Chances are you haven't been watching Invasion , an Apple TV+ sci-fi drama overshadowed to some extent by two of the streamer's other sci-fi shows, Silo and Foundation . Yes, Invasion has received mixed reviews for its ponderous pacing (especially in the first season). Even its fans may admit to having something of a love/hate relationship with the show. But the cinematography is gorgeous, and the writers are clearly trying to explore some ambitious themes, with variable success. Apple TV+ just released a trailer for the upcoming third season that suggests this series with so much promise might finally be hitting its stride.

(Some spoilers for first two seasons below.)

Invasion was created by David Weil ( Hunters ) and Simon Kinberg (best known for writing and/or producing several X-Men films, as well as The Martian , which was nominated for several Oscars). The first season focused on the initial stages of the titular alien invasion, portraying the events through the eyes of ordinary people around the world—the series is in English, Japanese, and Pashto—as they come to terms with the existential threat Earth is facing. In fact, the aliens take a back seat to the human interactions, which irritated some viewers eager to see actual aliens in a show about an extraterrestrial invasion.

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Electric vehicle maker Rivian filed a lawsuit against the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles this week in an effort to force the state to lift its ban on direct-to-consumer vehicle sales. Rivian is one of a number of new EV startups since Tesla that has abandoned the dealership model for selling cars, but as things currently stand, that remains illegal in many states.

The prohibitions on direct car sales date back to the early days of the automobile and fears that the big American car companies would become too vertically integrated. But there were other benefits to the car companies—supplying cars to franchised dealers allowed them to concentrate their capital on things like production lines and factories rather than a nationwide distribution system.

That's pretty much how things stayed until the early 2010s—despite a Justice Department report in 2009 that found the laws were harmful to consumers, when a new automotive startup called Tesla decided it wanted to go another way.

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Mandatory AI summaries have come to Google, and they gleefully showcase hallucinations while confidently insisting on their truth . I feel about them the same way I felt about mandatory G+ logins when all I wanted to do was access my damn YouTube account: I hate them. Intensely.

But unlike those mandatory G+ logins—on which Google eventually relented before shutting down the G+ service —our reading of the tea leaves suggests that, this time, the search giant is extremely pleased with how things are going.

Fabricated AI dreck polluting your search? It's the new normal. Miss your little results page with its ten little blue links? Too bad. They're gone now, and you can't get them back, no matter what ephemeral workarounds or temporarily functional flags or undocumented, could-fail-at-any-time URL tricks you use.

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While no one has figured out how to make money from generative artificial intelligence, that hasn't stopped Google DeepMind from pushing the boundaries of what's possible with a big pile of inference. The capabilities (and costs) of these models have been on an impressive upward trajectory, a trend exemplified by the reveal of Genie 3. A mere seven months after showing off the Genie 2 "foundational world model," which was itself a significant improvement over its predecessor, Google now has Genie 3.

With Genie 3, all it takes is a prompt or image to create an interactive world. Since the environment is continuously generated, it can be changed on the fly. You can add or change objects, alter weather conditions, or insert new characters—DeepMind calls these "promptable events." The ability to create alterable 3D environments could make games more dynamic for players and offer developers new ways to prove out concepts and level designs. However, many in the gaming industry have expressed doubt that such tools would help.

It's tempting to think of Genie 3 simply as a way to create games, but DeepMind sees this as a research tool, too. Games play a significant role in the development of artificial intelligence because they provide challenging, interactive environments with measurable progress. That's why DeepMind previously turned to games like Go and StarCraft to expand the bounds of AI.

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When will Sierra Space's winged vehicle, Dream Chaser, finally take flight? Unfortunately, it's still not clear. Almost certainly, however, it won't be this year.

The Dream Chaser space plane has now been under development for more than two decades, and it has a huge cult following because its winged shape mimics the iconic Space Shuttle. However, during a recent news briefing, a senior NASA official would only say this about a launch date: "We will be ready for them when they're ready to fly."

The comments came from Dana Weigel, who is the program manager for the International Space Station. Sierra Space has a contract with NASA to deliver cargo to the space station, and its first flight is intended to visit the space station. Weigel was asked about Dream Chaser at a news briefing Friday, following the successful launch of the Crew-11 mission.

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AI search engine Perplexity is using stealth bots and other tactics to evade websites’ no-crawl directives, an allegation that if true violates Internet norms that have been in place for more than three decades, network security and optimization service Cloudflare said Monday.

In a blog post , Cloudflare researchers said the company received complaints from customers who had disallowed Perplexity scraping bots by implementing settings in their sites’ robots.txt files and through Web application firewalls that blocked the declared Perplexity crawlers. Despite those steps, Cloudflare said, Perplexity continued to access the sites’ content.

The researchers said they then set out to test it for themselves and found that when known Perplexity crawlers encountered blocks from robots.txt files or firewall rules, Perplexity then searched the sites using a stealth bot that followed a range of tactics to mask its activity.

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Tesla is awarding Elon Musk over $29 billion of stock in an "interim" pay plan designed to maintain his interest in the company while a larger pay package awarded in 2018 remains held up in court.

"Retaining Elon is more important than ever before... It is imperative to retain and motivate our extraordinary talent, beginning with Elon," Tesla Board Chair Robyn Denholm and board member Kathleen Wilson-Thompson wrote in a letter to shareholders today.

The letter noted that Musk has several other companies to run.

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Formula 1 teams can start their annual summer break today. Sometime this month, each of the 10 teams has to close its factory for 14 consecutive days. Laptops stay in the office, email goes unchecked. It all sounds very civilized for a sport where the difference between hero and zero can come down to milliseconds. As was the case at this past weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix, at least in qualifying.

When the Hungaroring was added to the calendar back in 1986, it was F1's first true foray behind the Iron Curtain. Just 2.7 miles (4.3 km) long, the layout features a lot of medium-speed corners one after another that make overtaking more than a little challenging—to the extent that people call it "Monaco without the walls," something you'll hear so often over the course of a Hungarian Grand Prix weekend you'll want to scream.

Besides, more interesting things happen at the Hungaroring.

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Wasps living around a Cold War-era nuclear facility in South Carolina have built at least four radioactive nests, raising questions about their source of hazardous material and the extent of environmental contamination, according to a report by The New York Times .

Last week, news broke that officials at the site—Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, South Carolina—had found one radioactive nest on July 3. The discovery was documented in a July 22 report by the US Department of Energy , which owns the site.

The report said that the nest was on a post near a tank used to store nuclear waste and that it "was probing 100,000 dpm/100 cm2 beta/gamma." This contamination level "is greater than 10 times the total contamination values" listed in federal regulations for areas that require contamination posting and monitoring, the report said. Still, it concluded that the radioactivity of the nest was considered to be from "onsite legacy radioactive contamination not related to a loss of contamination control."

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