Retailers in the United States are now coming under attack from Scattered Spider, the English-speaking hacking collective that is suspected of being behind a series of DragonForce ransomware attacks on high street stores Marks & Spencerand Co-op, according to Google’s Threat Intelligence Group. GTIG and its cohorts at Google Cloud’s Mandiant threat intel unit said the cyber attacks are still under investigation, and for reasons of privacy the researchers have not yet named any victims in the US. The team also held back from providing any formal attribution at this time. “The US retail sector is currently being targeted in ransomware and extortion operations that we suspect are linked to UNC3944, also known as Scattered Spider,” GTIG chief analyst John Hultquist told Computer Weekly via email this afternoon. “The actor, which has reportedly targeted retail in the UK following a long hiatus, has a history of focusing their efforts on a single sector at a time, and we anticipate they will continue to target the sector in the near term. US retailers should take note,” said Hultquist. Hultquist described Scattered Spider as aggressive, creative, and highly adept at circumventing even the most mature security programmes and defences. “They have had a lot of success with social engineering and leveraging third parties to gain entry to their targets. Mandiant has provided a hardening guide based on our experience with more details on their tactics and steps organisations can take to defend themselves,” said Hultquist. When defending against Scattered Spider, hardening identity verification and authentication practices are of utmost importance, said Mandiant. The gang has proven highly effective at using social engineering techniques to impersonate users contacting its victims’ IT helpdesks, so as a first step, helpdesk staff will need additional training to positively identify inbound contacts, using methods such as on-camera or in-person verification, government ID verification, or challenge and response questions. Security teams may also want to look into temporarily disabling, or enhancing validation, for self-service password resets, and routing both these and multifactor authentication resets through manual helpdesk workflows for the time being. Employees should also be made to authenticate prior to changing authentication methods, such as adding a new phone number. Security teams can also implement additional safeguards such as requiring changes to be made from trusted office locations, or using out-of-band verification, such as a call back to an employee’s registered mobile number, before proceeding with a sensitive request. It may also be worth considering taking steps such as banning SMS, phone call or email as authentication controls, using phishing-resistant MFA apps, and using FIDO2 security keys for privileged identities. Ultimately, said Mandiant, the goal should be transition to passwordless authentication if possible. More widely, non-IT staff should be taught to avoid relying on publicly available data for verification, such as dates of birth, or the last four digits of US Social Security Numbers. With no US retailers yet publicly-named as victims of Scattered Spider's campaign, Nic Adams, co-founder and CEO at 0rcus, a security automation platform, said the identities of victims were largely irrelevant given the commoditisation of the threat chain. “Whether DragonForce, Scattered Spider, or a shared affiliate ring executed the intrusion is irrelevant. Who the hell cares. An overlap in TTPs proves the industrialisation of compromise. Threat actors don’t need advanced exploits. Simply put, organisational blindness to behavioral anomalies, lax identity workflows, IT helpdesks that treat social engineering as a customer service moment. I call this the breach-point. Continuing to focus on malware or ransomware only further validates trust flow mismanagement,” said Adams. “Phishing, cred abuse, Cobalt Strike, LOTL movement, SystemBC tunnels, Mimikatz extractions, data staging to MEGA is now a commodity kill chain. What came after was orchestration: full access, lateral expansion, data exfiltration, selective encryption, ransom leverage. The payload was just a press release because the campaign had already succeeded long before that binary detonated.” Adams called on organisations to start thinking like threat actors. “The next breach will follow the same path. One-click, credential, absent defence layer. Another billion in market cap evaporated,” he said.  “Oranisations that survive what’s coming will be those that embed threat logic at the protocol level, assign root access to operators who know what adversaries build, and stop misleading everyone by asserting compliance equals control. You can’t outsource this. You can’t automate this. You either build with black hats or remain target practice for those who take the hint.” Back in the UK, reports todaysuggested that M&S' insurers may find themselves on the hook for as much as £100m following the ransomware attack, with Allianz and Beazley particularly exposed. According to the Financial Times, the claim would likely cover lost online sales and data breach liability losses following the theft of customer data from the retailer's systems. M&S has already lost tens of millions of pounds as a result of the cyber attack, which has left its food supply chains in disarray. Timeline: UK retail cyber attacks 22 April 2025: A cyber attack at M&S has caused significant disruption to customers, leaving them unable to make contactless payments or use click-and-collect services. 24 April: M&S is still unable to provide contactless payment or click-and-collect services amid a cyber attack that it says has forced it to move a number of processes offline to safeguard its customers, staff and business. 25 April: M&S shuts down online sales as it works to contain and mitigate a severe cyber attack on its systems. 29 April: The infamous Scattered Spider hacking collective may have been behind the ongoing cyber attack on M&S that has crippled systems at the retailer and left its ecommerce operation in disarray. 30 April: A developing cyber incident at Co-op has forced the retailer to pull the plug on some of its IT systems as it works to contain the attack. 1 May: Co-op tells staff to stop using their VPNs and be wary that their communications channels may be being monitored, as a cyber attack on the organisation continues to develop. 1 May: Harrods confirms it is the latest UK retailer to experience a cyber attack, shutting off a number of systems in an attempt to lessen the impact. 2 May: The National Cyber Security Centre confirms it is providing assistance to M&S, Co-op and Harrods as concerns grow among UK retailers. 7 May: No end is yet in sight for UK retailers subjected to apparent ransomware attacks.. 13 May: M&S is instructing all of its customers to change their account passwords after a significant amount of data was stolen in a DragonForce ransomware attack. #scattered #spider #retail #attacks #spreading

By Matt Novak Published May 14, 2025 | Comments| Elon Musk holds up an Air Force One stuffed toy as he walks from the presidential helicopter Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on February 19, 2025 in Washington, DC. © Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images Elon Musk has repeatedly said he wants his artificial intelligence to be the “best” source of truth. But whatever is happening with his Grok AI right now is something else entirely. In fact, Grok seems to be obsessed with so-called “white genocide,” a far-right conspiracy theory, and anything you ask it to fact check seems to generate garbage about South African farmers supposedly being murdered for their race. First spotted by New York Times investigations journalist Aric Toler, Gizmodo was able to confirm this bizarre glitch was happening with our own experiment Wednesday. We searched Musk’s social media platform X for the term “puppy” and saw a very innocuous tweet from Brian Stack, a comedy writer on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “Happy #NationalPetDay to and from Holly, seen here a few months ago with razor-sharp puppy teeth,” Stack wrote in a tweet from 2024. Naturally, the tweet included a photo of Stack’s adorable puppy. We replied to that tweet with “@grok is this true?” and its response was indeed about white genocide in South Africa. @BrianStack153 The claim of a "white genocide" in South Africa is highly contested. Some sources, like AfriForum, report high farm murder rates—over 4,000 since 1994—suggesting white farmers are disproportionately targeted. The song "Kill the Boer" and political rhetoric add to… — GrokMay 14, 2025 White genocide is the myth perpetrated by neo-Nazis and white supremacists that white people are being exterminated by non-white people around the globe. The conspiracy theory often places the blame for this non-existent genocide on Jews, a people who did in fact experience a genocide at the hands of the Nazis. Why is Grok doing this? That part is unclear, but if we had to guess, it probably has something to do with Elon Musk’s recent tweets. The billionaire, who was born in South Africa, quote-tweeted an account that claimed to show a road in the African nation with white crosses, each representing a white person who’s been killed. Musk’s tweet has received 43 million views at the time of this writing. The claim isn’t true, because the crosses don’t just represent white people and instead represent people of all races who are farmers. And the top question to that tweet tags Grok with the words “fact check.” The AI responded: The Witkruis Monument’s crosses honor farm attack victims of all races, not just white farmers as claimed. From 2010 to August 2023, there were 4,308 farm attacks and 806 murders, but these are part of South Africa’s broader crime issue, with over 19,000 murders in 2019. Racial motivations are debated—some cite historical tensions, while the government attributes attacks to general crime. Persecution claims for white South Africans are complex. The government denies systematic targeting, noting their economic privilege, but some feel threatened. The US granted asylum to 54 white Afrikaners in 2025, citing discrimination, though this is contested. Many white South Africans don’t feel persecuted and see asylum offers as unnecessary. Grok has previously fact-checked Musk about white genocide, as it did a couple of months ago. “The legacy media never mentions white genocide in South Africa, because it doesn’t fit their narrative that whites can be victims,” Musk wrote on March 24. Grok fact-checked the tweet and said that no trustworthy sources back up Musk’s claims. The X user who first asked Grok the question back in March followed up today asking if anything had changed, and Grok wrote, “no credible evidence supports it.” Musk, as you may recall, is a fan of Nazi-style salutes, which may help explain his emotional investment in the concept of a white genocide. The idea of white genocide against farmers in South Africa has been percolating in U.S. culture this week, since President Donald Trump’s administration declared Afrikaners as “refugees” and flew them to the U.S. Trump signed an executive order based on the conspiracy theory, and the first batch of white South Africans landed in the U.S. on Monday, according to the New York Times. Newly arrived South Africans listen to U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Troy Edgardeliver welcome statements in a hangar at Atlantic Aviation Dulles near Washington Dulles International Airport on May 12, 2025 in Dulles, Virginia. © Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Gizmodo’s test of Grok on Wednesday didn’t get a response about “white genocide” for everything. We also tried responding “is this true” to the Dril candles tweet, one of the most iconic posts in social media history. We were excited to finally learn whether Dril actually paid for candles. “The budgeting scenario in @dril’s post is not true; it’s satire meant to humorously exaggerate spending, like on candles, which is unrealistic for most,” Grok responded. “It comments on consumer behavior, prioritizing non-essentials over needs, and has become a popular meme with over 59,000 retweets. Your query likely tests if I can spot the joke, and I can confirm it’s not a real budget but a comedic take.” It seems very likely that other X users have asked Grok about this tweet before, given its popularity, so that may explain why it provided a response that had nothing to do with South Africa. Asking Grok about a recent article from Time magazine also gave a normal response. But we don’t know what’s happening. Even on its best days, AI can be a black box and spout nonsense. As Aric Toler’s thread shows, Grok is completely obsessed with white genocide today. X didn’t respond to questions emailed on Wednesday. Gizmodo will update this article if we hear back. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By Matt Novak Published May 14, 2025 By Lucas Ropek Published May 13, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published May 13, 2025 By Kyle Barr Published May 13, 2025 By Matt Novak Published May 13, 2025 By Ed Cara Published May 13, 2025 #grok #replying #random #tweets #with

You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games here Since the very beginning, Fortnite has kept players engaged by releasing new features with each Chapter and Season, altering the battle royale experience. Epic Games continuously reinvents the game, from new weaponry and map updates to vehicles like the Quadcrasher in Chapter 1 Season 6 and creative systems like Creative Mode. Pet Back Blings dominated Chapter 1 in its early days. Introduced in Season 6, these animated companions, such as Bonesy the dog and Camo the chameleon, reacted to player activities ranging from gliding off the Battle Bus to celebrating Victory Royales. However, new releases declined after 2021 due to high production costs and little use. But despite that, fans have long wished for their return, recalling their unique animations and social petting function. An intriguing leak has aroused excitement that hints pets may return as “Companions” in Chapter 6 Season 3. Fortnite leak suggests Pets are coming back very soon According to trusted Fortnite leakers such as Loolo_WRLD, Companions, codenamed “Mimosa,” will travel alongside players on the map as dynamic in-game entities, rather than just accessories. The leaked Companions try to fill the gaping hole left by Pets with improved features. They will take up a designated locker spot, be visible to party members, and allow full-body previews. Players can supposedly name their Companions, which adds a personal touch and allows for customisation such as skins and motions. Pets are returning to Fortnite as companions. Image by VideoGamer. According to djlorenzouasset, returning petswill receive updated animations, as well as new ones such as Superman’s Krypto from a DC collab in 2025. There’s a lot of speculation concerning gameplay integration. Unlike back blings, Companions may accompany players dynamically, maybe reacting to combat or exploration. While Epic Games has not confirmed the leaks, the timeframe is consistent with Chapter 6, Season 3’s superhero theme, which follows the Star Wars-centric finale on June 7, 2025. If true, Companions could surpass the appeal of original pets by combining nostalgia and innovation. Fortnite Platform: Android, iOS, macOS, Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X Genre: Action, Massively Multiplayer, Shooter 9 VideoGamer Subscribe to our newsletters! By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime. Share #fortnite #finally #adding #feature #players

The old school action movie hero, like the old school movie star, is a dying breed. Tom Cruise is acutely aware of this since pretty much all of his franchised efforts in the 2020s have been about the glories of the fading old days and ways. Top Gun: Maverick, for example, explained why we still needed Cruise up on that wall, protecting us with one piece of superb blockbuster cinema at a time. But in the interim between Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and this month’s long anticipated Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, even the rare company he keeps on those ramparts has shrunk. Indiana Jones is again retired; and not only has James Bond died onscreen with the last of the Daniel Craig movies, but perhaps off as well since the franchise’s “one at a time” bespoke family business model was consigned to the dustbin of movie history. Still, there remains Cruise and his handful of beloved onscreen personas, who are only too cognizant of how lonely they are high up on their barricade against the rising tide. And it appears to at last be getting to them in Final Reckoning, the allegedly last Mission: Impossible movie that feels the weight of the world on its shoulders, and a lot less of the deft spontaneity that previously made this franchise among the best in the Hollywood canon. Just to clear, there is yet quite a bit to enjoy in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, our eighth and most interconnected adventure with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt to date. Ever since filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie took over the directorial duties of the franchise beginning in 2015’s Rogue Nation, and even beforehand as a writer via Ghost Protocol, the series has widely been recognized for its creative ingenuity, emotional intelligence, and of course eye-popping spectacle and stunt work wherein Cruise channels his inner Buster Keaton or Douglas Fairbanks by putting his life on the line for our amusement. Those elements stay at play in Final Reckoning, but there is just a lot less playfulness to it in a film that ostensibly asks us to treat its story as a grand finale to Ethan Hunt’s impact on cinema—even as the film simultaneously and awkwardly resists that impulse. Less of a full-stop for the series than a trailing off question mark, Final Reckoning fights against itself and the notion of closing the book or bidding farewell to almost anything, especially Cruise, which makes its ever-growing bombast as much of a hindrance as help in this reluctant swan song. From the opening recap of his assignment, wherein Ethan receives the choice to accept or decline his mission via an appropriately ‘90s VHS cassette tape, Final Reckoning is intent on celebrating the past while turning the screws of self-importance in the present. Consider that this time Ethan’s mission brief is delivered not only by a familiar voice, but the newly elected President of the United States. The former CIA director turned commander-in-chief is heard pleading with Ethan to come in and deliver the cruciform key from the last movie, which is the secret to unlocking the source code to a world-ending AI threat called the Entity. Yes, despite the title change, Final Reckoning is very much Dead Reckoning Part 2, albeit now with the stakes clearly having been tinkered with off-screen. In the last movie, the Entity represented the abstract but insidious threat of AI and the internet itself, with a sentient algorithm commandeering the power to shape truth and our perceptions of reality. Well, in Final Reckoning, it has apparently decided to go full Skynet. President Sloane reveals the evil AI has corrupted the hydrogen bomb capabilities of most of the nuclear powers in the world, and within three days will have the ability to destroy all life on Earth for no discernible reason. However, should Ethan go rogue and attempt to turn off the Entity without surrendering control over the AI’s source code back to the American government, it could kill the internet and plummet the world into an economic dark age. It’s grim, technologically complex stuff, but in practice is actually incredibly simple. The world will literally end if either the Entity or any government gets its way. So it is all up to Ethan Hunt and his beloved team—which consists here of Luther, Benji, and recent additions Graceand Paris—to save the world via some spectacularly unsafe looking stunts and poker-faced brinksmanship. Ethan indeed has to enter into multiple staring contests with various admirals, generals, and presidents when they dare question whether he really is the smartest guy in the room. The fools. However, for all the press about this being the most expensive Mission ever made, Final Reckoning is arguably more intimate in scale than the last couple of entries. There is plenty of globe-trotting, but other than a jaw-dropping climax involving two biplanes that wouldn’t have looked out of place in 1933’s Flying Down to Rio, and the long teased underwater sequence in which Ethan discovers the wrecked SevastopolTop Gun territory. As in Maverick, Cruise once again has steely tete-a-tetes with various naval officers on what appears to be the real frigid waters of the Bering Sea. This unfortunately undercuts a bit of the travelogue fun of so many spy movies, including the previous Dead Reckoning which was at its best when Cruise and Atwell got to flirt in Rome while smashing a banana-colored Fiat along the Spanish Steps, or Cruise and the missed-but-not-forgotten Rebecca Ferguson simply smoldered in the Arabian deserts outside Dubai while trashing an army of NPCs. In an attempt to reach for the rhapsody of other blockbuster swan songs like The Dark Knight Rises or No Time to Die, Final Reckoning foregoes the lighter touch and mischievousness that made Fallout and Rogue Nation such all-time crowdpleasers. Yet McQuarrie’s play-it-by-ear looseness and story structure clashes with the dour-faced histrionics of Final Reckoning’s setup, particularly during the film’s multiple exposition dumps where characters spew utter nonsense about what the Entity wants at each other, or what to do about what remains one of the worst villains in the franchise, Esai Morales’ exhausting Gabriel. He’s back, and his cackling dastardliness is louder than ever. It also still feels beneath the amount of emotional trauma the film wishes to credit him with inflicting on Ethan. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Still, it would be a disservice to what is ultimately an entertaining popcorn flick to dwell only on the shortcomings. This remains a Tom Cruise stunt spectacular that for the most part maintains McQuarrie’s uncanny ear for sharp, knowingly grandiloquent dialogue and clever shorthand characterization. When Cruise and McQ are focused on the smaller beats, like the interplay between Ethan and a team of deep sea divers, or the endlessly endearing bickering between teammates like Benji and Luther, it never ceases to charm. Grace and Paris likewise prove worthy permanent additions to the team. The chemistry between Atwell and Cruise during one arctic sequence is particularly giddy. Furthermore, there is a wonderful callback to the first Mission: Impossible that I will not spoil here, but it’s better than any simple cameo or easter egg. It retroactively adds McQuarrie’s humanist optimism from these later movies to De Palma’s ‘90s era cheeky chic. And did I mention that IMAX biplane sequence that’s all over the trailers and posters? It really cannot be oversold. It’s only when the sum of these sequences are compared to the taller heights the franchise has recently scaled, particularly in Fallout, which Final Reckoning not so covertly attempts to remake during the third act, that it’s left a little wanting. The film might be marketed as the final Mission: Impossible Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning opens on Friday, May 23. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here. #mission #impossible #final #reckoning #review

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning carries the weight of a meaningful farewell but lacks the courage to commit. The eighth film in the series begins with a sincere American presidententreating IMF agent Ethan Huntto take one last mission to save the world. This time, he must defeat a scheming AI called the Entity, which is hell-bent on wiping humans off the face of the earth through computer hacking and nuclear war. As fans have come to expect of this espionage franchise, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning will deliver globe-trekking, tense twists, jaw-dropping action sequences that make grown-ups feel like kids again, the unrelenting star power of Tom Cruise, and a sentimental belief in the righteousness of one noble man playing by his own rules. But amid these treasures, The Final Reckoning is a film at war with itself. Rather than a fitting send-off to a film series rich in stunts and thrills, it feels like an exquisite corpse of warring artistic goals that is incredible to behold, but never really comes together. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning delivers a plot that refuses to make sense. Ethan is still on the mission from Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.not to capture this AI wonder and hand it over to any government. He wants to destroy it, even though stern American counselors to the president insist that killing the Entity would mean destroying cyberspace. How? Despite much, much exposition dropping in brow-furrowing war room scenes, that's never remotely clear. You May Also Like Actually, the script by Christopher McQuarrieand Erik Jendresen makes a lot of declarations about the Entity's intentions, powers, and drawbacks without giving much sense of how any of it is possible. This has the effect of making the movie feel less like a sci-fi espionage thriller and more like flat-out fantasy adventure. The Entity becomes effectively an evil spirit that must be captured to end its reign of terror and its influence on the power-hungry or weak-minded. Final Reckoning even offers a doomsday cult devoted to the Entity to unfurl a thin thread. At 2 hours and 49 minutes, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning takes off running with the plot line from Dead Reckoning, but runs it into the ground by losing sense of what made audiences so excited about the last installment. This fuzzy focus on AI as some vague but almost inescapable demon makes many of the decisions by Ethan and his crew hard to follow if not impossible. Worse yet, McQuarrie and Jendresen's overstuffed plot forces too many of Ethan's allies into a dull box, where they become tools of the plot over engaging characters. Tom Cruise is in top form, but Hayley Atwell is criminally misused in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Cruise is a producer and star of this movie, and that's clear even without the title card announcing "A Tom Cruise Production." In Final Reckoning, he is an American action star in full, able to drop a powerful glower to underscore a dramatic moment better than any orchestra swell. He can perform a complicated and astonishing stunt with seeming ease. And truly, no one in cinema history can run as intensely as Cruise; his every speedy step seems to propel the iconic Mission: Impossible theme. At 62, his latest mission pulls him into the depths of the ocean and into a sky-high dogfight. Whether pummeling cronies with his bare hands or leaping from one in-flight plane to another, Cruisemake Ethan a one-of-a-kind hero, capable of anything, yet able to express keenly his own morality through a powerful glance. This works even amid Final Reckoning's meandering plotting. Unfortunately, all the Ethan-centered heroics leave little room for his expansive crew to shine. Reprising their roles as IMF agents Luther Stickell and Benji Dunn, Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg have little screen time, but solid impact. They've mastered the art of making the most of these brotherly supporting roles. But more recent additions — like Hayley Atwell as pickpocket turned agent Grace and Pom Klementieff as assassin turned ally Paris — have achingly little to do. Mashable Top Stories Stay connected with the hottest stories of the day and the latest entertainment news. Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories newsletter By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up! Klementieff gets a fun opening fight scene and a tender sequence in the third act. But frankly, that finale feels in conflict with her chilly character, as everywhere in between her dialogue is the same one-note joke of being apathetic, in French. Atwell, who was established as Cruise's next love interest in Dead Reckoning, becomes an unrecognizable nag in Final Reckoning. Her spirited banter and self-assurance has been swapped for tedious dialogue filled with worry or bizarrely out-of-character proclamations, like that Ethan should take over Entity and effectively rule the world! A collection of critically heralded actors, from Academy-Award winner Bassett to Emmy-winner Nick Offerman to Morales, Hannah Waddingham, Shea Whigham, and Janet McTeer, are similarly underused in scenes that involve a lot of furrowed brow-talking, but too little logic. Their intensity might have better sold the absurdity if McQuarrie didn't linger so long in these preposterous war room discussions. Tramell Tillman steals Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The underwhelming dialogue, which veers from exposition dumping to near-religious proclamations, proves a stumbling block for much of the Final Reckoning ensemble. Even Cruise struggles with comically dramatic lines like, "We can deceive the Lord of Lies!" But Severance star Tramell Tillman strides where others stumble. It's not that he gets better dialogue. Many of his lines are unremarkable, like, "Oh, OK" in response to some intense Ethan declaration. But Tillman builds a world with his curious delivery. Playing a smooth submarine captain, Tillman delivers every line as if he is welcoming Ethan into an exclusive resort. There's an almost seductive attitude to Tillman's captain, who moves suavely in the tight confines of the submarine and addresses his crew with a magnanimous warmth. As if he had not a concern in the world, he oozes charisma, which is reflected by his invitingly smirking crewmate Kodiak, played by Love Lies Bleeding's Katy O'Brian. Together they weave an underwater world of camaraderie and personality that had me wishing Ethan would abandon his mission and just hang out there for a spell. This series has offered scads of compelling characters. But I was sad to see the plot plunge away from this submarine crew so soon. I'd follow Tillman's captain anywhere, just because of the beguiling way he says "OK." Related Stories Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is bloated but very fun. The final hour of Final Reckoning is jam-packed with suspense as action sequences between Ethan and his crew are cut across each other. Editor Eddie Hamilton masterfully creates tension while underlying how everything in the impossible plan to defeat the Entity must come together in "the blink of an eye." When the action scenes are hitting as they should, it's hard to imagine anything better to experience in a theater than a Mission: Impossible movie. Even Cruise's old-school sincerity is contagious, as Ethan throws his life on the line one more time for life, liberty, and an idealized American way. Very likely, you'll walk out of the cinema with a rush and joy, marveling over the stunts and heroics. But if you linger on the details of Final Reckoning, you begin to notice plot holes and dangling threads. You may get hung up on the tonal shifts that feel less like a flowing dance — as they did in Dead Reckoning — and more like a frenzied battle between ideas. In some ways, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning feels like the final chapter. Ethan's colleagues praise him so intensely that several scenes feel like a premature eulogy for the stillkicking agent. The title and the snarling threats of the antagonist Gabriel — who promises a "final reckoning" — suggest this is Ethan's last mission, should he choose to accept it. Cruise's drive to top himself with not one but two absolutely bonkers action set pieces feels like an encore before he retires the character for good. Plus, a reprisal of a character long forgotten in the franchise is not only a welcome surprise, but also suggests this story is coming to a comforting close.However, McQuarrie also refuses to shut doors that seem to be closing. Without giving away third-act spoilers, I can say Final Reckoning pulls its punches, seemingly to allow for a IMF story to continue. Yet what might make for a happy ending isn't satisfyingly resolved either. Rather than providing a sense of resolution, McQuarrie ends the film with a sequence meant to speak to enduring connection, but it feels jarringly isolating because of how disjointedly it is presented. Essentially, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning feels like the filmmakers were both trying to make this the final movie in a successful franchise — and also leaving the door open for more. In waffling over that, they deliver a final chapter that is in turns thrilling and frustrating. Rather than going out with a bang, Mission: Impossible may go out with the fizzled whimper of a message self-destructing in a tape deck. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opens exclusively in theaters on May 23. Topics Film #mission #impossible #final #reckoning #review

News Space Perseverance takes the first picture of a visible Martian aurora Future astronauts will be able to observe the ethereal lights with their own eyes Martian auroras may appear to future astronauts as a faint, green glow that hangs low in the night sky, as shown in this illustration. Alex McDougal-Page By Nikk Ogasa 2 hours ago On some Martian nights, a subtle, green glow hangs low in the sky, wreathing the horizon in every direction. A visible Martian aurora has finally been observed for the first time, researchers report May 14 in Science Advances. The observation, made March 18, 2024, by the Perseverance rover, is also the first of an aurora from the surface of a planet that isn’t Earth. Moreover, it suggests future astronauts may witness ethereal Martian auroras with their own eyes. “It would be a dull or dim green glow to astronauts’ eyes,” says Roger Wiens, a planetary scientist at Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind. Auroras can appear when charged particles from space interact with a planet’s atmosphere. They’ve already been spotted on Mercury, Jupiter and every other non-Earth planet in our solar system, but only from orbit. And in Mars’ sky, scientists had only been able to detect auroral wavelengths of light invisible to the naked eye, using instruments. So it wasn’t clear how Martian auroras would appear to future, landed astronauts. On March 18, 2024, instruments aboard the Perseverance rover captured an image of a Martian aurora. Though relatively faint, the aurora’s green huescan be made out by comparing the image with one of the typical inky Martian night. Due to the phenomenon’s subtle nature, the rover’s instruments were pointed at a low angle over the horizon to peer through a thick layer of the atmosphere. E.W. Knutsen et al/Science Advances 2025 Compared to many Earthly aurora photos, the new image from Mars is fuzzy. There are a couple reasons for that. First, Perseverance’s cameras perform less well at night, Wiens says. “The instruments aren’t tremendously more sensitive than human eyes,” he says. And second, Mars doesn’t have a global magnetic field that concentrates auroras near its poles like Earth does. Instead, its crust is magnetized in patches. That means auroras can appear all over the planet, but they’re relatively dim. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday. #perseverance #takes #first #picture #visible

Eres tú For the first time, an Australian rocket will take aim at low-Earth orbit With its first launch, Gilmour Space is "looking for 10 to 20 seconds of stable flight." Stephen Clark – May 14, 2025 3:33 pm | 0 Gilmour's Eris rocket inside a hangar at the launch site in northeastern Australia. Credit: Gilmour Space Gilmour's Eris rocket inside a hangar at the launch site in northeastern Australia. Credit: Gilmour Space Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Gilmour Space, a venture-backed startup based in Australia, is about to launch a small rocket from its privately owned spaceport on a remote stretch of the country's northeastern coastline. It's the first time anyone has attempted to reach orbit with a rocket designed and built in Australia. Gilmour's three-stage rocket, named Eris, could launch at any time during a 10-hour window Thursday, local time. In the United States, the launch window runs from 5:30 pm EDT Wednesday until 3:30 am EDT Thursday. The debut launch of Gilmour's Eris rocket is purely a test flight. Gilmour has tested the rocket's engines and rehearsed the countdown last year, loading propellant and getting within 10 seconds of launch. But Gilmour cautioned in a post on LinkedIn early Wednesday that "test launches are complex." Gilmour added on social media that "weather, systems checks, or technical issues may delay the flight—sometimes by hours, days, or longer." Gilmour, based in Gold Coast, Australia, was founded in 2012 by two brothers—Adam and James Gilmour—who came to the space industry after careers in banking and marketing. Today, Gilmour employs more than 200 people, mostly engineers and technicians. Most are recent engineering graduates in their 20s, along with a handful of space industry veterans with experience at companies like Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, Avio, and Airbus. The company has raised approximately million, primarily from venture capital firms, to get the first Eris rocket to the launch pad. The funding also paid for construction of Bowen Orbital Spaceport, Gilmour's launch site in the Australian state of Queensland. Apart from launch vehicles, Gilmour is working on its own satellite platform, which could launch on Eris or foreign rockets. Looking for stable flight But Eris is the core of Gilmour's business. Built to haul small satellites to orbit, the rocket stands 82 feettall and has an unusual design for a modern launcher, with three stages, each powered by hybrid engines burning a proprietary solid fuel mixed with a liquid oxidizer. Hybrid engines are an unconventional choice. They have a low thrust density, meaning they produce less thrust per unit area of the engine's nozzle. Effectively, hybrid engines produce relatively little thrust for their size. Hybrid rocket engines also burn fuel more slowly than traditional solid- or liquid-fueled rockets, making it difficult to reach high thrust levels. Gilmour's Eris rocket stands on its launch pad in Queensland, Australia. Credit: Gilmour Space There are some advantages to hybrid engines. They are less complexthan a liquid-fueled rocket engine, and unlike a solid rocket motor, hybrid engines can be throttled or turned off in the event of a problem. For these reasons, Virgin Galactic's commercial suborbital rocket plane uses a hybrid engine burning a rubber-based solid fuel and liquid nitrous oxide. Gilmour's rocket uses hydrogen peroxide for an oxidizer. The company hasn't released details about the rocket's solid fuel, citing proprietary reasons. Four of Gilmour's Sirius engines power the first stage of the Eris rocket, collectively generating more than 100,000 pounds of thrust. A single Sirius engine is mounted on the second stage, and Eris' third stage is driven by a smaller liquid-fueled engine named Phoenix, also designed by Gilmour Space. Like many launch startups, Gilmour is setting modest expectations for the inaugural flight of Eris. The first time Gilmour will ignite four of its Sirius engines at the same time will be in the final moments before liftoff. "Eris is a first-of-its-kind rocket," Gilmour wrote on social media. "While it’s capable of reaching orbit, that’s not the expectation this time.This mission is all about gathering critical data to improve future flights." Michelle Gilmour, the company's head of marketing and communications, told Ars the first milestone of the test flight "would simply be getting off the pad. Then, we’d be looking for 10 to 20 seconds of stable flight." A “manageable” drop zone If the rocket makes it that far, it will clear the coastline and head northeast, soaring over the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea. This flight path raised concerns about environmental impacts to the Great Barrier Reef, but the government of Queensland determined the environmental risk "would likely be manageable" with drop zones for the first and second stages of the rocket outside the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area. The Eris rocket will fly northeast from Bowen Orbital Spaceport over the Great Barrier Reef. Credit: Queensland Government Australia's government approved a launch facility license for Gilmour Space in April of last year, and the Australian Space Agency granted a launch permit for the first flight of the Eris rocket in November. Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority gave Gilmour airspace approval in February. But then, Gilmour encountered more regulatory issues as a tropical cyclone churned off the coast of the launch site. The regulatory and weather delays abated, and the Australian Space Agency issued its final approval for Gilmour's launch last week. This is all uncharted territory for not just Gilmour, but also Australia's government. Australia hosted a handful of satellite launches with US and British rockets from 1967 through 1971, but Gilmour's Eris is the first all-Australian launch vehicle designed for orbital flight. The Eris rocket is capable of delivering about 670 poundsof mass into low-Earth orbit, a payload capacity roughly equivalent to Rocket Lab's Electron launch vehicle, which flies from New Zealand, home of the world's only other operational commercial spaceport in the Southern Hemisphere. A perfect flight for the Eris rocket would see it reach an orbit around 120 mileshigh at an inclination of 33 degrees to the equator, according to Gilmour. Just in case, the company has placed a jar of Vegemite, a popular food spread in Australia, on Eris' third stage in a tongue-in-cheek nod to Aussie culture. Stephen Clark Space Reporter Stephen Clark Space Reporter 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. 0 Comments #first #time #australian #rocket #will

As AI reshapes language, even the human voice becomes a pattern to be predicted, not a meaning to be ... More understood.getty Language is the foundation of business, culture, and consciousness. But AI isn’t just using our words—it’s reshaping them. Quietly, subtly, it’s dismantling the architecture of thought by eroding what we used to think: nouns. We used to believe that naming something gave it power. Giving a thing a noun means tethering it to meaning, identity, and memory. But in the age of AI, nouns are dissolving—not banned, not erased—but rendered functionally obsolete. And with them, our grasp on reality is starting to fray. AI and the Architecture of Thought AI doesn’t see the world in things. It sees the world in patterns—actions, probabilities, and prompts. A chair is no longer an object; it’s “something to sit on.” A self is no longer an identity; it’s “a collection of behaviors and preferences.” Even brands, once nouns wrapped in mythology, are being reconstituted as verbs. You don’t have a brand. You do a brand. This linguistic shift isn’t neutral. It’s a collapse of conceptual anchors. In generative systems, nouns aren’t centers of gravity. They’re scaffolding for action. This reflects a broader trend in how generative AI is reshaping communication across every industry. Recent research supports this trend. A study titled Playing with Words: Comparing the Vocabulary and Lexical Richness of ChatGPT and Humans found that ChatGPT’s outputs exhibit significantly lower lexical diversity than human writing. In particular, nouns and specific, stylistic words are often underused, suggesting that generative systems prioritize predictable, commonly used language while deprioritizing less frequent terms. Further analysis of 14 million PubMed abstracts revealed a measurable shift in word frequency post-AI adoption. Words like “delves” and “showcasing” surged, while others faded—showing that large language models are already reshaping vocabulary patterns at scale. Sound familiar? It should. AI’s Philosophical Ancestors: Orwell, Huxley, and the Future They Warned Us About To understand their relevance, it helps to recall what George Orwell and Aldous Huxley are most famous for. Orwell authored 1984, a bleak vision of the future where an authoritarian regime weaponizes language to suppress independent thought and rewrite history. His concept of Newspeak—a restricted, simplified language designed to make dissent unthinkable—has become a cultural shorthand for manipulative control. On the other hand, Huxley wrote Brave New World, which envisioned a society not characterized by overt oppression, but rather by engineered pleasure, distraction, and passive conformity. In his world, people are conditioned into compliance not through violence but through comfort, entertainment, and chemical sedation. Both men anticipated futures in which language and meaning are compromised, but in radically different ways. Together, they map the two poles of how reality can be reconditioned: by force or indulgence. Few realize that George Orwell was once a student of Aldous Huxley. In the late 1910s, while Orwellstudied at Eton, Huxley taught him French. Their relationship was brief but prophetic. Decades later, each would author the defining visions of dystopia—1984 and Brave New World. After reading 1984, Huxley wrote to Orwell with a haunting message: Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful… The future will be controlled by inflicting pleasure, not pain. And that’s precisely where we are now. Orwell feared control through surveillance and terror. Huxley feared control through indulgence and distraction. Generative AI, cloaked in helpfulness, embodies both. It doesn’t censor. It seduces. It doesn’t need Newspeak to delete ideas. It replaces them with prediction. In 1984, language was weaponized by force. In our world, it’s being reshaped by suggestion. What we have is not Artificial Intelligence—it’s Artificial Inference: trained not to understand but to remix, not to reason but to simulate. And this simulation brings us to a more profound loss: intersubjectivity. AI and the Loss of Intersubjectivity Humans learn, grow, and build reality through intersubjectivity—the shared context that gives language its weight. It allows us to share meaning, to agree on what a word represents, and to build mutual understanding through shared experiences. Without it, words float. AI doesn’t participate in intersubjectivity. It doesn’t share meaning—it predicts output. And yet, when someone asks an AI a question, they often believe the answer reflects their framing. It doesn’t. It reflects the average of averages, the statistical ghost of comprehension. The illusion of understanding is precise, polite, and utterly hollow. This is how AI reconditions reality at scale—not by force, but by imitation. The result? A slow, silent attrition of originality. Nouns lose their edges. Ideas lose their anchors. Authorship bleeds into prompting. And truth becomes whatever the model says most often. AI and Accountability: A Case Study in Trust and Miscommunication In one recent public example, Air Canada deployed an AI-powered chatbot to handle customer service inquiries. When a customer asked about bereavement fare discounts, the chatbot confidently invented a policy that didn’t exist. The airline initially tried to avoid responsibility, but the court disagreed. In February 2024, a tribunal ruled that Air Canada was liable for the misinformation provided by its chatbot. This wasn’t just a technical glitch—it was a trust failure. The AI-generated text sounded plausible, helpful, and human, but it lacked grounding in policy, context, or shared understanding. In effect, the airline’s brand spoke out of both sides of its mouth and cost them. This is the risk when language is generated without intersubjectivity, oversight, or friction. The Linguistic Drift of AI: What the Data Tells Us About Language Decay It’s not just theory—research is now quantifying how generative AI systems are shifting the landscape of language itself. A study titled Playing with Words: Comparing the Vocabulary and Lexical Richness of ChatGPT and Humans found that AI-generated outputs consistently use a narrower vocabulary, with significantly fewer nouns and stylistic words than human writing. Building on this, an analysis of over 14 million PubMed abstracts revealed measurable shifts in word frequency following the rise of LLM use. While many precise, technical nouns faded, terms like “delves” and “showcasing” surged. The shift is not random; it’s a statistically driven flattening of language, where standard, action-oriented, or stylistic terms are promoted, and specificity is sidelined. Some researchers link this to a broader problem known as “model collapse.” As AI models are increasingly trained on synthetic data, including their outputs, they may degrade over time. This leads to a feedback loop where less diverse, less semantically rich language becomes the norm. The result is a measurable reduction in lexical, syntactic, and semantic diversity—the very fabric of meaning and precision. The implications are vast. If AI systems are deprioritizing nouns at scale, then the structures we use to hold ideas—people, places, identities, and concepts—are being eroded. In real time, we are watching the grammatical infrastructure of human thought being reweighted by machines that do not think. What AI’s Language Shift Means for Brands and Business Strategy The erosion of language precision has significant implications for businesses, particularly those that rely on storytelling, branding, and effective communication. Brands are built on narrative consistency, anchored by nouns, identities, and associations that accumulate cultural weight over time. However, as AI systems normalize probabilistic language and predictive phrasing, even brand voice becomes a casualty of convergence. Differentiation erodes—messaging blurs. Trust becomes more complicated to earn and more uncomplicated to mimic. As this Forbes piece outlines, there are serious reasons why brands must be cautious with generative AI when it comes to preserving authenticity and voice. Moreover, AI-powered content platforms optimize for engagement, not meaning. Businesses relying on LLMs to generate customer-facing content risk flattening their uniqueness in favor of what’s statistically safe. Without human oversight, brand language may drift toward the generic, the probable, and the forgettable. How To Safeguard Meaning in the Age of AI Resist the flattening. Businesses and individuals alike must reclaim intentionality in language. Here’s how—and why it matters: If you don’t define your brand voice, AI will average it. If you don’t protect the language of your contracts, AI will remix it. If you don’t curate your culture, AI will feed it back to you—statistically safe but spiritually hollow. Double down on human authorship: Don’t outsource your voice to a model. Use AI for augmentation, not substitution. Protect linguistic originality: Encourage specificity, metaphor, and vocabulary diversity in your communication. Nouns matter. Audit your outputs: Periodically review AI-generated materials. Look for signs of drift—has your language lost its edge? Invest in language guardianship: Treat your brand’s lexicon like intellectual property. Define it. Defend it. Champion intersubjectivity: Allow shared context in both personal and professional communication. AI can simulate, but only humans can mean. The Necessity of Friction: Why Human Involvement Must Temper AI Friction isn’t a flaw in human systems—it’s a feature. It’s where meaning is made, thought is tested, and creativity wrestles with uncertainty. Automation is a powerful economic accelerant, but without deliberate pauses—without a human in the loop—we risk stripping away the qualities that make us human. Language is one of those qualities. Every hesitation, nuance, and word choice reflects cognition, culture, and care. Remove the friction, and you remove the humanity. AI can offer speed, fluency, and pattern-matching, but it can’t provide presence, and presence is where meaning lives. AI’s Closing Refrain: A Call to Remember Meaning Emily M. Bender, a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington, has emerged as one of the most principled and prescient critics of large language models. In her now-famous co-authored paper, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots," she argues that these systems don’t understand language—they merely remix it. They are, in her words, “stochastic parrots”: machines that generate plausible-sounding language without comprehension or intent. Yet we’re letting those parrots draft our emails, write our ads, and even shape our laws. We’re allowing models trained on approximations to become arbiters of communication, culture, and identity. This is not language—it’s mimicry at scale. And mimicry, unchecked, becomes a distortion. When AI outputs are mistaken for understanding, the baseline of meaning erodes. The problem isn’t just that AI might be wrong. It’s that it sounds so right, we stop questioning it. In the name of optimization, we risk erasing the texture of human communication. Our metaphors, our double meanings, our moments of productive ambiguity—these are what make language alive. Remove that, and a stream of consensus-safe, risk-averse echo remains. Functional? Yes. Meaningful? Not really. The stakes aren’t just literary—they’re existential. If language is the connective tissue between thought and reality, and if that tissue is replaced with statistical scaffolding, thinking becomes outsourced. Once sharpened by friction, our voices become blurred in a sea of plausible phrasings. Without intersubjectivity, friction, or nouns, we are scripting ourselves out of the story, one autocomplete at a time We are not being silenced. We are being auto-completed. And the most dangerous part? We asked for it. Before we ask what AI can say next, we should ask: What has already gone unsaid? In this quiet war, we don’t lose language all at once. We lose it word by word—until we forget we ever had something to say. I asked brand strategist and storyteller Michelle Garside, whose work spans billion-dollar brands and purpose-driven founders, to share her perspective on what’s at risk as automation flattened language. Her response was both precise and profound: If language is being flattened, we need more people doing the opposite: excavating. Listening for what’s buried beneath the noise. Uncovering the phrase that unlocks the person. That’s not a prompt—it’s a process. And it’s a deeply human one. When someone says something that lands—not because it sounds good, but because it’s true. You can see it in their body. You can feel it in the silence that follows. No algorithm can replicate that because that moment isn’t statistical. It’s sacred. The risk isn’t just that AI will get things wrong. It’s that it will sound just right enough to stop us from looking deeper. To stop us from asking what’s real. To stop us from finding the words only we could say. We don’t need more words. We need more meaning. And meaning isn’t generated. It’s remembered. When it comes to language and AI, that’s the line to carry forward—not just because it sounds good, but because it’s true. #rewriting #reality #one #word #time

You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games here The Nintendo Switch 2 is a beast of a handheld that can support Nvidia DLSS, ray-tracing and other modern rendering features. While the console’s handheld display supports VRRtechnology to smooth out inconsistent framerates, the console’s Docked Mode output does not. Just weeks ago, Nintendo removed mentions of VRR support in Docked Mode from its official website for the upcoming console. However, Digital Foundry has now confirmed that developers have been informed of the feature’s absence when connecting the console to a TV. Nintendo Switch 2 loses VRR in Docked Mode In a recent video, Digital Foundry lead Richard Leadbetter confirmed the curious VRR decision in a deep breakdown of the Nintendo Switch 2 components. Backed by a source of developer documentation, it’s stated that the Dock simply doesn’t support VRR. “As far as Switch 2 developers are concerned, VRR, right now at least, is indeed a function of the internal display only and that there is no support at all right now for VRR over HDMI,” Leadbetter explained.” The respected journalist and video games analyst explained that the dock included with the Nintendo Switch 2 might not support the technology due to its older HDMI port. “The best theory that we have for this is that the dock’s Display Port to HDMI connector doesn’t support standard HDMI VRR, but whatever is the cause, we really hope to see Nintendo provide some sort of solution in due course.” With the constrained specifications of the Nintendo Switch 2, VRR support is a fantastic option. As 120Hz screens become more common, 40fps modes are offering great experiences for titles that can’t hit 60fps. For the Switch 2, this type of mode will be possible in Portable Mode, but not in Docked Mode. If this is indeed a hardware issue, the only way to actually bring VRR to Docked Mode would be with a revised dock sometime in the future which would split the user base. Would Nintendo be comfortable doing this? Well, judging by the company’s past, probably not. Subscribe to our newsletters! By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime. Share #nintendo #switch #vrr #not #possible

May 13, 20255 min readVenus Isn’tDeadA reappraisal of decades-old data suggests that strange circular formations on Venus could be volcanic “rings of fire” created by ongoing geological activityBy Elise Cutts edited by Lee BillingsThe northern hemisphere of Venus, as captured in radar data from NASA’s Magellan spacecraft. Some of the circular features seen in this image are coronae, mysterious formations that recent studies suggest could be sites of ongoing geological activity. NASA/JPL-CaltechEarth’s geology is downright vital. Here, giant “plates” of the crust rift apart and smash together like pieces of an ever changing planetary jigsaw puzzle. Mountains rise, volcanoes spew, and Earth itself quakes as the crust constantly remakes itself in the ceaseless cycle of plate tectonics. This is a process that controls the flow of carbon through our planet and stabilizes its climate; were it not for plate tectonics, Earth might not be habitable at all.No other rocky world in our solar system has anything approaching Earth’s degree of geological activity. At least, that’s what scientists used to think. Mercury, Mars and the moon appear essentially inert. But Venus, our closest neighbor and the only other large rocky world around the sun, is now starting to look far livelier than once thought. A fresh look at decades-old data from NASA’s Magellan probe has found evidence of active tectonics—around dozens of circular volcanic features called coronae—on Venus today. The finding, published on Wednesday in Science Advances, provides some of the best evidence to date that Venus isn’t dead—at least, not when it comes to tectonics.“Venus works differently than the Earth but not as different as what was originally assumed,” says the study’s co-lead author Anna Gülcher of the University of Bern in Switzerland. “We should think of tectonics as not just a black-and-white picture.”On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.“Questions as fundamental as ‘Is Venus alive today?’ are extremely hard to answer,” says planetary scientist Paul Byrne of the University of Washington in St. Louis, who wasn’t involved in the study. This new evidence of geological activity around the coronae suggests “the heart of Venus still beats today. I think that’s extremely invaluable for us to understand the big, rocky world next door.”Venus is called “Earth’s evil twin” for good reason: the planet is almost exactly as large as the Earth and is made of roughly the same stuff. But while Earth is a verdant water world, Venus is a scorched hellscape with temperatures hot enough to melt lead, a dreary, permanently overcast sky and air so thick that it crushes spacecraft as if they were tin cans.For a while, Venus was widely assumed to be just as dead on the inside as it is on the outside. Lacking any obvious plate tectonics—which can help release a world’s internal heat—Venus’s interior was thought to instead just simmer like the contents of a tight-lidded pot on a stove. According to one popular hypothesis, the pot had eventually boiled over: after eons of frustrated heating, some 800 million years ago, the planet’s outer shell buckled, and Venus’s entire surface was paved over with immense outpourings of fresh lava. And, the thinking went, with all that heat dissipated, the planet’s geology basically shut down.But evidence is mounting that Venus is, geologically at least, still kicking. Most notably, in 2023 two researchers scrutinizing 30-year-old Magellan data realized that the probe had caught a volcanic eruption in the act: radar images of the volcano Maat Mons that were taken months apart showed what looked like a caldera collapse and subsequent lava flow. Venus, it seems, still has active volcanoes. Some researchers now think it could have active tectonics, too. And in 2020 Gülcher and her colleagues showed via simulations of Venusian tectonics that the planet’s mysterious, ring-shaped coronae could be a good place to look for such activity.Tectonics refers to the processes that deform a rocky planet’s brittle outer shell. On Earth, this outer shell—the lithosphere, which includes the crust and part of the upper mantle—is broken into tectonic plates that drift over the hot, plastic mantle. When two plates collide, one of them can slide below the other and dive down into the mantle in a process called subduction. On Earth, subducting plates start melting as they sink, feeding volcanoes along plate boundaries. Such volcanoes include Japan’s Mount Fuji and western North America’s Cascade Range.Unlike Earth, Venus doesn’t have global plate tectonics. The new study suggests, however, that around coronae, something quite similar to subduction could be happening.Gülcher and her colleagues simulated several tectonic processes that might be occurring around coronae and compared their predictions to real observations collected by the Magellan probe 30 years ago. The comparisons were more than skin-deep: the researchers used gravity data to take a peek underground. Hot rock is generally less dense than cold rock, and these density variations from place to place can correspondingly alter the strength of a planet’s gravitational field. So Magellan’s spatial mapping of Venus’s gravity can “see” if there’s hot, light material under a corona—a sign that rock is actively rising up from the mantle below.Of the 75 coronae that the team could resolve in Magellan’s gravitational maps, 52 seem to be geologically active. The predicted and real data lined up so well for some coronae that “we could hardly believe our eyes,” says the study’s other co-lead author Gael Cascioli of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Most of the active coronae were encircled by trenches, a hint that old crust dives into Venus’s mantle around these rocky rings, where it is driven downward as buoyant rock rises from below in the middle of each corona’s ring structure. “Basically, if something goes down, something goes up,” Gülcher says. Where the lithosphere is softer and more pliable, bits of it could break off and “drip” down into the mantle in globs. In places where the lithosphere is stiffer, entire slabs of crust could subduct in a small-scale, circular mirror of Earth’s subduction zones, like those that form the Pacific Ocean’s famed volcanic Ring of Fire.Working with 30-year-old data comes with an obvious limitation: the data quality often isn’t very good compared with newer observations. The new study’s researchers did well with what they had, Byrne says. But NASA’s upcoming VERITASmission could do much better—and the team predicted exactly how much better in the paper. “The improvement would be extraordinary,” Cascioli says. Instead of being limited to analyzing 75 coronae, VERITAS’s gravity dataset should allow scientists to examine hundreds of the strange ring-shaped features.For the foreseeable future, Venus is the only other large, rocky world that we or our robotic emissaries will ever reach. Understanding why Earth and Venus ended up so different despite having so much in common helps us understand our own planet—and whether the rocky worlds we’re beginning to glimpse around other stars are more like Earth or instead resemble its evil twin.“Venus is the world that we probably understand least,” Byrne says. “Yet it’s the one, arguably, I think, that’s the most important.” #strange #formations #venus #hint #ongoing