When Maureen Long talks to the public about her work, she likes to ask her audience to close their eyes and think of a landscape with incredible geology. She hears a lot of the same suggestions: Iceland, the Grand Canyon, the Himalayas. “Nobody ever says Connecticut,” says Long, a geologist at Yale University in New Haven in that state.

And yet Connecticut—along with much of the rest of eastern North America—holds important clues about Earth’s history. This region, which geologists call the eastern North American margin, essentially spans the US eastern seaboard and a little farther north into Atlantic Canada. It was created over hundreds of millions of years as slivers of Earth’s crust collided and merged. Mountains rose, volcanoes erupted and the Atlantic Ocean was born.

Much of this geological history has become apparent only in the past decade or so, after scientists blanketed the United States with seismometers and other instruments to illuminate geological structures hidden deep in Earth’s crust. The resulting findings include many surprises—from why there are volcanoes in Virginia to how the crust beneath New England is weirdly crumpled.

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It's difficult to underestimate the massive influence that Disney's 1982 cult science fiction film, TRON , had on both the film industry—thanks to combining live action with what were then groundbreaking visual effects, rife with computer-generated imagery—and on nerd culture at large.  Over the ensuing decades there has been one sequel, an animated TV series, a comic book miniseries, video games, and theme park attractions, all modeled on director Steve Lisberg's original fictional world.

Now we're getting a third installment in the film franchise: TRON: Ares , directed by Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) , that serves as a standalone sequel to 2010's TRON: Legacy . Disney just released the first trailer and poster art, and while the footage is short on plot, it's got the show-stopping visuals we've come to expect from all things TRON .

(Spoilers for ending of TRON: Legacy below.)

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Road trips with just two people always have their awkward silences. In Dustland Delivery , my character, a sharpshooter, has tried to break the ice with the blacksmith he hired a few towns back, with only intermittent success.

Remember that bodyguard, the one I unsuccessfully tried to flirt with at that bar? The blacksmith was uninterested. What about that wily junk dealer, or the creepy cemetery? Silence. She only wanted to discuss "Abandoned train" and "Abandoned factory," even though, in this post-apocalypse, abandonment was not that rare. But I made a note to look out for any rusted remains; stress and mood are far trickier to fix than hunger and thirst.

Dustland Delivery , available through Steam for Windows (and Proton/Steam Deck), puts you in the role typically taken up by NPCs in other post-apocalyptic RPGs. You're a trader, buying cheap goods in one place to sell at a profit elsewhere, and working the costs of fuel, maintenance, and raider attacks into your margins. You're in charge of everything on your trip: how fast you drive, when to rest and set up camp, whether to approach that caravan of pickups or give them a wide berth.

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The start-up Colossal Biosciences aims to use gene-editing technology to bring back the woolly mammoth and other extinct species. Recently, the company achieved major milestones: last year, they generated stem cells for the Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, and this month they published photos of genetically modified mice with long, mammoth-like coats . According to the company’s founders, including Harvard and MIT professor George Church, these advances take Colossal a big step closer to their goal of using mammoths to combat climate change by restoring Arctic grassland ecosystems. Church also claims that Colossal’s woolly mammoth program will help protect endangered species like the Asian elephant, saying “we’re injecting money into conservation efforts.”

In other words, the scientific advances Colossal makes in their lab will result in positive changes from the tropics to the Arctic, from the soil to the atmosphere.

Colossal’s Jurassic Park-like ambitions have captured the imagination of the public and investors, bringing its latest valuation to $10 billion . And the company’s research does seem to be resulting in some technical advances. But I’d argue that the broader effort to de-extinct the mammoth is—as far as conservation efforts go—incredibly misguided. Ultimately, Colossal’s efforts won’t end up being about helping wild elephants or saving the climate. They’ll be about creating creatures for human spectacle, with insufficient attention to the costs and opportunity costs to human and animal life.

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The US Space Force announced Friday it selected SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin for $13.7 billion in contracts to deliver the Pentagon's most critical military to orbit into the early 2030s.

These missions will launch the government's heaviest national security satellites, like the National Reconnaissance Office's large bus-sized spy platforms, and deploy them into bespoke orbits. These types of launches often demand heavy-lift rockets with long-duration upper stages that can cruise through space for six or more hours.

The contracts awarded Friday are part of the next phase of the military's space launch program once dominated by United Launch Alliance, the 50-50 joint venture between legacy defense contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

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AI image generator Midjourney released its first new model in quite some time today; dubbed V7, it's a ground-up rework that is available in alpha to users now.

There are two areas of improvement in V7: the first is better images, and the second is new tools and workflows.

Starting with the image improvements, V7 promises much higher coherence and consistency for hands, fingers, body parts, and "objects of all kinds." It also offers much more detailed and realistic textures and materials, like skin wrinkles or the subtleties of a ceramic pot.

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After The New York Times sued OpenAI in December 2023—alleging that ChatGPT outputs violate copyrights by regurgitating news articles—the ChatGPT maker tried and failed to argue that the claims were time-barred.

According to OpenAI, the NYT should have known that ChatGPT was being trained on its articles and raised its lawsuit in 2020, partly because of the newspaper's own reporting. To support this, OpenAI pointed to a single November 2020 article, where the NYT reported that OpenAI was analyzing a trillion words on the Internet. But on Friday, US district judge Sidney Stein disagreed, denying OpenAI's motion to dismiss the NYT's copyright claims partly based on one NYT journalist's reporting.

In his opinion , Stein confirmed that it's OpenAI's burden to prove that the NYT knew that ChatGPT would potentially violate its copyrights two years prior to its release in November 2022. And so far, OpenAI has not met that burden.

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This morning's announcement that Nintendo is delaying US preorders for the Switch 2 immediately increased the salience of President Trump's proposed wide-reaching import tariffs for millions of American Nintendo fans. Additionally, the Entertainment Software Association—a lobbying group that represents the game industry's interests in Washington—is warning that the effects of Trump's tariffs on the gaming world won't stop with Nintendo.

"There are so many devices we play video games on," ESA senior vice president Aubrey Quinn said in an interview with IGN just as Nintendo's preorder delay news broke. "There are other consoles... VR headsets, our smartphones, people who love PC games; if we think it's just the Switch, then we aren't taking it seriously.

"This is company-agnostic, this is an entire industry," she continued. "There's going to be an impact on the entire industry."

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A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned.

The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day or two; in other cases, they change almost hourly. The constant flux complicates the task of isolating the true origin of the infrastructure. It also provides redundancy. By the time defenders block one address or domain, new ones have already been assigned.

A significant threat

“This technique poses a significant threat to national security, enabling malicious cyber actors to consistently evade detection,” the NSA, FBI, and their counterparts from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand warned Thursday . “Malicious cyber actors, including cybercriminals and nation-state actors, use fast flux to obfuscate the locations of malicious servers by rapidly changing Domain Name System (DNS) records. Additionally, they can create resilient, highly available command and control (C2) infrastructure, concealing their subsequent malicious operations.”

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