Remember when Elon Musk told advertisers to “go fuck” themselves and then sued them for the crime of taking his advice? A federal judge has now dismissed that lawsuit — with prejudice — confirming what anyone with a passing familiarity with antitrust law already knew: companies deciding they don’t want their brands plastered next to extremist content aren’t engaged in an illegal conspiracy. They’re just making basic (probably pretty smart) business decisions.

When X Corp filed this case back in August of 2024, we walked through in great detail why the legal theory was fundamentally broken. Not broken in a “they pleaded it badly” kind of way, but broken in a “this theory does not describe an antitrust violation no matter how many drugs you’re taking or how convinced you are that the world owes you advertising dollars” kind of way. Judge Jane Boyle of the Northern District of Texas has now agreed, and the key section of her ruling is worth reading in full...

...The "dark points" measured by the group are essentially tiny "holes" in the wave structure. Known as vortices, the holes are a common phenomenon in nature: We encounter them in ocean waves, in air currents, and even in coffee when we stir it or pour it into the sink. As early as the 1970s, a surprising theoretical prediction was proposed: Vortices may move faster than the wave in which they are formed. As strange as it sounds—imagine a vortex in a river overtaking the flow of water in which it exists—the phenomenon is real. Until now, this was based on theory. The research team's achievement has now confirmed it experimentally...

"Our discovery reveals universal laws of nature shared by all types of waves, from sound waves and fluid flows to complex systems such as superconductors. This breakthrough provides us with a powerful technological tool: the ability to map the motion of delicate nanoscale phenomena in materials, revealed through a new method (electron interferometry) that enhances image sharpness.

"We believe these innovative microscopy techniques will enable the study of hidden processes in physics, chemistry, and biology, revealing for the first time how nature behaves in its fastest and most elusive moments."...

...things need to change, or Toyota, the world's largest car company by sales, "will not survive."

...If Toyota feels like it's losing ground, then the ground is probably moving.

The problem isn't just one thing, either. It's everything, everywhere, all at once. Chinese automakers are gaining ground quickly and setting a new standard for manufacturing costs. Software is becoming a core part of cutting-edge vehicle. Tariffs are still a thing. The auto industry has seen more upheaval in the last few years than it did over the last several decades...

Toyota has always had extremely strict quality standards...But that could soon change.

The brand is implementing something that it calls "Smart Standard Activity." This is meant to slash...quality standards...Toyota believes it will lower the price of its components...

...The orbiter has been in space for nearly 17 years now, the longest of any lunar-orbiting mission. An advantage of always having this spacecraft whizzing around the Moon is that we can see when anything changes on the lunar surface...

...The new crater, measuring 225 meters (738 feet) in diameter, is far larger than other craters discovered by the orbiter...

..."Prior to this discovery, the largest crater found to have formed during the LRO mission had a diameter of 70 m [230 feet],"...

The crater has an average depth of around 43 meters (141 feet), and is surrounded by bright streaks of lunar ejecta, material thrown up following the impact event...

While this is a new crater, as a result of the impact, the Moon's crater tally went down.

"Only two preexisting craters are detectable within two radii (4 and 8 m [13 and 26 feet] diameters), and both occur within 30 m [98 feet] of that limit," the team explains. "All other craters (maximum 40-m [131 feet] diameter) within that limit were obliterated or so degraded that they are no longer detectable...

...Isaacman also confirmed that NASA will no longer build a Lunar Gateway in orbit around the Moon, but would rather focus all of its energy and resources on the lunar surface...

...One of Isaacman’s fundamental beliefs is that NASA does not have a revenue problem. Rather, it has an expense problem.

“For too long we tried to satisfy every stakeholder, and the results of that are very well documented in Office of the Inspector General reports,” he said. “Billions of dollars wasted. Years lost. Hardware that never launched. Fewer flagship science missions. And fewer astronauts in space, which means fewer kids dressing up as astronauts for Halloween...

...the lunar base would be established through three phases...The first of these, running through 2028, is estimated to comprise 21 landings, putting a total of 4 metric tons of payload on the Moon...

Iranian state television says a missile strike on Dimona, home to a nuclear facility in southern Israel, was a "response" to an earlier attack on its Natanz nuclear site.

Iran’s atomic energy organisation said the "Natanz enrichment complex was targeted this morning", adding there was "no leakage of radioactive materials reported", according to local media.

The Israeli army confirmed "a direct impact of an Iranian missile" on a building in the city that houses a nuclear research facility, AFP reported.

In 2020, scientists at Tufts created tiny novel living forms called xenobots from frog cells, capable of traversing a watery environment, healing their own injuries, and even gathering other cells to build xenobot siblings.

Now, researchers at Tufts and the Wyss Institute have taken the quest to reimagine life forms a step further, adding nerve cells and observing how they self-organize and alter xenobot behavior. The resulting neurobots take on new shapes and show unique behaviors...

“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent said in a statement posted on social media...

“They’re not smart people, or they’re not savvy people,” Trump said.

. . .

“It speaks to our hubris,” Kent told reporters while campaigning for Congress. “For us not to have learned from all this just shows that there are people making money and making their careers at the other end of it. They’ve been doing it on the backs and dead bodies of U.S. soldiers.”

During his 2022 congressional campaign, Kent paid Graham Jorgensen, a member of the far-right military group the Proud Boys, for consulting work. He also worked closely with Joey Gibson, the founder of the Christian nationalist group Patriot Prayer, and attracted support from a variety of far-right figures.

Early during his first campaign, Kent acknowledged that a political consultant set up a call that was joined by Nick Fuentes, a popular right-wing influencer who has said that Jews are holding the U.S. “hostage” and once proclaimed that “Hitler was awesome, Hitler was right.”

..."This is what we call Agentic Blabbering: the AI Browser exposing what it sees, what it believes is happening, what it plans to do next, and what signals it considers suspicious or safe."

By intercepting this traffic between the browser and the AI services running on the vendor's servers and feeding it as input to a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), Guardio said it was able to make Perplexity's Comet AI browser fall victim to a phishing scam in under four minutes.

. . .

"If you can observe what the agent flags as suspicious, hesitates on, and more importantly, what it thinks and blabbers about the page, you can use that as a training signal," Chen explained. "The scam evolves until the AI Browser reliably walks into the trap another AI set for it."

Niantic's AI spinout is training a new world model using 30 billion images of urban landmarks crowdsourced from players.

. . .

“Five hundred million people installed that app in 60 days,” says Brian McClendon, CTO at Niantic Spatial, an AI company that Niantic spun out in May last year. According to the video-game firm Scopely, which bought Pokémon Go from Niantic at the same time, the game still drew more than 100 million players in 2024, eight years after it launched.

. . .

Now Niantic Spatial is using that vast and unparalleled trove of crowdsourced data—images of urban landmarks tagged with super-accurate location markers taken from the phones of hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players around the world—to build a kind of world model, a buzzy new technology that grounds the smarts of LLMs in real-world environments.

The company’s latest product is a model that it says can pinpoint your location on a map to within a few centimeters, based on a handful of snapshots of the buildings or other landmarks in view. The firm wants to use it to help robots navigate with greater precision in places where GPS is unreliable. . .

...A mysterious phenomenon known as “red sprites” randomly occur in the mesosphere, hanging like upside-down jellyfish for a scant ten milliseconds. Blue jets spear from cloud tops toward the stratosphere with eerie, silent urgency.

Both events happen so fast and high that capturing their details was nearly impossible. Yet ASIM can spot them from orbit.

One study used its footage and ground instruments to pinpoint the altitude of a single blue jet. This confirmed that these upward bolts really do punch beyond the weather layer we know.

Those measurements feed directly into storm-charging models, which in turn inform aviation guidelines about where dangerous electrical fields might lurk...

Thousands of companies are jockeying for billions of dollars in Defense Department contracts to build a shield designed to intercept and destroy missiles launched against the United States.

But amid the intense competition, a handful of firms have an important inside connection.

At least four of the companies awarded contracts so far are owned by Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm founded by billionaire Steve Feinberg, who until last year ran the company and is now the deputy secretary of defense — the second-highest-ranking official in the Pentagon.

. . .

On his first day back in office, Trump rescinded an executive order signed by President Joe Biden that required his appointees to comply with an ethics pledge. The pledge barred them from working on issues related to their former lobbying topics or clients for two years. Weeks later, Trump fired 17 inspectors general charged with investigating fraud, corruption and conflicts of interest across the federal government. Around the same time, he removed the head of the Office of Government Ethics, the agency that oversees ethics compliance throughout the executive branch. The office is currently without a head or a chief of staff.

. . .

“This is what President Eisenhower worried about in the 1960s” when he railed against the military-industrial complex...