Try, try again SpaceX test-fires Starship for an all-important next flight A notice to mariners suggests SpaceX's next Starship test flight could launch as soon as May 21. Stephen Clark – May 13, 2025 6:33 pm | 0 Starship's six Raptor engines fired for about 60 seconds Monday on a test stand in South Texas. Credit: SpaceX Starship's six Raptor engines fired for about 60 seconds Monday on a test stand in South Texas. Credit: SpaceX Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more SpaceX fired six Raptor engines on the company's next Starship rocket Monday, clearing a major hurdle on the path to launch later this month on a high-stakes test flight to get the private rocket program back on track. Starship ignited its Raptor engines Monday morning on a test stand near SpaceX's Starbase launch facility in South Texas. The engine ran for approximately 60 seconds, and SpaceX confirmed the test-firing in a post on X: "Starship completed a long duration six-engine static fire and is undergoing final preparations for the ninth flight test." SpaceX hasn't officially announced a target launch date, but maritime warnings along Starship's flight path over the Gulf of Mexico suggest the launch might happen as soon as next Wednesday, May 21. The launch window would open at 6:30 pm local time (7:30 pm EDT; 23:30 UTC). If everything goes according to plan, Starship is expected to soar into space and fly halfway around the world, targeting a reentry and controlled splashdown into the Indian Ocean. After Monday's successful static fire test, SpaceX is in the final stretch of preparations for Starship's ninth full-scale test flight. Last month, SpaceX test-fired the rocket's massive booster stage, known as Super Heavy. The Super Heavy booster assigned to the next Starship launch will become the first that SpaceX will reuse from a previous test flight. This, alone, is a significant step for the Starship program. SpaceX wants the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage to become rapidly reusable, eventually operating more like an airplane than a legacy rocket. The booster slated to launch on Flight 9 made its first flight in January, when it soared to the edge of space, released SpaceX's Starship upper stage, and returned to the launch pad, where it was caught in mid-air by heavy-duty mechanical arms. SpaceX will again try to catch the Super Heavy booster on Flight 9. Righting the ship While reusing the first stage is a noteworthy milestone, the next flight is important for another reason. SpaceX's last two Starship test flights ended prematurely when the rocket's upper stage lost power and spun out of control, dropping debris into the sea near the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. With Flight 9, SpaceX hopes to get the Starship program back on track. The company aimed for as many as 25 Starship test flights this year, but will now likely fall short of that number. Near-term goals beyond Flight 9 include returning Starship from low-Earth orbit to the launch site, with a tower catch similar to the one SpaceX used to recover the Super Heavy booster. Then, SpaceX will begin flight experiments with an in-space refueling system to transfer super-cold liquid propellants between two Starships in orbit. This is an important milestone for NASA, which has a contract with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop a version of Starship for landing humans on the Moon. To do that, SpaceX must launch around 10 Starship refueling tankers—the exact number remains unclear—to gas up the Moon-bound Starship lander before it can depart low-Earth orbit. SpaceX founder Elon Musk also wants Starship to fly to Mars, which will, likewise, require a mastery of in-space refueling. NASA may also soon rely on Starship and other massive commercial rockets to launch astronauts from Earth. The Trump administration has proposed canceling NASA's Space Launch System rocket after two more flights in favor of lower-cost commercial options. Starship's black heat shield tiles are visible here during the rocket's static fire test on Monday morning. Before any of this becomes possible, SpaceX must prove it has overcome the setbacks encountered on the two previous test flights. Both flights failed at roughly the same time—approximately eight minutes after liftoff—near the end of the ship's engine firing. SpaceX investigators, working under the oversight of the Federal Aviation Administration, determined the Starship test flight in January failed after propellant leaks led to fires in the rocket's aft compartment, or attic. This led to the early shutdown of the rocket's engines and eventual breakup. Engineers concluded the leaks were most likely caused by vibrations during the ship's climb into space. The vibrations were in resonance with the vehicle's natural frequency, intensifying the shaking beyond the levels SpaceX predicted. For the next test flight on March 6, SpaceX made changes to the ship's feed lines routing fuel to its Raptor engines, made adjustments to propellant temperatures, and flew the engines at a new throttle setting. But that didn't solve the problem. Once again, Starship's engines cut off too early, and the rocket broke apart before falling to Earth. SpaceX said "an energetic event" in the aft portion of Starship resulted in the loss of several Raptor engines, followed by a loss of attitude control and a loss of communications with the ship. The similarities between the two failures suggest a likely design issue with the upgraded "Block 2" version of Starship, which debuted in January and flew again in March. Starship Block 2 is slightly taller than the ship SpaceX used on the rocket's first six flights, with redesigned flaps, improved batteries and avionics, and notably, a new fuel feed line system for the ship's Raptor vacuum engines. SpaceX has not released the results of the investigation into the Flight 8 failure, and the FAA hasn't yet issued a launch license for Flight 9. Likewise, SpaceX hasn't released any information on the changes it made to Starship for next week's flight. What we do know about the Starship vehicle for Flight 9—designated Ship 35—is that it took a few tries to complete a full-duration test-firing. SpaceX completed a single-engine static fire on April 30, simulating the restart of a Raptor engine in space. Then, on May 1, SpaceX aborted a six-engine test-firing before reaching its planned 60-second duration. Videos captured by media observing the test showed a flash in the engine plume, and at least one piece of debris was seen careening out of the flame trench below the ship. SpaceX ground crews returned Ship 35 to the production site a couple of miles away, perhaps to replace a damaged engine, before rolling Starship back to the test stand over the weekend for Monday's successful engine firing. Now, the ship will head back to the Starbase build site, where technicians will make final preparations for Flight 9. These final tasks may include loading mock-up Starlink broadband satellites into the ship's payload bay and touchups to the rocket's heat shield. These are two elements of Starship that SpaceX engineers are eager to demonstrate on Flight 9, beyond just fixing the problems from the last two missions. Those failures prevented Starship from testing its satellite deployer and an upgraded heat shield designed to better withstand scorching temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius) during reentry. 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 Source: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-test-fires-starship-for-an-all-important-next-flight/ #spacex #testfires #starship #for #allimportant #next #flight

Table of Contents Table of Contents Another step toward a true Sonos alternative Between HomePod and Era 100 Still no AirPlay Tomorrow, Wiim will announce its first wireless speaker, the Wiim Sound. It looks like a lot like Apple’s HomePod, with an almost cylindrical shape that’s wrapped in a fabric grille and topped with a set of touch controls. But the detail that will likely get the most attention is its built-in, 1.8-inch circular touchscreen. The hi-res screen offers the same album displays and controls as the one on the front of the Wiim Ultra, the company’s flagship network music streamer. As with all of Wiim’s products, its core feature set is designed to work seamlessly with the rest of the affordable Wiim ecosystem, giving Sonos owners even more reason to make a switch. Recommended Videos The Wiim Sound is set to debut at High End Munich 2025, an audiophile-centric audio show in Germany. Wiim hasn’t released pricing or specific availability yet, noting only that the Wiim Sound will arrive in “Q3 2025 on Amazon and at select retailers.” For now, it’s only available in black. Related Wiim The Wiim Sound isn’t the first Wiim-compatible wireless speaker. Earlier in 2025, the company announced it had partnered with Swedish brand, Audio Pro to create Wiim Edition versions of its A10 Mk II and C10 Mk II wireless speakers, which can be discovered and controlled natively within the Wiim Home app. However, the Wiim Sound marks an important milestone in the company’s evolution as it begins to build out an ecosystem of in-house designed products that let it compete more directly with Sonos. It’s not difficult to imagine that Wiim will continue this expansion, eventually working its way into the rest of Sonos’ categories, such as soundbars, Bluetooth speakers, and possibly headphones. Wiim Physically, the Wiim Sound straddles the line between the Apple HomePod and the Sonos Era 100. Its footprint (5.7 x 5.7 inches) is almost exactly the same as the HomePod, while its height, at 7.5 inches is slightly taller than the Era 100 (7.18 inches). The presence of the circular touchscreen will no doubt renew speculation about Apple’s next HomePod, which has been widely rumored to include some kind of display. Internally, the Wiim Sound is much closer to Sonos’ speaker, with a 4-inch woofer and two balanced-mode radiator (BMR) tweeters. Thanks to those dual tweeters, Wiim says the Sound can reproduce two-channel stereo, though like the Era 100, getting true stereo separation may be tricky. Wiim hasn’t revealed the amplifier layout details, but it claims there’s 100 watts of combined power on tap. On the bottom of the speaker are ports for power, and 10/100 Ethernet, plus a 3.5mm jack for analog inputs. Wireless connectivity is supported by both Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. Wiim calls the Sound a smart speaker, but since there’s no built-in mic and no native voice assistant, that might be stretching the term. You can, however, use it as Amazon Alexa device via the included voice remote. For the Wiim Sound, the company has created a modified version of it Siri-remote clone, the Wiim Voice Remote 2. Alternatively, the Wiim Sound is compatible with Google Assistant and can respond to those voice commands if you own an Assistant-capable smartphone or other device. As with the rest of Wiim’s ecosystem, the Wiim Sound has an impressive array of streaming and EQ features, including: Hi-res audio support up to 24-bit/192 kHz Chromecast (Google Cast), Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, DLNA, or Alexa Cast 24 preset EQ profiles, a 10-band graphic equalizer, and an optional parametric EQ interface Room correction via a smartphone running the Wiim Home app You can control the Wiim Sound as part of a larger multiroom audio system within the Wiim Home app. This includes grouping the Sound with other Wiim components for synchronized playback as well as the ability to stereo-pair two Wiim Sounds. Interestingly, a single Wiim Sound can be used as center channel speaker, or two can be used as surround speakers within a 5.1 configuration. To do this, you’ll need a 5.1 source of sound — either a 5.1 audio recording that lives in your personal library on your home network, or from a TV plugged into one of Wiim’s HDMI-ARC compatible devices (Wiim Ultra, Wiim Amp, Wiim Amp Pro). For reasons known only to Wiim and Apple, the Wiim Sound is now the third Wiim streaming product to launch without support for Apple’s AirPlay 2 wireless streaming protocol. When the Wiim Ultra debuted without AirPlay, it was believed to be a temporary omission — one that would be rectified with a firmware update. This failed to happen, and then Wiim launched the Amp Pro, also without AirPlay. While AirPlay is a useful feature for iPhone users, letting them stream audio on their home Wi-Fi networks from any any app that supports it, its popularity among Wiim’s users is unclear. AirPlay 2 introduces lossy compression, which audiophiles consider an unacceptable tradeoff. Moreover, the trend toward streaming apps building their own version of AirPlay (Tidal Connect, Spotify Connect) plus the availability of Google Cast, reduces the need for AirPlay under most circumstances. Even on an iPhone when streaming Apple Music, Bluetooth can serve as an acceptable AirPlay alternative on Wiim’s products. Source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/exclusive-wiims-first-wireless-speaker-takes-on-apple-and-sonos/ #exclusivethis #wiims #first #wireless #speaker

"We're excited to become a clinical-stage biotech company; it's exciting from an AI drug discovery standpoint," says Absci founder and CEO Sean McClain. AbsciArtificial intelligence has been working its way into the drug development process for years now, but with little to show so far in revamping the notoriously burdensome process. While drugs are being developed using AI in a variety of ways, no drugs developed completely by AI, from start to finish, have so far made it over the finish line of regulatory approval. For that reason, every attempt by an AI drug to get approval is a landmark of sorts. Tuesday, drug development startup Absci, based in Vancouver, Washington, announced such a landmark, the beginning of a Phase I clinical trial for a therapy it built from scratch using generative AI to treat irritable bowel disease. The company announced it has "dosed" the first patients in Phase I trials, meaning, administering doses of its drug, ABS-101, to healthy volunteers. "This is a very big milestone for the company," said Sean McClain, founder and CEO of Absci, in a conversation with me via Google Meet Tuesday afternoon."We're excited to become a clinical-stage biotech company; it's exciting from an AI drug discovery standpoint," he said.Phase I is the first of three phases in a proposed drug's clinical trial process that must be completed in order for the drug to be considered for approval by regulators (the Food & Drug Administration in the US). The purpose of Phase I is to prove that no adverse side effects result from the drug being put into humans for the first time.  Absci describes the process:The Phase 1 (ACTRN12625000212459p) randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, first-in-human study of single ascending doses of ABS-101 will evaluate safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics (PK), and pharmacodynamics (PD) in healthy volunteers. The study is expected to enroll approximately 40 healthy adult participants. The primary endpoint is safety and tolerability, with PK, PD, and immunogenicity serving as secondary endpoints. The Phase 1 interim data readout is expected in the second half of 2025. Absci has used AI to dramatically streamline the drug development and pre-clinical process, known as the "front end" of drug development, where the discovery of drugs happens, and the initial validation using in vitro and in vivo animal models, before being put into human subjects. ABS-101 was developed from scratch and brought to the clinic in just 24 months, and at a cost of $15 million."Because of AI, we got to the clinic in roughly half the time, from five years to just over 24 months," McClain told me, "and with an order-of-magnitude less cost, $15 million to get this asset into the clinic versus what typically costs $50 to $100 million.Absci's AI-driven software tools, combined with its own wet lab, are a virtual reinvention of laboratory procedures.The company uses generative AI "to predict antibodies from scratch that can bind to a target of interest," McClain said. Traditionally, scientists in a wet lab would use an animal's immune system to generate an antibody. With generative AI, the antibody can be created as a computer model.Absci's ABS-101 is the first drug the company has ever brought to the clinic after over a decade spent on fundamental computer work and wet lab work. It is the company's lead drug candidate in its pipeline of drugs. The novel ABS-101 antibody, developed using generative AI, binds to the TL1A protein in immune cells whose over-expression has been linked to a variety of inflammatory autoimmune diseases.  Absci AbsciNot only did AI cut time and costs, but it has brought other novel advantages, said Christian Stegmann, the company's head of drug development, on the same call."Others have brought antibodies to the clinic that have had shortcomings, which we've tried to address," he said. A big issue has been that prior therapies "lead the patient to develop anti-drug antibodies, which can lead the patients to needing to switch treatments." The ABS-101, he said, is intended to have "reduced immunogenicity risk" by design, which will hopefully mean less drug resistance.In addition, the AI techniques allowed the company to go immediately to a "subcutaneous" method of administering the dose, rather than via a drip into the vein, as is standard in Phase I trials. "That is unusual; it usually comes much later in clinical development settings," said Stegmann. Using a needle versus a drip is important because, ideally, the final drug will be self-administered by patients. If the drug is already being tried out via needle rather than drip, it brings the therapy that much closer to its final form. "That allows us to be quicker in the overall clinical development pipeline, and to gather data for the setting that is actually going to reach the market" in the drug's final form, assuming it is ultimately approved."This is an advantage of AI," McClain said, "this ability to model not just for affinity and potency, but also to optimize for the manufacturability and such -- to go to all the attributes you want in the first go-around; that really helps."The full Phase I clinical trial will extend well into next year, said McClain and Stegmann. Gathering results is somewhat longer than for other Phase I trials because ABS-101 was designed to extend the time between doses. That is a benefit for patients as it makes less frequent dosing (less frequent needle pricks) possible, but it means the trial takes longer to carry out those dosages. "We have a long half life we have to monitor for a while," explained Stegmann.Well before the completion of Phase I, later this year, McClain expects to have a meaningful "read-out" of initial data from the Phase I. "We are going to, in Phase I, understand important pieces [of the whole trial process], as well as confirming whether we see the extended half-life" of the dosage, said McClain. "We will also get a look at the immunogenicity profile; there will be a lot of good information, as far as being able to show the efficacy" of ABS-101.Because of the incremental data Absci will get later this year, they will know enough to seek approval for Phase II and begin recruiting subjects before the completion of Phase I. Phase II is where the intense work of measuring the drug's effectiveness takes place, said McClain. "It's fair to say we will be moving faster into Phase II" than might otherwise be the case, he said. After ABS-101, McClain's next candidate approaching clinical trials is ABS-201, which has two indications of note, one for treating hair loss in the form of alopecia, and another for endometriosis. ABS-201 is expected to enter a Phase I trial in the first half of next year, McClain said.By any measure, drug development needs an overhaul. Creating new drugs, or even repurposing old ones, comes with an enormous cost. A new drug takes, on average, 10 years to develop, from fundamental chemistry through clinical trials to regulatory approval. It can cost almost $3 billion, and the failure rate of most new drug candidates is 96%. There has been a lot of activity so far, without a breakthrough AI drug. The US Food & Drug Administration's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research received over 500 drug applications through 2023 that used some sort of "AI component," according to CDER's materials on AI in drug development. But, as Nature Magazine's Melanie Senior reported in December, "No AI-enabled drug candidate has yet made it past regulators, despite several being in clinical trials."Aside from Absci, a small cohort of startups have made progress getting into trials even if they don't yet have a clinical result. For example, BPGbio of Framingham, Mass., has a drug for pancreatic cancer, developed using AI approaches, that is working its way through Phase II clinical trials.  Beyond the results of ABS-101, and other trials, the goal of Absci is to ultimately "predict the biology." That means the company will seek to "actually start to predict where an antibody should bind to a target to give us the biological response that we want."Absci's stock is publicly traded on Nasdaq. The shares have defied a tough stock market this year, rising 12% versus a 2% decline for the Nasdaq Composite Index. After hours on Tuesday, as Absci issued its press release, the stock surged by as much as 25% in late trading. Featured Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-ai-designed-drug-for-ibd-was-just-given-to-human-subjects-for-the-first-time/ #this #aidesigned #drug #for #ibd #was #just #given #human #subjects #the #first #time

Microsoft has issued fixes for a total of five new zero-day vulnerabilities out of a grand total of just over 70 addressable common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) on the fifth Patch Tuesday of 2025 – over 80 when third-party issues are accounted for. In numerical order, this month’s zero days are as follows: CVE-2025-30400, an elevation of privilege (EoP) vulnerability in Microsoft DWM Core Library; CVE-2025-30397, a memory corruption leading to remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Scripting Engine; CVE-2025-32701, an EoP vulnerability in Windows Common Log File System Driver (CLFS); CVE-2025-32706, a second EoP flaw in CLFS; CVE-2025-32709, an EoP issue in Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock (AFD.sys). All five of these CVEs are listed by Microsoft as being exploited in the wild, but have not yet been made public. They are all rated as being of Important severity, and all save the Scripting Engine flaw carry CVSS ratings of 7.8. Mike Walters, president and co-founder of patch management specialist Action1, said that the two CLFS issues stood out as particularly dangerous given its importance in computing – the CLFS is a critical component that providers logging services to user- and kernel-mode applications, and is widely used by various system services and third-party applications. “Attackers exploiting these vulnerabilities can escalate privileges to system level, granting them full control to run arbitrary code, install malware, modify data, or disable security protections,” said Walters. “With low complexity and minimal privileges needed, these flaws pose a serious risk, especially given the confirmed in-the-wild exploitation [and] while no public exploit code is currently available, the presence of active attacks suggests that targeted campaigns, potentially involving advanced persistent threats (APTs), are already underway. “Organisations should prioritise immediate assessment and remediation of these vulnerabilities to prevent potential compromise. Any organisation running Windows systems – across enterprise, government, education, or consumer sectors – could be exposed. Given Windows’ global footprint, millions of devices are likely at risk,” said Walters. CVE-2025-30400 in DWM Core Library should also be high on security admins’ patching lists, observed Kev Breen, senior director of threat research at Immersive. He explained: “If exploited, it would allow attackers to gain system-level permission on the affected host. With this level of privilege, attackers would be able to gain full control over the host, including any security tools and user accounts, potentially allowing for domain-level access to be compromised. “This CVE is marked as ‘Exploitation Detected’ by the Microsoft team, meaning patches should be applied immediately as threat groups, including ransomware affiliates, will be quick to leverage this once more details become public.” Breen added that once this happens, cyber teams and threat hunters should work quickly to review their systems for indicators of compromise (IoCs) to ensure that they haven’t been hit in the window between the point at which threat actors began at-scale exploitation, and the patch was released. Breen’s colleague, cyber threat intelligence researcher Ben Hopkins, ran the rule over the remaining exploited zero-days, CVE-20205-30397 in Scripting Engine and CVE-2025-32709 in AFD.sys “A scripting engine memory corruption vulnerability occurs when the Microsoft scripting engine mishandles objects in memory, in this case leading to an elevation of privilege being performed by an attacker,” he explained. “This specific vulnerability exists … involves access to a resource using (‘type confusion’) which allows attackers to execute code over a network. Type confusion in this context occurs when a program mistakenly treats a piece of data as a different type than it actually is, which leads to undefined and unpredictable behaviour, allowing the attacker to execute arbitrary code and elevate their privileges,” said Hopkins For the layperson, this means that having attained system-level privileges, a threat actor could easily access sensitive data and look for opportunities to pivot to other, more valuable parts of the victim’s network. Turning to the issue affecting AFD.sys, a core Windows kernel-mode driver that supports network socket operations by bridging from WinSock (Windows Sockets API) in user space, and lower-level network drivers in the kernel, Hopkins explained that an unauthorized attacker could exploit a condition in which memory that has been deallocated can still be accessed to inject controlled data into memory and influence how the program behaves, ultimately granting them the ability to elevate their privileges. In both cases, what this means is that having attained system-level privileges, a threat actor could easily access sensitive data and look for opportunities to pivot to other, more valuable parts of the victim’s network. Two additional zero-days have been publicly-disclosed today (13 May) but have not yet been reported as coming under attack at the time of writing. These are CVE-2025-26685, a spoofing vulnerability in Microsoft Defender for Identity, and CVE-2025-32702, an RCE vulnerability in Visual Studio. Both of these are rated of Important severity, carrying CVSS scores of 6.5 and 7.8 respectively. Finally, the May update brings a total of 11 critical flaws affecting Azure Automation, Azure DevOps, Azure Storage Resource, Microsoft Dataverse, Microsoft msagsfeedback.zurewebsites.net, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft Virtual Machine Bus and Remote Desktop Client (RDP). In their impact, these issues run the gamut from EoP to spoofing to information disclosure, and six of them lead to RCE, said Microsoft. Of the critical issues, Walters’ co-CEO and co-founder at Action1, Alex Vovk, told Computer Weekly that the two RDP flaws stood out in particular. These are tracked as CVE-2025-29966 and CVE-2025-29967. “Both vulnerabilities pose critical risks, including remote code execution, full system compromise, and data breaches,” remarked Vovk. “Given the broad adoption of remote desktop services, many organizations are potentially exposed. CVE-2025-29966 and CVE-2025-29967 underscore the urgent need to secure both client and server components in remote access environments.” Read more about Patch Tuesday April 2025: Microsoft is correcting 124 vulnerabilities in its March Patch Tuesday, one of which is being actively exploited in the wild, and 11 of which are ‘critical’. March 2025: The third Patch Tuesday of 2025 brought fixes for 57 flaws and a hefty number of zero-days. February 2025: Microsoft corrected 57 vulnerabilities, two of which are being actively exploited in the wild, and three of which are ‘critical’. January 2025: The largest Patch Tuesday of the 2020s so far brings fixes for more than 150 CVEs ranging widely in their scope and severity – including eight zero-day flaws. December 2024: Microsoft has fixed over 70 CVEs in its final Patch Tuesday update of the year, and defenders should prioritise a zero-day in the Common Log File System Driver, and another impactful flaw in the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. November 2024: High-profile vulns in NTLM, Windows Task Scheduler, Active Directory Certificate Services and Microsoft Exchange Server should be prioritised from November’s Patch Tuesday update. October 2024: Stand-out vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s latest Patch Tuesday drop include problems in Microsoft Management Console and the Windows MSHTML Platform. September 2024: Four critical remote code execution bugs in Windows and three critical elevated privileges vulnerabilities will keep admins busy. August 2024: Microsoft patches six actively exploited zero-days among over 100 issues during its regular monthly update. July 2024: Microsoft has fixed almost 140 vulnerabilities in its latest monthly update, with a Hyper-V zero-day singled out for urgent attention. June 2024: An RCE vulnerability in a Microsoft messaging feature and a third-party flaw in a DNS authentication protocol are the most pressing issues to address in Microsoft’s latest Patch Tuesday update. May 2024: A critical SharePoint vulnerability warrants attention this month, but it is another flaw that seems to be linked to the infamous Qakbot malware that is drawing attention. Source: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366623992/May-Patch-Tuesday-brings-five-exploited-zero-days-to-fix #may #patch #tuesday #brings #five #exploited #zerodays #fix

Tesla is overstocked with Cybertrucks, the PS1 graphics-looking mobile monument to Elon’s deep lack of creativity. With over 10,000 unsold units just sitting in dealerships, the stainless steel monstrosity has become more burden than an automotive revolution. Despite Musk’s grand claims of selling 250,000 Cybertrucks annually, and a million reservations that may as well have been scribbled on crumpled cocktail napkins, Tesla barely eked out 6,400 Cybertruck sales in Q1 of 2025. Videos by VICE At this rate, they’d be lucky to hit 20,000 by year’s end. And that’s assuming the accelerator doesn’t glue itself to the floor again, or any number of the many, many shocking reasons Cybertrucks have been recalled in their brief existence. They appear to be held together with Elmer’s glue. Why Aren’t Tesla Cybertrucks Selling Well? The Cybertruck, a once massively hyped vehicle that would usher in a new era for EVs, is now being called a flop. Even with massively discounted financing, Tesla can’t move these things. It probably doesn’t help when your car has been colloquially nicknamed the “Swasticar” after the company’s CEO/mascot, Elon Musk, started aligning himself with far-right movements from the US to Germany. The truck has become a rolling burning effigy in global protests, thanks to Musk’s charming blend of associating himself with fascists while helping the Trump administration slash and burn the federal government for no reason other than, seemingly, to consolidate power. Combine that with Tesla’s worst sales in Europe in years and a rollback of Cybertruck production, and it’s easy to see why Cybertrucks are just sitting around, waiting for someone to officially label them the DeLorean of the 21st century. Desperate to offload inventory, Tesla dropped a “cheaper” $69,990 Rear Wheel Drive version in April that comes with fewer features and—one assumes a complimentary disclaimer, or maybe even a guarantee, that something on this thing will fall off within a few months. It feels like white flags are being waved all over the place, especially as Tesla redirects workers from Cybertruck production back to the Model Y. While we can’t yet write Cybertruck’s obituary, the prognosis is grim. What was once marketed as the future of transportation now feels like a midlife crisis on wheels. It has simultaneously become a Swasticar and a Gen-Xer divorcemobile, a pair of reputation-ruining associations that will take a miracle to recover from. Source: https://www.vice.com/en/article/tesla-reportedly-has-800-million-worth-of-cybertrucks-that-nobody-wants/ #tesla #reportedly #has #million #worth #cybertrucks #that #nobody #wants

May 12, 20257 min readPhysicists Build a ‘Black Hole Bomb’ in the LaboratoryAstronomical amounts of energy could be extracted from black holes—to build a gigantic bomb, for example. Experts have now implemented this principle in the laboratoryBy Manon Bischoff edited by Lee BillingsAn artist’s rendition of a black hole surrounded by a glowing accretion disc of material, the light from which is warped by the strong gravity. In principle, energy could be harvested from a spinning black hole—and lab-based demonstrations are beginning to show physicists how this could occur. Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty ImagesA bomb from a black hole would probably be the most destructive weapon in the universe. Hypothetically, it could be created by wrapping one of these cosmic monsters in mirrors and waiting for it to go “boom.” Now Hendrik Ulbricht of the University of Southampton in England and his colleagues have demonstrated this principle, called superradiance, in the lab using a rotating metal cylinder instead of a black hole. They submitted their results, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, to the preprint server arXiv.org in late March.“This work shows that a ‘black hole bomb’ can actually be built in the laboratory,” says physicist Vitor Cardoso of the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, who was not involved in the study. “It thus provides a solid basis for studying the entire physics of black holes.”Among the strangest objects in the universe, black holes pack so much mass into such a small space that they can radically warp spacetime. A black hole’s gravitational pull is so strong that within a certain distance, nothing can escape it—not even light. Theorist Roger Penrose is one of the pioneers who first studied black holes mathematically in detail—work for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020. And amid that early work, he realized something surprising.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.As Penrose knew, nothing stands still in our cosmos, not even black holes. These massive monsters can spin, distorting spacetime in the process to form a kind of vortex. An approaching object can be caught up in this vortex and spiral around the spinning black hole. Even before the object passes the event horizon, beyond which not even light can escape gravity’s clutches, it reaches an area that physicists call the “ergosphere.” There the object would have to move faster than light to escape the rotation around the black hole.This ergosphere is a strange place, as Penrose noted, because objects there can possess negative energy. A particle, for example, could split into two equal-but-opposite parts: one with negative energy and another with positive energy. The former would then crash into the black hole (thus reducing the black hole’s energy), allowing the latter to escape the cosmic behemoth’s mighty grip. An external observer would see a particle with a certain energy falling toward the black hole, only to apparently rebound outward with higher energy. The black hole loses part of its rotational energy in the process.Black Hole Mining and SuperradianceIn principle, this would allow black holes to serve as gigantic sources of energy. The process could not only imbue massive objects with more energy but also amplify electromagnetic waves in a phenomenon called superradiance. This realization spurred some physicists to even imagine how advanced alien civilizations might use superradiance to generate energy. But despite how relatively simple it is to describe on paper, no one knew how the signal of superradiance could be observed in real black holes. Thus, the concept initially remained mere speculation.In 1971, however, two years after Penrose first described this phenomenon, physicist Yakov Zel’dovich published research that suggested that black holes aren’t the only objects that can be tapped as superradiant energy sources. Any rotating, axially symmetrical body that absorbs electromagnetic radiation—such as a metal cylinder—can also exhibit superradiance under certain circumstances. “Roughly speaking, the rotating absorber must rotate faster than the phase rotation of the incident radiation,” explains physicist Maria Chiara Braidotti of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, who was involved in the latest work. “If this condition is met, the absorption coefficient of the cylinder changes sign, thus amplifying the radiation.”Zel’dovich even went one step further by showing that superradiance could also take place in a vacuum and wouldn’t require an incoming electromagnetic wave. That’s because on quantum scales the vacuum is anything but empty. At any time, pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles can pop into existence, although they typically immediately annihilate each other again. The phenomenon is known as vacuum fluctuation. And these fluctuations could also be amplified in the vicinity of black holes —or a rotating metal cylinder. “Stephen Hawking didn’t believe this idea and tried to refute it,” explains Marion Cromb, a researcher in Ulbricht’s group at the University of Southampton and a contributor to the new work. “Not only did [Hawking] admit that Zel’dovich was right but he was also able to prove that even nonrotating black holes—without an ergosphere—spontaneously emit radiation.” This realization led to the discovery of Hawking radiation.According to the theoretical calculations, however, vacuum-based superradiance would be so faint that it could not be detected—unless, that is, it was somehow amplified. As Zel’dovich described, the rotating body (black hole or metal cylinder) could be encased in mirrors to reflect the amplified radiation back to the rotating body, intensifying it over and over again. As physicists William Press and Saul Teukolsky realized, so much energy could accumulate inside the mirrors that a gigantic explosion would occur. Press and Teukolsky, therefore, referred to the setup as a black hole bomb.Depending on how much rotational energy the black hole or the metal cylinder has, a result other than a gigantic explosion is conceivable, though. Cardoso and his colleagues described this possibility in a paper published in 2004 that showed how superradiance can cease if the black hole or metal cylinder loses too much angular momentum, thus defusing the explosion.Explosions in the LaboratoryUlbricht, Braidotti and their colleagues now wanted to test all these theoretical predictions in the laboratory. “Originally, we thought it would be too difficult to observe the actual effect,” Braidotti says, nothing that a cylinder would have to rotate so fast that it would be destroyed in the process. For this reason, she initially turned her attention to simpler systems in which superradiance can occur, including a setup with sound waves. “The breakthrough was our noticing how to reduce the frequencies of electromagnetic fields in a very simple way so that they are smaller than the rotation frequencies of the metal cylinders,” Ulbricht explains. The researchers only needed alternating current circuits for this. “This finding opened up the possibility of conducting the experiment with electromagnetic waves,” Braidotti says.The team then turned its attention to electromagnetic superradiance. “The experimental setup itself is quite simple: it consists of a rotating cylinder and the stator coils of a commercially available induction motor, combined with some capacitors and resistors,” Cromb says. These devices were placed around the metal cylinder to generate a magnetic field inside it, which produced electromagnetic radiation. At the same time, these devices also served as mirrors because they reflected the electromagnetic waves back toward the cylinder.“The biggest difficulty was that things were constantly exploding,” Cromb says. “It was a balancing act between measuring a reasonable signal and overloading the system. When the current through the coils became too high, the resistors in the circuit exceeded their rated voltage and burned out. This interrupted the electrical circuit, thus destroying the ‘mirror.’”The researchers initially feared that these overloads would prevent any observation of superradiance. But they were lucky. “The reinforcement was large enough to overcome the loss and enter the area of instability,” Cromb says. In fact, the team was able to show that the voltage in their structure increased exponentially, as predicted by Zel’dovich. This underpins the researchers’ claim of the first-ever lab-based demonstration of an electromagnetic version of a black hole bomb.Note, however, that despite the martial connotations of the name, the “bomb” Ulbricht and his team built in their lab isn’t anything like a military-grade munition—or even a firecracker. It would be quite useless as a weapon because its yield is only on the order of a millijoule of energy—that is, about the same amount involved in pressing a single key on a mechanical keyboard.Radiation-Free Superradiance?Next, Cromb and the team used their setup to study whether superradiance can also take place in a vacuum: Would an electromagnetic signal arise in their apparatus even without a magnetic field? Because the experiment took place at room temperature, thermal fluctuations overshadowed any vacuum fluctuations—meaning that the team could not directly detect the latter. But that very same thermal background noise, the researchers realized, would spontaneously generate electromagnetic waves that could theoretically be amplified.And that is what they did manage to demonstrate: by choosing the appropriate rotation speed of the cylinder, they generated electromagnetic waves out of nowhere, so to speak. Their work also confirmed the “defusing” scenario predicted by Cardoso: the metal cylinder was able to lose enough rotational energy to halt superradiance and stave off any explosion.According to Ulbricht, the most special thing about the work is its sheer simplicity. “Many physicists think that all the simple experiments have already been done and that new insights into the fundamentals of physics can only come from very complex and very expensive projects,” he says. “We proved the opposite.”“I didn’t expect that someone would be able to carry out such an experiment now,” Cardoso says. On the day the new work was posted to arXiv.org, he recalls, he was giving a series of lectures at Bangalore University in India. “I talked about superradiance and told the audience that no one had ever proven the electromagnetic superradiance or the bomb effect in the laboratory. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw the paper shortly afterwards!”The new work could lead to deeper insights about black holes, Cardoso says. “Superradiance is a little-known classical effect that plays an important role in the physics of black holes,” he explains. For example, extremely light particles, such as axions or special types of photons considered candidates for dark matter, could absorb the rotational energy of black holes, amplifying their signals. “This means that black holes can be used as gigantic particle detectors,” Cardoso explains. With a lab-based black hole bomb, physicists could test such hypotheses more precisely than ever before.In the future, Ulbricht would like to carry out the quantum version of the experiment, which would entail observing the spontaneous generation of electromagnetic waves and their amplification from the vacuum. Such direct experiments with vacuum fluctuations could open up completely new possibilities for the scientific community and the world, he says, potentially representing “a major breakthrough for physics.” Perhaps, Ulbricht muses, that work could allow researchers “in a few decades to understand whether it is possible in principle to generate energy from the vacuum—which would be an inexhaustible new source of energy.” Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-build-a-black-hole-bomb/ #how #build #black #hole #bomb

Relaxed yet tailored outdoor living takes center stage in RH’s latest design story, where form meets functionality in the elegantly restrained Striata collection by Belgian designer Matthias De Ferm. Known for his precise craftsmanship and thoughtful use of materials, De Ferm brings a sculptural sensibility to alfresco spaces, seamlessly blending rope, teak, and architectural lines. The result is a collection that brings the sophistication of indoor design to outdoor spaces—inviting you to relax and linger longer.Courtesy RHThe Striata Teak Lounge Chair embodies Matthias De Ferm’s design language, from $4,200.When De Ferm first connected with RH, it was a meeting of minds and materials. “RH had long been on my radar,” the designer says. “It’s a brand that understands detail, proportion, and permanence.” Though his first proposal didn’t move forward, it established a creative trust that paved the way for Striata, a collection that’s both technically refined and poetically restrained.Courtesy RHPictured above, additional pieces including the Striata Teak Sectional from $13,310, Teak Swivel Lounge Chair, from $3,400 and Teak Ottoman, from $1,660.De Ferm is known for his material ingenuity and reverence for honest materials—he studied product development at AP Antwerpen, furniture design at Thomas More Mechelen, and earned additional degrees in metalwork and carpentry. Here, he faced a familiar challenge: how to create a curve in teak. The solution emerged in the development of a semi-transparent rope panel, one that allows the backrest to arc effortlessly, catching both light and air. This gesture becomes the through-line of Striata, echoed in the taut planes of the front legs and the interplay between structure and void, especially evident in the rear profile.“When you remove the excess, the emotion of the design becomes stronger.” —Matthias De FermCourtesy RHA classic barrel-back silhouette is constructed of natural, handwoven all-weather rope and teak with reeded detailing.“Design lives in the lines,” De Ferm says. Nowhere is that truer than in the lounge chair—the collection’s origin point. Barrel-backed and poised on reeded teak legs, it invites repose. Its proportions nod to the landscape, leaving the view uninterrupted.As terraces awaken and poolside cabanas unfold this season, Striata offers more than seating—it extends an invitation, one of ease, elegance, and joyful summer evenings. rh.com Source: https://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/a64746772/rh-outdoor-furniture-summer-2025/ #classic #teak #natural #rope #and #view #the #new #outdoor #furniture #trends #everyones #talking #about

There’s a routine, but profoundly telling moment when many visitors complete their first walkthrough at Future Pastime, the exhibition of paintings by the visionary artist and visual futurist Syd Mead currently on display in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. “His outlook on the future is so positive. I thought Syd Mead was dystopian,” many attendees exclaim, as if on cue.  Space Wheel Interior (1979) This perception is heavily guided by the work that—-for many—is the single most widely known reference point for Mead’s impact as a visual futurist: Director Ridley Scott’s 1982 rain soaked, techno-dystopian masterpiece, Blade Runner, whose visual landscape was largely Mead’s creation. In Blade Runner, Mead’s dystopian Los Angeles is so sleek, so complex, so rich with detail, one cannot blame audience members for confusing him with being a master of the morose. However, to quote Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve (and another Mead collaborator): “[Syd] traveled in dystopia only once, and it was because of Ridley Scott. Syd’s first drawings of Los Angeles for Blade Runner were pure, bright and peaceful, but Ridley wanted his new world to be more claustrophobic and oppressive. And Syd dived into the darkness.”  One would reasonably expect Mead, with his fluent visual language of darkness so ably on display in Blade Runner, to be a committed future-cynic. However, it was quite the opposite. Mead was, in Vileneuve’s words, “one of the last great utopians,” a tidbit often lost on audiences raised on a steady diet of apocalyptic scenarios, dismal futures, and collapsed civilizations—the same narrative requests made often by Mead’s commissioning directors. In fact, Mead’s output outside the world of cinema—which in fact represents the lionshare of his more than 65-year professional career—is a replete and uniform world of robust optimism and hopeful aspiration. The future of Syd Mead is a bright and gilded one; the fulfillment of our greatest hopes and aspirations. It exists on the distant end of realism, yet is still somehow within reach.  The son of a Baptist minister (and part time art teacher), Mead gathered the strands of a childhood crowded by poverty and increasing world strife and instead formulated a unique worldview and artistic direction that was irrepressibly optimistic, often in spite of (and in stark contrast to) the current affairs and fortunes of the time.  To Mead, the prospect of an optimistic future was not a question of chance but of preparation. “Why wouldn’t you rehearse for a good future?” he often said. “I think that we should celebrate and rehearse for a bright future, and maybe it will come true. I don’t have time to illustrate misery or dystopian scenarios because they’ll happen. If you let everything go, they’ll happen anyway.” This outlook was successfully channeled into a singular career as an industrial futurist, becoming one of a rare group of individuals kept on speed dial by titans of industry to predict and illuminate likely future outcomes across myriad disciplines: architecture, urban planning, engineering, automotive, aeronautics, mass transit, spaceflight, technology, innovation, consumer goods, media, and more. Mead took it a step further by assuming the mantle of “visual futurist,” delivering his results not in research papers or dissertations, but via vivid, dynamic artworks, most principally paintings in his medium of choice: gouache.  Running of the 200th Kentucky Derby (1975) What he never anticipated was that the language of his industrial forecasting work would escape its enclosure and go on to define the visual identity of modern science fiction storytelling and cinematic futurism.   Mead entered professional life with nary a thought nor desire to work in the movies. In fact, movies were banned in the Mead household until he was 13 years old, with his earlier years filled with a potent mixture of his father’s chief obsessions: end-times religion, study and practice of painting and fine arts, and the pulp science fiction adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon (which Kenneth, his father, would buy family friendly editions so they could read together). Syd’s personal contributions to this percolating artistic concoction—an obsession with automobiles, the vibrant creations of contemporary illustrators as diverse as Maxfield Parrish and Chesley Bonestell, and the constant desire to innovate and improve one’s artistic craft—provided the ingredients to a simmering brew that one day would synthesize into the poetic future seer we celebrate today. By his mid-teens, Mead distanced himself from the old time religion of his parents as a new devotion emerged:bright future. The works of his adolescence and early adulthood burst with an almost unbridled gusto of color and life as potential futures were considered. Cowboys draped in pastel tour rural ranch grounds on horseback and bi-copter. Flying transport, early prototypes of Blade Runner-esque vehicles to come, twenty five years before the fact, are wrapped in chrome and almost seem to lift off the page. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! After his 1959 graduation from the Art Center in Los Angeles where he majored in industrial design, word quickly spread of this young man with a “future touch:” the uncanny ability to conceptualize and render achievable futures with the dexterity of an industrial engineer, the functionality of a city planner, and the poetry of a master painter. His first post-college berth at Ford’s Advanced Car Styling studio—where he worked on futuristic concept cars like the Gyron—lasted all of 26 months. The “thinness of purpose” got to him, he said. “If the company decided to stop making cars and start making washing machines next week, the process would not change at all—you just start doing sketches of washing machines.”  Mead departed Ford in 1961, and it was a providential overture made by industrial giant U.S. Steel shortly prior that which truly set the stage for the budding visual futurist to prove his worth. Aluminum, both lighter and cheaper, had been steadily eating into U.S. Steel’s profits, as well as the public’s romance with the once iconic alloy. The task for Mead was clear: to portray steel as a material of the future. Fifty years. One hundred years. Beyond. To make it relevant again today by showcasing its dreamy successes of tomorrow.  It was the assignment he had been practicing for his whole life, and Mead did not disappoint. Essentially given carte blanche, he remarkably completed the entire book—text and images—in just 30 days. While first intended as a product marketing catalogue aimed squarely at U.S. Steel customers, clients, and manufacturing partners, his work was such a sensation that the company commissioned four more books through 1969, and expanded the distribution of the volumes, running adverts for free copies in young people’s magazines, and seeding editions to all of the major art and design schools across the country. The result was the 1960s equivalent of a viral sensation; the books “went horizontal through the design community,” as Syd put it himself. Blossoming directors, designers, technologists, and innovators sought out the books and cherished them as cult objects. Sacred windows into the future of both technology and design. Acclaimed genre director Joe Johnston, who cut his teeth as art director on the original Star Wars Wheeless Truck (1969) As a result, the “Syd Mead look” is all over Star Wars, very specifically in the case of the AT-ATs, the iconic tall legged imperial transports featured in The Empire Strikes Back, which were derived by Johnston and the Lucasfilm team directly from Mead’s “Wheelless Truck” Despite his overwhelming influence on the series, Mead was not involved directly in Star Wars. He wasn’t even asked. It’s an understandable oversight. The concept of calling up Syd Mead in 1975 (by then an acclaimed industrial designer and futurist) to work on a motion picture is equivalent to asking Zaha Hadid in her prime to design buildings for an episode of Dynasty. Requests like these were simply not made, and as the 20th anniversary of Syd Mead’s professional career approached, he had yet to work on a single motion picture, let alone even be asked. This all changed when a fortuitous thought entered the mind of Star Wars VFX director John Dykstra in early 1979. Dykstra, who had attended Long Beach State alongside Johnston, and maintained a personal collection of Mead’s U.S. Steel books, now found himself as the visual effects lead on Star Trek: The Motion Picture. With the design of the film’s central antagonist—a leviathan entity of “unimaginable scale” named V’ger—suddenly in jeopardy, Dykstra took a leap of faith and reached out to Mead, uttering 12 words that would change both film and futurism forever:  “Syd, would you like to work on a science fiction motion picture?” Syd replied, “Sure.” In this one moment, the circuit was completed, and the board lit up. Suddenly alerted to the fact that their favorite futurist was down to do film, the entire town pivoted to Mead in unison. Ridley Scott, Steven Lisberger, Peter Hyams, James Cameron, and John Badham all reached out in quick succession. By 1986, via Blade Runner, Tron, 2010, Aliens, and Short Circuit, the very aesthetic of science fiction was altered forever… not by the hand of an imaginative production designer, but an actual futurist trained on developing real world futures to be built.     Elon Solo is the co-curator of Syd Mead: Future Pastime, an exhibition exploring the original artwork of Syd Mead, currently on display in NYC through May 21.  City on Wheels (1969) Source: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/syd-mead-is-not-science-fiction/ #syd #mead #not #science #fiction