs may have gotten caught during its descent, causing it to tip onto its side and end up lying sideways on a rock. The mission did operate for seven days on the lunar surface, making Intuitive Machines the first company to land a private lander on the Moon. “Moving forward, we will succeed,” Altemus said. “Land softly, land upright, land ready to operate.” Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Passant Rabie Published May 10, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published May 9, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published May 8, 2025 By Isaac Schultz Published May 2, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published May 2, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published May 1, 2025

Donald Trump inaugure sa tournée au Moyen-Orient en grande pompe. Son premier voyage majeur depuis son retour dans le bureau ovale a débuté...

Cette semaine, le président américain Donald Trump était en tournée pour caresser dans le sens du poil l'Arabie Saoudite. Il n'est évidemment...