The road to the second flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lifting New Glenn rocket got a lot clearer Thursday night with a success test-firing of the launcher’s seven main engines on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Standing on a seaside launch pad, the New Glenn rocket ignited its seven BE-4 main engines at 9:59 pm EDT Thursday (01:59 UTC Friday). The engines burned for 38 seconds while the rocket remained firmly on the ground, according to a social media post by Blue Origin.

The hold-down firing of the first stage engines was the final major test of the New Glenn rocket before launch day. Blue Origin previously test-fired the rocket’s second-stage engines. Officials have not announced a target launch date, but sources tell Ars the rocket could be ready for liftoff as soon as November 9.

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2017 feels like another era these days, but if you cast your mind back that far, you might remember Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s vaporware Roadster 2.0. Full of nonsensical-sounding features that impressed people who know a little bit about rockets but nothing about cars, the $200,000 electric car promised to have a suction fan and “cold gas thrusters,” plus 620 miles (1,000 km) of range and a whole load of other stuff that’s never happening.

Plenty of other electric automakers have introduced electric hypercars in the eight years since Musk declared the second Roadster a thing, with no sign of it being any closer to reality, if the latest job postings are accurate . And it seems that over time, a lot of the people who gave the company a hefty deposit—some say interest-free loan—have become tired of waiting and want their money back.

And that’s not quite so easy, it turns out. Musk’s current Silicon Valley rival is the latest to discover this. According to Sam Altman’s social media account, he placed an order for a Roadster on July 11, 2018, with a deposit of $45,000 ($58,206 in today’s money). But after emailing Tesla for a refund, he discovered the email address associated with preorders had been deleted.

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AT&T yesterday sued the advertising industry’s official watchdog over the group’s demand that AT&T stop using its rulings for advertising and promotional purposes.

As previously reported , BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division (NAD) found that AT&T violated a rule “by issuing a video advertisement and press release that use the NAD process and its findings for promotional purposes,” and sent a cease-and-desist letter to the carrier. The NAD operates the US advertising industry’s system of self-regulation, which is designed to handle complaints that advertisers file against each other and minimize government regulation of false and misleading claims.

While it’s clear that both AT&T and T-Mobile have a history of misleading ad campaigns, AT&T portrays itself as a paragon of honesty in new ads calling T-Mobile “the master of breaking promises.” An AT&T press release about the ad campaign said the NAD “asked T-Mobile to correct their marketing claims 16 times over the last four years,” and an AT&T commercial said T-Mobile has faced more challenges for deceptive ads from competitors than all other telecom providers in that time.

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When Hyundai’s E-GMP platform for electric vehicles arrived on the market, it cemented the Korean automaker’s place as one of the leaders of its industry. And in the absence of an influx of Chinese EVs, the Ioniq range of cars, crossovers, and SUVs is about as leading-edge as you’ll find in showrooms right now, particularly mainstream brands.

The first of the E-GMP cars was the Ioniq 5, which looks like a 1980’s hatch scaled up to the midsize crossover segment. Now made in the US, it has been a firm hit—and at the beginning of the month just got a hefty price cut , to boot. A midsized sedan followed, but these are a less common sight here given American car-buying tastes. Those tastes shaped the Ioniq 9, though.

The underlying technology might hail from Hyundai’s Namyang R&D center in South Korea, but the Ioniq 9 is the result of that technology expressed through the tastes of suburban America. Not so much the exterior styling, though. The hood is too low, the corners are more rounded, and it’s generally a less-threatening shape than the average domestic three-row SUV.

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As artificial intelligence drives the need for vastly more computing storage and processing power, interest in space-based data centers has spiked.

Although several startup companies, such as Starcloud, have begun to address this problem, the idea has also attracted the interest of tech barons. In May, it emerged that former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space due to his interest in space-based data centers. Then, earlier this month, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicted that gigawatt-scale data centers will be built in space within the next 10 to 20 years.

Now, Elon Musk, whose SpaceX owns and operates significantly more space-based infrastructure than any other company or country in the world, has also expressed interest in the technology.

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One reason to use the Task Manager in Windows is to see if any of the apps running on your computer are misbehaving or using a disproportionate amount of resources. But what do you do when the misbehaving app is the Task Manager itself?

After a recent Windows update, some users (including Windows Latest ) noticed that closing the Task Manager window was actually failing to close the app, leaving the executable running in memory. More worryingly, each time you open the Task Manager, it spawns a new process on top of the old one, which you can repeat essentially infinitely (or until your PC buckles under the pressure).

Each instance of Task Manager takes up around 20MB of system RAM and hovers between 0 and 2 percent CPU usage—if you have just a handful of instances open, it’s unlikely that you’d notice much of a performance impact. But if you use Task Manager frequently or just go a long time between reboots, opening up two or three dozen copies of the process that are all intermittently using a fraction of your CPU can add up, leading to a potentially significant impact on performance and battery life.

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The speedy demolition of the East Wing of the White House last week has health advocates and Democratic lawmakers seeking answers about what efforts were taken, if any, to keep workers and passersby safe from potential plumes of asbestos that could arise from the destruction, according to a report by The Washington Post .

The East Wing was originally constructed in 1902 and was renovated in 1942, and asbestos was used extensively in government buildings during this period, according to the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO), a nonprofit focused on preventing asbestos exposure. Anyone who inadvertently breathes in asbestos fibers launched into the air by construction work could be at heightened risk of lung diseases and cancer.

“Every building of this age must undergo full asbestos inspection and abatement before any demolition begins,” Linda Reinstein, president and cofounder of ADAO, said in a press statement .

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Two chunks of ocher unearthed at ancient rock shelters in Ukraine were actually Neanderthal crayons, according to a recent study. The pair of artifacts, unearthed from layers 47,000 and 46,000 years old, showed signs of being deliberately shaped into crayons and resharpened over time. A third piece of ocher had been carefully carved with parallel lines. The finds add to the growing body of evidence that Neanderthals had an artistic streak.

This piece of yellow ocher was used as a crayon and resharpened before finally being worn blunt and discarded. Credit: D'Errico et al. 2025

Please pass Og the yellow crayon

Rock shelters, occupied by Neanderthals between 100,000 and 33,000 years ago, dot the landscape near the modern city of Bilohirsk in Crimea (a peninsula in southern Ukraine). Archaeologists studying those rock shelters have unearthed dozens of chunks of an iron-rich mineral called ocher. Many of them have flakes knocked out or grooves gouged into their surface, which mark how Neanderthals extracted powdery red, orange, or yellow pigment from the stone. D’Errico and his colleagues used X-ray fluorescence and scanning electron microscopes to examine 16 ocher chunks to better understand exactly what ancient Crimean Neanderthals were doing with the stuff.

Most of those ocher chunks could have been used for nearly anything. Ocher is handy not just as a pigment but also for tanning animal hides, mixing with resins into adhesives for hafting tools, or even repelling insects and preventing infection. Knapping a few flakes off a hard nodule of ocher, then crushing them into powder (or just carving out a chunk of a softer, more crumbly piece), is a good way to prepare it for any of those uses. But two pieces, both from a site called Zaskalnaya V, were clearly different.

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About an hour after sunrise over the Mojave Desert of Southern California, NASA’s newest experimental supersonic jet took to the skies for the first time on Tuesday. The X-59 Quesst (Quiet SuperSonic Technology) is designed to decrease the noise of a sonic boom when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier, paving the way for future commercial jets to fly at supersonic speeds over land.

The jet, built by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, took off from US Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California. Flown by Nils Larson, NASA’s lead test pilot for the X-59, the inaugural flight validated the jet’s airworthiness and safety before landing about an hour after takeoff near NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.

“X-59 is a symbol of American ingenuity,” acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said in a statement. “It’s part of our DNA—the desire to go farther, faster, and even quieter than anyone has ever gone before.”

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