President Trump announced Tuesday evening that he is renominating private astronaut Jared Isaacman to lead NASA.

“Jared’s passion for space, astronaut experience, and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and advancing the new space economy make him ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new era,” Trump wrote on his social media network, Truth Social.

In his statement, Trump did not offer an explanation for why he found Isaacman acceptable now after pulling his original nomination in late May.

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An alleged extortion attempt, a petty yearslong grudge, shocking social media posts, and ominous text messages make up the latest scandal at the Food and Drug Administration, an agency that industry outsiders are calling a “clown show” and “soap opera” amid the Trump administration’s leadership, according to reporting by Stat News.

Federal health agencies, in general, have taken heavy blows in Trump’s second term. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in particular, has seen the abrupt dismantling of whole programs and divisions—teams that provide critical health services to Americans. CDC staff regularly describe being demoralized over the last year. Their Senate-confirmed director didn’t make it a full month before being dramatically ousted after allegedly refusing to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel filled with vaccine skeptics by anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert. F. Kennedy Jr.

While the CDC is in shambles, the FDA has turned into something of a sideshow, with concern mounting that it remains a serious enough regulator to keep America’s medicines and treatments modern and safe. Many of the scandals are tied to Vinay Prasad, the Trump administration’s top vaccine regulator, who also has the titles of chief medical officer and chief scientific officer. Prasad made a name for himself on social media during the pandemic as a COVID-19 response skeptic and, since joining the FDA, has been known for overruling agency scientists and sowing distrust, unrest, and paranoia among staff. He was pushed out of the agency in July only to be reinstated about two weeks later.

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The Atlantic hurricane season is drawing to a close, and with the tropics quieting down for a winter slumber, the focus of forecasters turns to evaluating what worked and what did not during the preceding season.

This year, the answers are clear. Although Google DeepMind’s Weather Lab only started releasing cyclone track forecasts in June, the company’s AI forecasting service performed exceptionally well. By contrast, the Global Forecast System model, operated by the US National Weather Service and is based on traditional physics and runs on powerful supercomputers, performed abysmally.

The official data comparing forecast model performance will not be published by the National Hurricane Center for a few months. However, Brian McNoldy, a senior researcher at the University of Miami, has already done some preliminary number crunching .

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Motion smoothing has a bad reputation among most cinephiles, as well as many home theater enthusiasts and content creators. Also known as motion or video interpolation, motion smoothing is available in virtually every modern TV today. It’s supposed to remove judder from films and TV shows that are shot with 24p (24 frames per second) or 25p film and displayed on 60Hz or 120Hz TVs. But motion smoothing often results in the dreaded soap opera effect and unwanted visual artifacts.

Two upcoming HDR standards, HDR10+ Advanced and Dolby Vision 2, are looking to change how we perceive motion smoothing and more closely align motion interpolation with a creator’s vision. However, it’s unclear if these standards can pull that off.

HDR10+ Advanced’s Intelligent FRC

Today, Samsung provided details about the next version of the HDR10 format, which introduces six new features. Among HDR10+ Advanced’s most interesting features is HDR10+ Intelligent FRC (frame rate conversion), which is supposed to improve motion smoothing.

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US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) launched a face-scanning app for local law enforcement agencies that assist the federal government with immigration-enforcement operations. The Mobile Identify app was released on the Google Play store on October 30.

“This app facilitates functions authorized by Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA),” a US law that lets Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) delegate immigration-officer duties to state and local law enforcement, according to the Mobile Identify app’s description on the Google Play store . “Through a formal agreement, or Memorandum of Agreement (MOA), with DHS [Department of Homeland Security], participating agencies like your Sheriff’s Department can have designated officers who are trained, certified, and authorized to perform certain immigration enforcement functions, helping to identify and process individuals who may be in the country unlawfully. This tool is built to streamline those responsibilities securely and efficiently, directly in the field.”

A screenshot of the app on the Google Play listing shows it requires camera access “to take photos of subjects.” More information on how it works was reported today by 404 Media . “A source with knowledge of the app told 404 Media the app doesn’t return names after a face search. Instead it tells users to contact ICE and provides a reference number, or to not detain the person depending on the result,” the news report said.

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The tech industry is on a tear, building data centers for AI as quickly as they can buy up the land. The sky-high energy costs and logistical headaches of managing all those data centers have prompted interest in space-based infrastructure . Moguls like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have mused about putting GPUs in space , and now Google confirms it’s working on its own version of the technology. The company’s latest “moonshot” is known as Project Suncatcher , and if all goes as planned, Google hopes it will lead to scalable networks of orbiting TPUs.

The space around Earth has changed a lot in the last few years. A new generation of satellite constellations like Starlink has shown it’s feasible to relay Internet communication via orbital systems. Deploying high-performance AI accelerators in space along similar lines would be a boon to the industry’s never-ending build-out. Google notes that space may be “the best place to scale AI compute.”

Google’s vision for scalable orbiting data centers relies on solar-powered satellites with free-space optical links connecting the nodes into a distributed network. Naturally, there are numerous engineering challenges to solve before Project Suncatcher is real. As a reference, Google points to the long road from its first moonshot self-driving cars 15 years ago to the Waymo vehicles that are almost fully autonomous today.

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Many insect species hear using tympanal organs, membranes roughly resembling our eardrums but located on their legs. Grasshoppers, mantises, and moths all have them, and for decades, we thought that female stinkbugs of the Dinidoridae family have them, too, although located a bit unusually on their hind rather than front legs.

Suspecting that they use their hind leg tympanal organs to listen to male courtship songs, a team of Japanese researchers took a closer look at the organs in Megymenum gracilicorne , a Dinidoridae stinkbug species native to Japan. They discovered that these “tympanal organs” were not what they seemed. They’re actually mobile fungal nurseries of a kind we’ve never seen before.

Portable gardens

Dinidoridae is a small stinkbug family that lives exclusively in Asia. The bug did attract some scientific attention, but not nearly as much as its larger relatives like Pentatomidae . Prior work looking specifically into organs growing on the hind legs of Dinidoridae females was thus somewhat limited. “Most research relied on taxonomic and morphological approaches. Some taxonomists did describe that female Dinidoridae stinkbugs have an enlarged part on the hind legs that looks like the tympanal organ you can find, for example, in crickets,” said Takema Fukatsu, an evolutionary biologist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tokyo.

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Mercedes-Benz provided flights from Washington, DC, to Las Vegas and accommodation so Ars could drive the prototype GLC. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

LAS VEGAS—About 100 miles from Las Vegas, at the northern end of the Mojave Desert, you’ll find a pretty large pile of sand. The Dumont Dunes formed thousands of years ago as sand from recently dried-up lakes blew in on the wind through gaps in the mountains. We’re talking real Lawrence of Arabia stuff—some dunes hundreds of feet high, and a large amount of it is run as a recreational area by the Bureau of Land Management for activities that include a bit of off-roading.

Which is why we found a trailer full of Mercedes-Benz engineers and some preproduction prototype electric GLCs at work out there. When we last saw the next GLC, it was earlier this year at a German test track, wearing one of those black-and-white digital camouflage wraps that obscure the finer details of a new design. The automaker is dealing with the finishing touches ahead of the model going into production next year. The hardware is signed off on, but there’s plenty of code to tweak and calibrations to perform, including making sure that even when the terrain gets loose, the handling won’t.

While I’m sure that the vast majority of GLC customers’ experience with rough surfaces won’t extend past the odd, particularly bad pothole, the car is being engineered to cope with much more. When fitted with the optional air suspension, the ground clearance can increase to up to 8.1 inches (206 mm) at low speed and 7.2 inches (183 mm) even up to highway speed, as long as the car is in the more extreme of the two Terrain modes. That allows for approach and departure angles as much as 21.4 degrees (approach) and 22.6 degrees (departure).

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After several weeks of testing, Apple has released the final versions of the 26.1 update to its various operating systems. Those include iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, and the HomePod operating system, all of which switched to a new unified year-based version numbering system this fall.

This isn’t the first update that these operating systems have gotten since they were released in September, but it is the first to add significant changes and tweaks to existing features, addressing the early complaints and bugs that inevitably come with any major operating system update.

One of the biggest changes across most of the platforms is a new translucency control for Liquid Glass that tones it down without totally disabling the effect. Users can stay with the default Clear look to see the clearer, glassier look that allows more of the contents underneath Liquid Glass to show through, or the new Tinted look to get a more opaque background that shows only vague shapes and colors to improve readability.

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