During the pre-dawn hours in South Texas on Friday morning, SpaceX’s next-generation Starship first stage suffered some sort of major damage during pre-launch testing.

The company had only rolled the massive rocket out of the factory a day earlier, noting the beginning of its test campaign said on the social media site X : “The first operations will test the booster’s redesigned propellant systems and its structural strength.”

That testing commenced on Thursday night at the Massey’s Test Site, a couple of miles down the road from the company’s main production site at Starbase Texas. However an independent video showed the rocket’s lower half undergo an explosive (or possibly implosive) event at 4:04 am CT (10:04 UTC) Friday.

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LAUNCH COMPLEX 14, Cape Canaveral, Fla.—The platform atop the hulking steel tower offered a sweeping view of Florida’s rich, sandy coastline and brilliant blue waves beyond. Yet as captivating as the vista might be for an aspiring rocket magnate like Andy Lapsa, it also had to be a little intimidating.

To his right, at Launch Complex 13 next door, a recently returned Falcon 9 booster stood on a landing pad. SpaceX has landed more than 500 large orbital rockets. And next to SpaceX sprawled the launch site operated by Blue Origin. Its massive New Glenn rocket is also reusable, and founder Jeff Bezos has invested tens of billions of dollars into the venture.

Looking to the left, Lapsa saw a graveyard of sorts for commercial startups. Launch Complex 15 was leased to a promising startup, ABL Space, two years ago. After two failed launches, ABL Space pivoted away from commercial launch. Just beyond lies Launch Complex 16, where Relativity Space aims to launch from. The company has already burned through $4 billion in its efforts to reach orbit. Had billionaire Eric Schmidt not stepped in earlier this year, Relativity would have gone bankrupt.

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Some Dell and HP laptop owners have been befuddled by their machines’ inability to play HEVC/H.265 content in web browsers, despite their machines’ processors having integrated decoding support.

Laptops with sixth-generation Intel Core and later processors have built-in hardware support for HEVC decoding and encoding. AMD has made laptop chips supporting the codec since 2015 . However, both Dell and HP have disabled this feature on some of their popular business notebooks.

HP discloses this in the data sheets for its affected laptops, which include the HP ProBook 460 G11 [ PDF ], ProBook 465 G11 [ PDF ], and EliteBook 665 G11 [ PDF] .

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ByHeart announced on Thursday that its own testing identified the bacterium that causes botulism in its baby formula, which is linked to an ongoing infant botulism outbreak that has doubled since last week.

As of November 19, there have been 31 cases across 15 states —up from 15 cases in 12 states reported last week. All 31 cases so far have been hospitalized. No deaths have been reported.

The outbreak was announced on November 8, and ByHeart was, at first, unusually aggressive in deflecting blame for linked illnesses.

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Zork , the classic text-based adventure game of incalculable influence , has been made available under the MIT License, along with the sequels Zork II and Zork III .

The move to take these Zork games open source comes as the result of the shared work of the Xbox and Activision teams along with Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO). Parent company Microsoft owns the intellectual property for the franchise.

Only the code itself has been made open source. Ancillary items like commercial packaging and marketing assets and materials remain proprietary, as do related trademarks and brands.

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Astronomical events such as eclipses were central to Maya culture, reflected in the care the Maya took to keep accurate calendars to aid in celestial predictions. Among the few surviving Maya texts is the so-called Dresden Codex, which includes a table of eclipses. Researchers have concluded that this table was repurposed from earlier lunar month tables, rather than being created solely for eclipse prediction, according to a paper published in the journal Science Advances. They also figured out the mechanism by which the Maya ensured that table would be accurate over a very long time period.

The Maya used three primary calendars: a count of days, known as the Long Count; a 260-day astrological calendar called the Tzolk’in; and a 356-day year called the Haab’. Previous scholars have speculated on how awe-inspiring solar or lunar eclipses must have seemed to the Maya, but our understanding of their astronomical knowledge is limited. Most Maya books were burned by Spanish conquistadors and Catholic priests. Only four hieroglyphic codices survive: the Dresden Codex, the Madrid Codex, the Paris Codex, and the Grolier Codex.

The Dresden Codex dates back to the 11th or 12th century and likely originated near Chichen Itza. It can be folded accordion-style and is 12 feet long in its unfolded state. The text was deciphered in the early 20th century and describes local history as well as astronomical lunar and Venus tables.

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Last year, Apple finally added support for Rich Communications Services (RCS) texting to its platforms, improving consistency, reliability, and security when exchanging green-bubble texts between the competing iPhone and Android ecosystems. Today, Google is announcing another small step forward in interoperability, pointing to a slightly less annoying future for friend groups or households where not everyone owns an iPhone.

Google has updated Android’s Quick Share feature to support Apple’s AirDrop, which allows users of Apple devices to share files directly using a local peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection. Apple devices with AirDrop enabled and set to “everyone for 10 minutes” mode will show up in the Quick Share device list just like another Android phone would, and Android devices that support this new Quick Share version will also show up in the AirDrop menu.

Google will only support this feature on the Pixel 10 series, at least to start. The company is “looking forward to improving the experience and expanding it to more Android devices,” but it didn’t announce anything about a timeline or any hardware or software requirements. Quick Share also won’t work with AirDrop devices working in the default “contacts only” mode, though Google “[welcomes] the opportunity to work with Apple to enable ‘Contacts Only’ mode in the future.” (Reading between the lines: Google and Apple are not currently working together to enable this, and Google confirmed to The Verge that Apple hadn’t been involved in this at all.)

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President Trump is considering an executive order that would require the federal government to file lawsuits against states with AI laws, and prevent states with AI laws from obtaining broadband funding.

The draft order, “Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy,” would order the attorney general to “establish an AI Litigation Task Force whose sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws, including on grounds that such laws unconstitutionally regulate interstate commerce, are preempted by existing Federal regulations, or are otherwise unlawful in the Attorney General’s judgment.”

The draft order says the Trump administration “will act to ensure that there is a minimally burdensome national standard—not 50 discordant State ones.” It specifically names laws enacted by California and Colorado and directs the Secretary of Commerce to evaluate whether other laws should be challenged.

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One week after the successful second launch of its large New Glenn booster, Blue Origin revealed a roadmap on Thursday for upgrades to the rocket, including a new variant with more main engines and a super-heavy lift capability.

These upgrades to the rocket are “designed to increase payload performance and launch cadence, while enhancing reliability,” the company said in an update published on its website . The enhancements will be phased in over time, starting with the third launch of New Glenn, which is likely to occur during the first half of 2026.

A bigger beast

The most significant part of the update concerned an evolution of New Glenn that will transform the booster into a super-heavy lift launch vehicle. The first stage of this evolved vehicle will have nine BE-4 engines instead of seven, and the upper stage four BE-4 engines instead of two. In its update, Blue Origin refers to the new vehicle as 9×4 and the current variant as 7×2, a reference to the number of engines in each stage.

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